Talk About Dance Accessibility
Donna Folan and Maureen Finnerty at Dance for World Community Discussion
Posted Sunday August 21 2011 at 12:43 pm.
Used tags: accessibility, dance, inclusive
VSA Teaching Artist Fellow Donna Folan and her colleague VSA MA Teaching Artist Maureen Finnerty represented VSA MA this summer in a discussion about dance accessibility at Dance for World Community in Cambridge. Some excerpts:
Donna Folan - "Does accessibility confront me often? Yes - both personally and professionally. Not everybody learns one way -- if you can find out how everyone learns best, then you can really accept the way everyone learns differently - and the way everyone moves differently. Maureen and I just basically move differently. Young people with disabilities pretty much assume that they can't be dancers - "nobody likes the way I move and nobody moves like I do." Things can be programmatically accessible, but then there's [also] physical access. And [beyond that], the acceptance that people with disabilities can make significant contributions, because the [current] assumption is that people with disabilities need to be taken care of."
Maureen Finnerty - "For me, access needs to be a forethought and not an afterthought. It's all about thinking that someone with a disability might show up - as opposed to what happens when I go to a show. People don't think I should be at a dance show "because I don't dance." First of all I do dance and second of all, why would you make that assumption? From a teaching perspective, access needs to be about language - especially in the definition of dance. For the kids we work with, some of them have difficulty moving their arm - and so if we can get them to move that arm, that's dance for them. We need to take the "dis" out of disability."
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