Disability and the Dancing Body: A symposium on ownership, identity and difference in dance

Abstract

Introduction The InVisible Difference Project is a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project, which examines the intersection between disability, dance and law. It asks questions surrounding authorship and ownership in dance made and performed by disabled artists, why disabled dance is almost entirely absent from our cultural heritage and how can audiences better view and review disabled dance.[1] On 26 November 2014, InVisible Difference hosted its second annual collaborative event, the “Disability and the Dancing Body Symposium”.[2] This event, which was open to the public and held at the Siobhan Davies Studios in London, was designed to steer the remainder of our research into areas identified as important by stakeholders in dance.

All tickets to the symposium were taken up in advance and seventy-two participants attended on the day. The event reached 691 people through our social media outlets. The professions and organisations represented at the symposium are shown in Figure 1.[3] The geographical dispersion of participants is shown in Figure 2. Both figures demonstrate the demographical diversity of the participants. The symposium proceeded by way of a keynote address from Australia via Skype, two panel presentations followed by discussion, three live dance performances after the lunch break and a final panel and discussion followed by general plenary discussion. The following reports on the symposium itself and analyses the new data it generated.