“You don’t look like a dancer!”: Gender and disability politics in the arena of dance as performance and as a tool for learning in South Africa

abstract

This briefing interrogates disability and its activist and artistic engagement with (contemporary) dance by looking at the legacies of current integrated/disabled dance programmes and companies Candoco in the United Kingdom and Remix in South Africa. This briefing links feminist engagement with critical dance studies to break male codes of reception and assumed hegemonic ‘correct’ dancing bodies, with disability studies and the politics around representations of ‘wellness’. A gendered case study of the politics and process of working in a performance and dance educational environment with young disabled dancers in a programme run by myself and FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY in Durban called LeftFeetFIRST! is shared. The core argument is that dance's engagement with disability, under the right circumstances, can be a liberatory pedagogy.

Keywords:

• dance
• disability
• education
• performance
• liberatory pedagogy

Notes

1. While it might be argued that these three divisions are artificial classifications reproducing false and often colonial boundaries within dance study (e.g. the racialised notion that all black dance forms are cultural), the intention here is to offer a full ambit of all ways in which we construct human engagement in dance. While all dance is a cultural engagement, not all dance is social and not all dance is meant for performance platforms.

2. The only times dancers working with disabilities have been excluded from our youth dance programmes have been as a result of non-accessible architectural teaching spaces where issues around disabled access have been ignored in design. An example of this would be spaces/halls and dance studios that have stair access with no lifts, that do not have toilets accessible to dancers living with disabilities, and performance stage platforms that require use of ramps (usually non-existent) or stairs, etc.

3. Our working methodologies in terms of dance practice and dance education and our dance education programmes with youth living with disability have also been heavily influenced by disability dance activist and practitioner, and former Candoco dancer, Jürg Koch (2006), who has spent time in Durban (over two separate long-term visits as an artist in residence with FLATFOOT) working with us and sharing pedagogy skills.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lliane Loots

LLIANE LOOTS is the dance lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Howard College Campus). She is the founder and Artistic Director of the South African and KwaZulu-Natal-based FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, now in its twelfth year as a professional African contemporary dance and dance education company. She strives to find the balance between being a working artists and an academic and teacher. Email: [email protected]