"Just with you": Professional integrated dancers' practices of access and access intimacy in timing

• Author / Creator

  Acton, Kelsie

• Integrated dance brings together disabled and non-disabled people to train, rehearse, and perform (Cooper Albright, 1997). In integrated dance, like normative Western concert dance, practices of timing are tacit knowledge and rarely examined. Using participatory performance creation, which brings together participatory action research (PAR) (McIntyre, 2008) and performance ethnography (Denzin, 2003), eight dancers/ researchers from CRIPSiE, Edmonton’s integrated dance company, investigated the accessibility and inaccessibility of their practices of timing. The dancers/researchers who came together for this project wanted to examine their practices of timing (specifically pace, unison movement, improvisation scores, and partnering) because these practices had the potential to allow them to experience what Mia Mingus (2011b) names access intimacy. Access intimacy is an emotion, a good feeling of connection, ease, and embodiment that people can experience when their access needs are met. For the dancers/ researchers good dance was dance in which there was the possibility of experiencing access intimacy. Creating access intimacy depended on creating access to practices of timing that enabled the dancers/researcher to coordinate their movements. We discovered, however, that creating access to practices of timing was complicated. The capacity to control our pace – to move faster or slower than our bodies ordinarily did – was key to many practices of timing. Controlling our pace placed varying mental demands on the dancers/researchers – changed the cognitive load – depending on the practice of timing. The cognitive load demanded of the dancers/researchers in our practices of timing often influenced the possibility the dancers/researchers would experience access intimacy. We also discovered that determining if a practice of timing was difficult or inaccessible, particularly under the time constraints of a rehearsal process was very complicated but had high stakes. Making the practices of timing easier could remove pleasurable challenge and replicate the contempt of the ableist world for disabled people but if we asked too much of ourselves we risked pushing past our limits in a way that replicates how ableism expects disabled people to push past their limits (Mingus, 2011a). Creating more accessible practices of timing and the possibility of access intimacy was a complex, ever-evolving task.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • disability
  • access
  • timing
  • dance
  • access intimacy

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-xv2r-0953

• License

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