Scaling Sustainability in Disability Dance

The presence of disabled bodyminds in dance presents challenges to the function and production of repertoire, as well as traditional methods of conditioning the body to avoid pain and injury in dance training and choreography. Whereas repertory models of mainstream dance presume that dancing bodies function similarly and are therefore essentially interchangeable, these methods of movement and knowledge transfer must shift in order for the field of disability dance, built to fit the unique embodiments of its dancers, to sustain itself. Additionally, though mainstream dance demands that dancers train their bodies to reduce the possibility of pain or injury, disabled dancing bodyminds often already experience pain and injury that might signal the end of a performer’s career in mainstream dance. This thesis uses a close reading the disability aesthetics employed by two 3Arts Resident Fellows at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ginger Lane and Kris Lenzo, as well as my own embodied engagement with their work, to explore the tensions and possibilities between these two scales of sustainability in disability dance – that of the field and that of the bodymind. Drawing on work across dance studies, disability studies and performance studies, this critical theory project leverages a critique of normative practices in mainstream dance in order to imagine a sustainable disability dance field that passes repertoires of knowledge from bodymind to bodymind while insisting on the artistic value of pained, injured and aging bodyminds in the dancemaking process.