Meaning in Motion: The Embodied Poetics and Politics of Dancing Wheels

Abstract

This essay examines poetic sense-making and illustrates the significance of numerous story forms, including dance, for organizations that do the work of social movements. We demonstrate how meaning emerges through motion, even as it is expressed and negotiated in language in two vital ways. First, we engage the early work of Kenneth Burke to explore the poetic nature of storied forms and connect it with contemporary studies of dance that emphasize the agency of bodies. Second, we illustrate the efficacy of this position by bringing into focus the efforts of The Dancing Wheels Company & School, a modern dance company integrating professional stand-up and sit-down (wheelchair) dancers in performances that seek to transform public understandings of disability. We construct an account of how the studio and its members rely on movement and other signifying practices to engage, orient, and motivate contemplators, remember history, and enlarge possibilities for individuals marked as disabled.

Keywords:

• The Dancing Wheels Company & School
• Embodied Poetics
• Aesthetics
• Form
• Burkean Theory
• Narrative

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Drs. Rose and Ferris for their invaluable feedback as well as the two anonymous reviewers. We would also like to thank Mary Verdi-Fletcher and The Dancing Wheels Company & School for inviting us into their lives.

Notes

1. See Hawhee for related discussion of Burke's interconnectedness theorizing of poetics, rhetoric, and the body.

2. Over a period of eighteen months, the first author collected data from three sources: (1) participant observations in the studio (workshops and rehearsals) and of performances; (2) in-depth interviews with nine dancers, three choreographers, and five board and staff members; and (3) documents produced by and about Dancing Wheels, including but not limited to newspaper articles, promotional materials, videos, and the website. The first and second author met weekly for eighteen months to discuss the fieldwork and to analyze the data.

3. The 1985 bus protest in Cleveland was part of a growing wave of activism for disability rights in the United States. ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) had begun orchestrating similar bus protests in Denver in the early 1980s. For a broad overview of the disability rights movement in the United States, see Shapiro, and Fleischer and Zames.

4. For more information about RTA history in Greater Cleveland see <http://www.riderta.com/ar_RTAhistory.asp>

5. This essay is the first in a series of articles about Dancing Wheels. The second article is a critical interrogation of paradoxes and tensions experienced by the organization and its members as they organize around difference through dance. We realize that Dancing Wheels does not always live up to its mission; yet, this is a first step in what will be several attempts at problematizing this discourse.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret M. Quinlan

Margaret M. Quinlan (PhD, Ohio University, 2009) is an Assistant Professor of Communication and a Core Faculty Member of the Health Psychology PhD Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Lynn M. Harter

Lynn M. Harter is the Steven and Barbara Schoonover Professor of Health Communication in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. This study is based on Maggie Quinlan's doctoral dissertation conducted under the direction of Lynn Harter