AXIS Dance Company

AXIS Dance Company is a nonprofit dance company and dance education organization based in Oakland, California. Founded in 1987 by Bonnie Lewkowicz, Thais Mazur, Judith Smith and others, AXIS was one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities [cite news |first=Rona |last=Marech |title=Rebel filmmaker's movie about Burning Man screens in Oakland |url=http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/03/08/EB78192.DTL |work= San Francisco Chronicle |page=EB-3 |date=2002-03-08 |accessdate=2008-01-09 ] . AXIS dancers with disabilities have included wheelchair users (both manual wheelchairs and power wheelchairs), crutch users, and people with amputations using prosthetic limbs. Through interactions between these dancers and nondisabled dancers, a new dance vocabulary began to be developed. This started a trend which eventually became known as the physically-integrated dance movement, which seeks to increase opportunities for artistic expression through movement for a wide spectrum of physical attributes and disabilities [cite book |title=Moving Over the Edge: Artists with Disabilities Take the Leap |last=Pamela Kay |first=Walker |year=2005 |publisher=Michael Horton Media |location=Davis, California |pages=pp 112-117 |isbn=0977150526 ] . The physically-integrated dance movement is part of a broader disability culture movement, which recognizes and celebrates the first-person experience of disability, not as a medical-model construct but as a social phenomenon, through artistic, literary, and other creative means [ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement, p. 97] . The AXIS Dance Company has commissioned works by a number of renowned choreographers, including Ann Carlson, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Joanna Haigood, Margaret Jenkins, Bill T. Jones, Victoria Marks, and Stephen Petronio.

Awards

AXIS has received several Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (also known as “Izzies”), which are awarded in recognition of outstanding achievement by San Francisco Bay Area dance artists and organizations.

References

*
* Interview, Judith Smith, “Artistic Director, AXIS Dance Company” conducted by Esther Ehrlich in 2005, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2006. [http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/projects/artistsdis/ Artists with Disabilities Oral History Page]

External links

* [http://www.axisdance.org/ AXIS Dance Company website]
* [http://www.izzies-sf.org/ Isadora Duncan Dance Awards website]