The Physically Disabled Dancer and the Affirmative Model of Disability

This volume investigates the contributions and achievements of the physically disabled dancer while challenging and recognizing the inherent inequities in the field of integrated dance in the UK which currently places greater emphasis on the learning-disabled performer.

This is the first book ever written by a physically disabled dancer on the subject of physically disabled dancers. Inherent in this examination is the model of examining disability that is most closely associated with the disability arts movement which is the ’affirmative model of disability’. This model is defined as an approach to disability in which the disabled person is neither an object of medical care nor a victim of social indifference but a self-respecting, autonomous individual in which their disability is a positive and affirming aspect of their self-identity. This book, based on interviews with physically disabled dancers, choreographers, academics and arts producers all in a UK context, combines a wide range of perspective of disability dance together with the intellectual rigour of disability studies to produce a new definition of the physically disabled dancer as an affirming, positive, indispensable practitioner of contemporary performance art. The volume pioneers perspectives of the physically disabled dancer prioritizing first-person accounts from the performers themselves to produce an unprecedented contribution to the study of disability arts from a uniquely British perspective.

This book will offer educators as well as arts and cultural professionals a critical resource for facilitating work by and in alliance with practitioners of integrated dance.

Lawrence Shapiro is a pioneering disabled dancer in his native Canada for over twenty years, is a validated Deaf and Disability Artist with the Canada Council for the Arts and a UK-published dance researcher whose writing on disability arts has appeared in a variety of publications including Canadian Scholars Press, Disability Studies Quarterly and the Dance Current.