Growing up in a small-town dance studio, I was rarely exposed to anyone with a disability, much less a dancer with a disability. There was one small boy at the church I grew up in that was later diagnosed with autism, but I don't know that he did any sort of art. There was a teenage boy I went to high school that I knew was different, but wasn't sure what was "wrong" with him. My mother speculated that he had asperger's syndrome, which I didn't know existed until later in my school career.
The only dancer I came in contact with who had any sort of obvious disability was a young girl I taught my last two years at my home dance studio. I'm not sure whether she had some sort of syndrome or was in an accident, but she had braces on her legs. It took her some time to get her shoes on and off over the braces, and she couldn't move as easily as the others. For a long time, I felt sorry for her; I didn't know how to relate to her. Now, I look back and remember how sweet she always was, how hard she tried, and how her spirit soared every time she came into the studio. She would smile at me as she showed me a step she had made up and practiced at home. Most of the time, it didn't seem very "dance-ish," a concept that has changed drastically for me since my dance career started at UNC Asheville. One of my dance professors challenged me multiple times with the question "What is dance?" (She once gave an example of a man giving a dance performance in which he sat onstage and ate an apple - that was the entire routine).
The next time I was exposed to a dancer with disability was the summer after my sophomore year of college. I came home after work one day and sat down to watch an early audition episode of So You Think You Can Dance and saw this:
Every time I go back and watch that, I can't help but have a huge smile on my face. Later that same season, they featured a duet from a dance company called AXIS. AXIS is a company that incorporates dancers both with and without disabilities. It was founded by Judith Smith after she decided to discover how she could move with disability after she broke her neck in a car accident.
I didn't give arts within the disabled community much thought again until I watched ARTS: A Film About Possibilities, Disabilities, and the Arts, a documentary focusing on how people with disabilities use the arts to communicate, as well as the discourse around the terms "disability" and "art."
People who have various disabilities use art in order to communicate to the world around them. One lady with autism used painting to mourn for her husband who had passed. Another used painting to figure out and work through whatever emotions she was feeling.
A question most people ask is whether or not these paintings, songs, dances, etc. that the disabled create are truly art. To these people, I want to pose the question of how this art is any different from the art I may create. Most times, when I am choreographing, there is some emotion spurring my creativity. There are days when I can find no other release from the anxiety or anger I'm feeling other than to dance. Most will consider that art. So how is this different from the art created from people with disability working through an emotion? To me, there is no difference at all. The disabled artists I saw in the documentary even said that they see themselves first and foremost as an artist, then as a disabled person.
The word "disabled," when applied to many examples leaves me questioning why these people are considered disabled. They can usually create more beautiful and/or amazing pieces of work than most "normal" people. While they may be disabled in the way the normal people see them, they certainly are enhanced in other areas of their lives. Stephen Wiltshire, a young man with autism, is a prime example of someone considered to be disabled, while being enhanced in his own way. People call him the human camera; at age 10 or 11, he drew pictures of London accurately from memory. One of his most recent endeavors was drawing Brisbane, Australia from memory after seeing it for only a few minutes.
Another similarity between art from so-called "normal" people and people with "disabilities" is the issue that Kwame Anthony Appiah talks about in his book Cosmopolitanism. Who does this art belong to? Does it belong to the people who create it, the state or nation in which it is created, the people who purchase it, a museum? Or does it belong to all of humankind? If all art were to contribute to a global community, would the world be better off? Would people find ways to communicate and understand each other through art despite cultural and language differences?
This is the issue presented in Cosmopolitanism. The idea of cosmopolitanism itself is to communicate and understand cultures other than our own. It is not to decide who or what is right or wrong. It is to understand the different ways different cultures give to various similar or different practices. One of the examples he gives is that of female circumcision. Because it is foreign to my mind and I see it as a mutilation of the female body does not mean they see it as the same way. And my logic may not make sense to whoever is an advocate for it. The point is not to come to a consensus of what is right and wrong; the point is, in simplistic terms, to agree to disagree.
In order to agree to disagree, some sort of communication must take place so that people are able to know how the others feel on certain topics. Just as people with various disabilities learn to use art to communicate, people could very well use art to communicate through different communication difficulties. It has already worked in the past: just see what all we have learned about other civilizations due to art found in archaeological digs.
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