Resilience and Inclusion: Dancers as Agents of Change

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The InVisible Difference: Dance Disability and Law project uniquely brought together the combined expertise of researchers and practitioners in dance and law to address questions concerning the making, status, authorship and ownership of disability dance. The project has generated a great deal of attention from independent disabled dance artists and arts organisations, leading to the recognition that there is a general lack of awareness of the legal frameworks relevant for the sector. The research was undertaken against a background of significant cuts in welfare provision in the UK for disabled people, which has begun to have a negative impact on independent disabled artists including dancers, further reducing participation in the arts and requiring some innovative thought about resilience within the disabled dance community. The recent report by the Warwick Commission (2015) also warned of the impact of welfare cuts meaning that other strategies are needed to enable artists to develop the ingenuity and resources to survive and prosper. In the context of austerity and cuts to public funding for the arts it is copyright that could underpin new and emergent business models within the dance community. But whilst there was a high level of demand from within the professional dance sector to understand more about the law of copyright within this context, an additional and ongoing barrier to these artists being able to thrive is a lack of critical engagement with the work of disabled artists. In particular, there is a lack of knowledge amongst the general public and those responsible for programming the work of disabled dancers (theatre programmers, producers, directors, curators etc.) about the working lives of dancers with disabilities and how this impacts on the dancers' ability to make, produce and share their work. This is in part because of the entrenched nature of the medical model of disability (prevalent within the health sector), which becomes a lens through which the participants in this sector are often viewed, and the failure of the human rights framework to deliver tangible benefits to the everyday lives of the dancers, despite the promise that it holds. Our research revealed that audiences tend to focus on binary concepts of bodily difference and deviations from the 'normal' dancing body and theatre professionals often struggle to make informed decisions about artistic quality and how to promote and market the work in its own terms, unleashed from a focus on inclusion and integration. The project will directly address this lack of audience and legal literacy for dance by disabled artists, across the sector, by creating easily accessible resources to generate wider acknowledgement of the contribution that disabled dancers can make to the cultural landscape and to stimulate the development and sustainability of new business models for dance. By working in conjunction with initiatives led by national dance and arts organisations, including Arts Council England's Creative Case for Diversity 'change makers' scheme and Dance for Change's 'quality framework for inclusive dance' programme, we will create an Online Toolkit to transmit knowledge about the issues at stake. The Toolkit will include film of professional disabled dancers in rehearsal, focusing on their working methods and working conditions, and talking about their work. Designed for two main audiences; the disabled dance community and performance programmers, the Toolkit will be made freely available to change perceptions about disability and to show how the law of copyright can be applied to support the sustainability and impact of dance made and performed by disabled dance artists. The project will conclude with a stakeholder workshop to disseminate the project, the Toolkit and to capture feedback for a set of sector-facing project briefings.