Inclusive Dance

Katy Dymoke

ISBN 10: 1789388694 / ISBN 13: 9781789388695

Published by Intellect, GB, 2023

Inclusive Dance is an ethnography of disability arts, and historiographic overview of the 1980s when many new disability arts groups came to fruition. Touchdown Dance was the research 'ambition' of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne, involving visually impaired and sighted adults in Contact Improvisation - a dyadic movement form requiring physical contact. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and refers here to archives, accounts and personal experience to share the learning that has been shared over the years to today. Touch and movement are vital for accessibility and inclusion and modality specific approaches were devised to ensure a democratic process towards the inclusion of visually impaired people in a pro-touch activity. The continuum of movement based methods fills the gaps in polarities of visual and nonvisual and a two-way membrane interlinks all the participants in a body focused learning experience. The mutable membrane becomes a heuristic device for the relational realm, a locus for debate, for change. Touch deprivation, exclusion and inequality are the consequence of an inaccessible visually dominant society.Three point of view chapters - from two visually impaired and one sighted company dancer - further describe the performance work, revealing how lives are changed and why sociocultural inclusion is imperative. Seller Inventory # LU-9781789388695

Synopsis:

Inclusive Dance is an ethnography of disability arts, and historiographic overview of the 1980s when many new disability arts groups came to fruition. Touchdown Dance was the research 'ambition' of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne, involving visually impaired and sighted adults in Contact Improvisation - a dyadic movement form requiring physical contact. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and refers here to archives, accounts and personal experience to share the learning that has been shared over the years to today.

Touch and movement are vital for accessibility and inclusion and modality specific approaches were devised to ensure a democratic process towards the inclusion of visually impaired people in a pro-touch activity. The continuum of movement based methods fills the gaps in polarities of visual and nonvisual and a two-way membrane interlinks all the participants in a body focused learning experience. The mutable membrane becomes a heuristic device for the relational realm, a locus for debate, for change. Touch deprivation, exclusion and inequality are the consequence of an inaccessible visually dominant society.

Three point of view chapters - from two visually impaired and one sighted company dancer - further describe the performance work, revealing how lives are changed and why sociocultural inclusion is imperative.

 

About the Author:

Katy is a Body-Mind Centering ® (BMC®) teacher and practitioner and director for the UK programme. As a dance movement psychotherapist she applies BMC® in all settings and to supervision – it is the source of her own embodied dance and movement practices and provides the theoretical and praxical basis for her own writing on the ‘membrane’ concept.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Inclusive Dance
Publisher: Intellect, GB
Publication Date: 2023
Binding: Hardback
Condition: New