Response To Disability

The contradiction in cultural mindsets of persons with disabilities challenges us to introspectively examine our personal response to divergence.  In the emerging paradigm of an inclusive society, we are confronted with 'ugliness' that pierces our own perfection bubbles created by the media. We are threatened to engage our own sense of imperfection, shattering our protective shield.   We become aware that we are all an accident or illness away from a restricted dance through life. We are blinded by the norms that restrict us. What would it take to see?
In the article, Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance, Albright asks a powerful question: “How do you see me?” Presented through the photograph, you look like a person,

a woman; you have long hair pulled into a messy bun, the back of your aging body is exposed as you sit on what appears to be a backless chair with wheels. As a society, we are contextually subject to the actual, imagined or symbolic presence of others (Zimbardo, 461). Social norms govern our behaviors, American culture prioritizes the façade of beauty and fitness, creating a protective barrier around the elite, and providing encouragement to those working to get inside. This mindset of our cultural norm builds an inescapable wall around people with disabilities, blocking their rights to inclusively exist within their culture. Terri Rathbun in her lecture said, “We find ourselves fighting against the perceptions of others. We sometimes feel excluded or shunned by those assumptions and fears, by accessibility and our own anger”.
We as a nation, have embraced adversity in the rights of race, sexual orientation and religion. We find ourselves to be progressive and forward thinking, genuine and inclusive. When our fragile mindsets are met with the challenge to broaden social norms to include people with disabilities our response is to invalidate. We, a strong, genuine and inclusive society, are too emotionally fragile to identify with what we find unsettling in fear of our own vulnerability (Goodley, 22). The issue in our modern civilization is the stratum and social demand to encompass refinement and appropriateness. We, the barbarian, discriminate within our social model of gentility, unable to inclusively associate portions of our own spices as the norm. As the demand for ‘bodily delicacy and emotional refinement advance, the threshold of repugnance and intolerance’ subconsciously too advance, (Elias, 2000: 98–9, 414–21) heeding to the morals of our super ego in fear of judgment. The very definition of a dancers’ body encompasses the pinnacle of our societal demands on beauty, displaying dedication in a pristine form. A dancer with a disability is a binary collision of an ‘abnormal’ body with civil refinement, it challenges us to disconnect from civilization, susceptible to redefine what a dancer is.
Disability in dance uniquely awards the individual the ability to invite an audience to stare (Kilgannon), removing them from the zone of acceptance, commanding the audience to view their disability as a tool in exchange for deficiency.

In reviewing GIMP, a studious dance performance incorporating four classic dancers and four dancers with disabilities, Theodore Bale wrote: “…as a child, I was taught never to stare at disabled persons. I remained curious into adulthood, however, the dancers in GIMP not only break this common taboo, they make the situation reciprocal. They stare back at you.” (Goodley, 9) Dancers with disabilities produce unique, modernistic movements foreign to dance, making these movements rare and intangible by most able-bodied dancers. The unique gate of cerebral palsy or fluid involuntary movements of Huntington’s disease, when interpreted as dance, grants the individual freedom to acquiesce from the pressure to assimilate into society. They are pangloss, displaying their ‘grotesque’ body open, protruding (Albright, par. 9), fear and anxiety being replaced with the eager anticipation of change. Imploring the reaction of ‘disgust’ will eventually fade into appreciation, and by final curtain the audience forms a new definition of beauty, and what it means to be a

dancer.
To many Americans the idea of incorporating disability in dance would be provoking, inflicting emotions contingent on their previously formed relationships with persons with disabilities. Those of us subservient to persons with disabilities may see things differently. We firmly grasp the notion that all people are competent, with equal abilities and rights seeing through the disability to the person. We don’t see a person in a wheelchair, we see a person on a chair, such a minor distinction in a single word defines ownership; when a person is in a wheelchair, it surrounds them, becoming a part of who they are, when they are on a wheelchair it becomes a useful device, a bike (Aaron ‘Wheelz’ Fotheringham). Deconstructing the definition of normal to facilitate a change in perception is essential. Subconscious biases underpin the social constructs of acceptance, embedded and not easily changed. Dance provides an alternative mode of connection where an interpersonal dialogue can be achieved, through movement and storytelling, independent of words or music (Goodley, 9).
Disability in dance as a platform abruptly uncovers the societal confines for both the dancer and the viewer.

The stage is therapeutic to the dancer, enabling them to face the emotional wall of perception, removing the veil to an arranged marriage. The viewer takes this opportunity to stare, like an infant taking in its mother’s face, we become attached. As the dance continues we become emotionally invested in the dancers and the story they tell. We realize, somewhere along the way, we began to see past the disability to see dancers, capable, strong and beautiful. As we stand to applaud we feel joy, not the usual charity, for we understand the dedication involved to rehabilitate our own disability of blindness in

inclusion.