Encountering disability through contemporary dance in Africa

This project responds to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, set out in 2018 for 2030, which highlights the needs of specific minorities, including 'people with disabilities'; and insists on 'leaving no one behind' (Murphy, 2018:1). Yet, as we have seen with Covid-19, people with disabilities have been left behind, often to die. This has exacerbated issues of extreme inequality in Africa where other factors already marginalise disabled persons.

It will scope ways in which integrated/ disabled dance, as an embodied form can both highlight and expose how citizenship in Africa has been and is being socially constructed and conceptualised through uninterrogated colonial frames in post-independence contexts. It aims to trace methodologies that can challenge and change these perceptions and thus the lived experiences of disabled people in Africa.

This project is set out in two parts - the first is conceptual and methodological. We will begin by considering different approaches to disability from diverse perspectives, taking a critical disability studies approach that includes postcolonial and indigenous perspectives. Then we will ask how placing the physically, learning or neurologically differently-abled body in a dance context in Africa can disrupt the normative narratives regarding the unity, universality and usefulness of the conventional human body, particularly when the social body is articulated primarily through a capitalist frame of economic production, as was the case under settler/colonialism and apartheid, where peoples' worth is defined by their perceived ability to contribute to society, as opposed to needing support from it, physically, economically, etc. Dance is the ideal form through which to make visible and challenge these views on disability because 'dance favours the able working body, a body in control' (Loots); and when the disabled body enters this space of super-ability, its very presence challenges cultural representations of social, sexual and political norms.

The second part of this study will work through practice by how specific integrated/ disabled dance companies and choreographers in Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa are engaging citizenship in and thorough their work. We will also consider how these approaches compare to similar work being done in UK and Europe - Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy and Flanders, via the inaugural integrated dance festival at Sibikwa Arts in October 2022 in Johannesburg, where some of these companies are collaboratively creating new work with disabled and able-bodied dancers. We will explore their diverse integrated dance practice via performances, workshops and roundtable discussions to
- trace the diversity of the sophisticated artistic practices of integrated dance work,
- articulate how dance has a unique capacity both to illuminate the substantial flaws and exclusionary nature of modern concepts of citizenship, and offer a path to resolving these issues through this integrated form of dance that allows for adaptive choreographies,
- consider how / whether integrated dance can foster a sense of home/ belonging (citizenship) for those that have been marginalised due to disability, and
- and compare African and Europe/ global integrated dance practices.

We will trace the specific choreographic methodologies these artists have developed to explore issues related to disability and citizenship in their contexts and facilitate the sharing of these practices via a 2-day online colloquium (year 1) and a Disability dance festival-colloquium of practice hosted by UKZN, where our collaborators will meet and share work face to face. This will enable us to decolonise approaches to dance, disability and citizenship and disseminate existing good practice more extensively.
The outcomes will be a book and audio-visual material accessible via a project website that reflects the practitioners own work and experiences in their own words.