Disability in the arts

See also: Inclusion (disability rights)

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Disability in the arts is an aspect within various arts disciplines of inclusive practices involving disability, and manifests itself in the output and mission of some stage and modern dance performing-arts companies, as well as the subject matter of individual works of art, such as the work of specific painters and those who draw.

As compared with the more general timeline of performing and visual arts in human history, this "disability art" is a relatively new phenomenon.^[1]

Performing arts

Dance

Main article: Physically integrated dance

Some dance companies practice inclusion by employing disabled dancers alongside their non-disabled peers.

AXIS Dance Company

AXIS Dance Company is a professional contemporary dance company and dance education organization based in Oakland, California. It was founded in 1987 and was one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities. Their work has received seven Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and nine additional nominations for both their artistry and production values.

Candoco

Candoco Dance Company is a contemporary dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers, founded in 1991 by Celeste Dandeker and Adam Benjamin. Dandeker, who had previously trained with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, suffered a fall whilst dancing on stage.^[2] The resulting spinal injury prevented her from dancing until choreographer Darshan Singh Buller persuaded her to dance again, albeit from her wheelchair, for the subsequently award-winning dance film The Fall.^[3] From this, Dandeker took inspiration to create Candoco, which, since its inception, has been creating an inclusive dance practice.^[4]

Dancing Wheels

The Dancing Wheels Company is a professional dance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. Founded in 1980, it was the first in America to stage performances involving dancers with and without disabilities.^[5] The company uses its performances to enhance public awareness of disability issues and promote social change.^[6]

DV8 Physical Theatre

DV8 Physical Theatre was formed in 1986 by an independent collective of dancers who, they claim, had become frustrated and disillusioned with the preoccupation and direction of most dance. The company has produced 16 dance pieces, which have toured internationally, and 4 award-winning films for television. They are performing works that break down the barriers between dance, theatre, and personal politics and, above all, communicate ideas and feelings clearly and unpretentiously. Dancers and production staff include people with disabilities, for example in the company's film The Cost of Living.

Remix Dance Project

Remix Dance Project is a South African contemporary dance company that "brings together performers with physical disabilities and performers without."^[7] It concentrates on the contemporary dance genre, with its activities focused on education and the creation of "performances that are intriguing and intelligent".^[7]

Restless Dance Theatre

Restless Dance Theatre is a pysically integrated dance company based in Adelaide, Australia.^[8] The company has three core areas of activity: a community workshop program for small children with intellectual disability, a core performance group of 15 - 26 year olds with and without disabilities who work in collaboration with professional artists and a touring company of professional dancers.^[9]

Theatre

Graeae Theatre Company

Graeae Theatre Company is a British organisation composed of artists and managers with physical and sensory impairments. It was founded in 1980 by Nabil Shaban and Richard Tomlinson and named for the Graeae of Greek mythology. In 1981 the Company was offered the use of an office, rehearsal space and facilities for 18 months by the West End Centre, an Arts Centre in Aldershot in Hampshire.

Nicu's Spoon Theater Company

Nicu's Spoon is an inclusion-oriented^[10] Off-Off-Broadway theater company in New York City.

PHAMALY

PHAMALY, the Physically Handicapped Actors & Musical Artists League, is a theater group and touring company formed in 1989 when a group of former students of the Boettcher School in Denver, Colorado, frustrated with the lack of theatrical opportunities for people with disabilities, decided to found a company of their own. PHAMALY performs at the Denver Performing Arts Complex and the Aurora Fox Theatre. The company's season also includes various touring and educational shows.

Theater Breaking Through Barriers

Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), formerly Theater By the Blind, is an inclusive theater company in New York City that strives develop the talents of individuals with disabilities for work onstage, backstage, in the office and in the audience.^[11] It began in 1979 as sighted actors recording plays for the blind. The theater then moved to performances for the blind and then blind performances for the sighted.^[12]

Film

For the depiction of disability in documentary film, see Disability in the media.

Disability may be an essential plot element or make a significant contribution as part of the screenplay. Some visual media companies have a particular focus on issues involving disability. Some examples follow.

Plot

• Sur mes lèvres features a heroine who is introduced immediately with a shot of her putting her earpiece in. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is by no means weak-willed, but her partial deafness makes it more distressing to watch her cope with her job as an overworked and under-appreciated secretary. It is only when she faints from the exhaustion of picking up after her unpleasant coworkers that Carla accepts the boss's offer of an intern assistant. She rapidly falls in love with her new colleague, an ex-convict, and ends up colluding with him in an outlandish scheme.

• Rory O'Shea Was Here, about a young rebel man with muscular dystrophy who tries to help a fellow young man with cerebral palsy follow him in the arts of "getting drunk and getting laid". Rory dies at the film's end, but his mission has been accomplished: his friend with CP has successfully been taught self-determination, and carries on the legacy.

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a drama about the (mis)treatment of mental patients which was the second film to win all five main Academy Awards.

• The Cost of Living, by DV8 Physical Theatre, which is less a coherent plotline and more a loosely-gathered collection of scenes features dancer David Toole interacting with other dancers and having a close friendship with an able-bodied fellow artist.

• Helena Bonham Carter plays a woman with motor neurone disease in The Theory of Flight. The film deals with the sexuality of people with disabilities.

• The Australian film Dance Me to My Song, with similar themes to The Theory of Flight, was written by and stars Heather Rose, who herself has cerebral palsy.^[13]

• In Wait Until Dark, a blind woman (Audrey Hepburn) must fight criminals who break into her home. Hepburn was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress.

• In Snow Cake, Sigourney Weaver plays an autistic woman, and has said that she spent enormous amounts of time with a real-life autistic individual in order to totally immerse herself in this role.

• The romantic drama Children of a Lesser God tells the story of a speech teacher at a school for deaf students who falls in love with a deaf woman (Marlee Matlin) who also works there. Matlin, who is in real life almost completely deaf herself, is the youngest-ever winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress.

• In The Horse Whisperer, teenager Grace (Scarlett Johansson) loses her lower right leg in a riding accident which also leaves her horse traumatised. The film portrays the physical and mental recovery of both horse and rider after her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) drives them from New York to Montana to meet "horse whisperer" Robert Redford.^[14]

• There is an amputee in Battleship Potemkin (1925).

• The 2010 Chinese film Ocean Heaven is about an autistic son.^[15]

Screenplay

In the 2009 science fiction film Avatar, the paraplegic protagonist (Sam Worthington) experiences a new freedom as a fully mobile human-alien hybrid (avatar).

Spencer Tracy plays a handicapped war veteran in Bad Day at Black Rock. He steps off the train at the almost-deserted desert hamlet of Black Rock. It is the first time the train has stopped there in four years. The remaining inhabitants are unaccountably hostile, but Tracy proves that one good arm is all you need to win a fight.

Companies

Roaring Girl Productions is a professional media company based in Bristol, UK, which creates fresh representations of disability in its productions.^[16] Founded in 1999 by artist-activist Liz Crow, RGP's work tours internationally^[17] and has set new standards of good practice for the inclusion of disabled people in film production and as audiences.

Literature

The Ship Who Sang is a collection of stories by science fiction author Anne McCaffrey about the brainship Helva. In a far future, young children with severe physical handicaps can be placed in a life-support shell and specially trained for tasks that a "normal" human would be unable to undertake. McCaffrey, who has described The Ship Who Sang, an early work, as the best story she ever wrote, asked herself one day: "what if severely disabled people were given a chance to become starships?"^[18]

See also

	Disability portal
	Arts portal

• Disability in the media
• Shameless: The ART of Disability (documentary film)

References

1. ^ Bragg, Melvyn (11 December 2007). "The last remaining avant-garde movement". Society Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/dec/11/disability.arts. Retrieved 18 September 2010. 
2. ^ Roy, Sanjoy (6 January 2009). "Step-by-step guide to dance: Candoco". Guardian News and Media. http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jan/06/dance-candoco. Retrieved 13 September 2010. 
3. ^ McCarthy, Suzanne (28 March 2002). "Celeste Dandeker...Anything But Bland". ballet.magazine. http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_02/apr02/interview_dandeker.htm. Retrieved 13 September 2010. 
4. ^ "background". Candoco Dance Company. http://www.candoco.co.uk/about-us/background/. Retrieved 13 September 2010. 
5. ^ Austin, Kristin (February 01, 2011). "Company demonstrates that there is no such thing as a disability when it comes to dance". mlive.com. http://www.mlive.com/onthetown/index.ssf/2011/02/company_demonstrates_that_ther.html. Retrieved February 7, 2011. 
6. ^ Quinlan, Margaret M (December 2010). "Communicating Through Dance". Communication Currents. Washington, DC: National Communication Association. http://www.natcom.org/CommCurrentsArticle.aspx?id=2147483919. Retrieved February 7, 2011. 
7. ^ ^{a b} "History". Remix Dance Project. http://www.remixdanceproject.co.za/?page_id=10. Retrieved 9 October 2010. 
8. ^ Restless Dance Theatre - Find us
9. ^ Restless Dance Theatre - What
10. ^ Barton-Farcas, Stephanie (May 2006). "Why Aren't You Working With Disabled Artists?". Newsletter. Aventura, Florida: Access Now. http://www.adaaccessnow.org/may06.htm. Retrieved 13 September 2010. 
11. ^ "Theater Breaking Through Barriers: An Introduction". 2007. http://www.tbtb.org/intro.htm. Retrieved 13 September 2010. 
12. ^ Heller Anderson, Susan; David W. Dunlap (25 July 1985). "New York Day by Day: Explaining Blindness". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9B07E6D91238F936A15754C0A963948260. Retrieved 13 September 2010. 
13. ^ Ebert, Roger (22 January 1999). "The Theory Of Flight". Chicago: Sun-Times Media. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990122/REVIEWS/901220306/1023. Retrieved 3 December 2010. 
14. ^ Maslin, Janet (15 May 1998). "Healing a Girl, Her Horse and Maybe Even Her Mother". The New York Times. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9903E0DE1330F936A25756C0A96E958260. Retrieved 8 November 2010. 
15. ^ "Jet Li in new movie about autism". 7 June 2010. http://www.theautismnews.com/2010/06/07/jet-li-in-new-movie-about-autism/. Retrieved 29 November 2010. 
16. ^ "Inside story: Resistance by Liz Crow". Brighton, UK: Disability Arts Online. 20 October 2009. http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/resistance-liz-crow. Retrieved 12 December 2010. 
17. ^ "Installation wows arts crowd in US". Bristol, UK: Evening Post. 30 July 2010. http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Installation-wows-arts-crowd/article-2473494-detail/article.html. Retrieved 12 December 2010. 
18. ^ "Anne McCaffrey: Heirs to Pern". Locus Magazine. November 2004. ISSN 0047-4959. http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/11McCaffrey.html. Retrieved 11 November 2010. 

External links

• "Companies Like Us". AXIS Dance Company. http://www.axisdance.org/education_likeUs.php. Retrieved 9 October 2010. List of dance companies and individuals involved with disabled dancers.