Dance, Disability and Law: InVisible difference
350
Dance, Disability and Law: InVisible difference
350eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783208708 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 350 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Charlotte Waelde is Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Coventry University. The focus of Charlotte Waelde’s work lies at the interface between intellectual property law (particularly copyright) and changing technologies, the changes in the law wrought by those technologies, and the impact that those changes have on the way that the law is both perceived and used by the affected communities. Charlotte is a member of a number of editorial boards including International Review of Law, Computers and Technology and the Web Journal of Current Legal Issues.
Dr Shawn Harmon is a Deputy Director at the Mason Institute, and specialises in medical law, health research regulation and the governance of converging technologies. He has investigated the interaction between law and ethics in the regulation of genomics and biotechnologies both domestically and internationally.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Disabled Dance: Barriers to Proper Inclusion within Our Cultural Milieu
Shawn Harmon, Charlotte Waelde and Sarah Whatley
Introduction
Culture has been described broadly as anything produced by humans, and not limited to tangible manifestations as exemplified by art, literature and architecture (UNESCO 1994). As we have demonstrated elsewhere (Harmon et al. 2014) dance is a part of our (or many) past and contemporary culture(s). Dance made and performed by 'differently abled' dancers, or dancers with disabilities, makes both difference and diversity, and impairment and disability visible in a way that no other art-form does. (For purposes of this chapter, we use the term 'disabled dance'.) A dancer with disabilities consciously places her body on show. She encourages a response from an audience to a body that is different not only from the socially constructed norm, but also from the hegemonic body of the traditionally trained dancer. This is not only courageous, it is necessary if we, as a society, wish to realise a more egalitarian, rights-based society that offers more than rhetorical support for the enjoyment of cultural and equality rights.
In this chapter, we consider both the evolving place of disabled dance in the contemporary UK arts scene, and the legal frameworks that would support inclusion within our cultural ecosystem (if they were better operationalised). First, we outline the research methodologies that support the InVisible Difference: Dance, Disability and Law project (InVisible Difference). Second, we highlight the prevailing arts funding scene within which disabled dance is practiced. We argue that the failure of a critical group (i.e. gatekeepers) to positively engage with disabled dance throws power onto another arguably ancillary group: audiences. Thus, third, we consider audience comprehension and appreciation of disabled dance, drawing on empirical evidence generated by InVisible Difference. We argue that audience illiteracy threatens the recognition and future of disabled dance as a protected element of our 'cultural heritage'. Fourth, we consider what the law, specifically human rights law, says about the recognition and support of disabled dance. Given the shortcomings that we expose, we conclude with some suggestions for legal and policy reform.
The InVisible Difference Project
As is noted in the introduction to this collection, InVisible Difference is an AHRC-funded empirical research project that seeks to extend thinking and alter practice around the making, status, ownership and value of work by contemporary dance choreographers and dancers, with an emphasis on the experience of 'differently abled' choreographers and dancers. InVisible Difference accepts that to critically interrogate complex social and ethical problems, it is most effective to do so at the intersection of disciplines and practices. Thus, it explores questions at the nexus of dance, disability and law drawing on dance and law scholars and practitioners, with intellectual property, human rights and medical law all represented. Some of the questions being asked are:
• What is 'normal'?
• Is the disabled dancing body more exposed to public consumption than the nondisabled body, and what are the personal and professional repercussions of this?
• To what extent are the needs of the differently abled (dancer) met by different legal and regulatory frameworks?
In undertaking its work, InVisible Difference relies on multiple methodologies, including: (1) literature reviews from a range of disciplines; (2) content analysis of governing instruments and social media narratives generated in response to performances; (3) interactive workshops with a growing network of individuals who are interested in dance and disabled dance; (4) micro-ethnographies of differently abled dancers making dance in the studio and transitioning that dance to the stage; and (5) semi-structured qualitative interviews with dance artists.
A Challenging Arts Scene
First, we acknowledge that support for Disability Arts has been growing, but that support has been and continues to be sporadic and uneven. Domestically, Scotland serves as a largely positive example (Patrick and Bowditch 2013). Beginning in 2004, the then Artistic Director of Scottish Dance Theatre, Janet Smith, embarked on a strategy to include disabled dancers in the work of that theatre. Around the same time the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) employed an Equalities Officer who focused on arts and disability. Since then it has earmarked funds for disabled performers, created a 4-year post of Dance Agent for Change (Verrent 2010), and embedded equality into all programmes (Creative Scotland 2010-11). Scotland's leadership in this area was acknowledged in 2013 when the British Council undertook a mission to Scotland to learn more about its approaches to equality in the performing arts.
England, by contrast, serves more as a more cautionary example. Figures from the Arts Council England (ACE) show that, between 2003–04 and 2014–15, 131 awards were made to disabled dance applicants (i.e. to individuals, and to organisations with over 50% of employees identified as disabled) totalling £4,786,203. For specifics on the amounts awarded annually, see Figure 1. Beyond ACE, in 2012, £3 million was made available under the Unlimited Programme, a part of the Cultural Olympiad that accompanied the Paralympics 2012, with a second tranche of £1.5 million made available in 2013.
In short, there exists a very mixed picture, which is underlined by the first UK country report under the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (2006) (UK Government 2016). That report openly admits that disabled people are less likely to participate in cultural activities (UK Government 2016, para. 327), although it focuses heavily on culture consumption rather than culture-making. This reflects the longstanding deficit in funding support for performance by differently abled people, who remain in a precarious position when it comes to producing and disseminating creative works. Such was acknowledged by Sir Peter Bazalgette, Director of ACE, in a December 2014 speech that he described as 'most important', and that was designed to reinforce the need to support greater diversity in the arts (Bazalgette 2014). In signalling a 'fundamental shift' in ACE's approach to diversity, Sir Bazalgette stipulated a need to recognise 'that there are substantial parts of society that are still largely invisible: disabled people [...] for example' (Bazalgette 2014).
This ambivalent situation is not helped by the fact that funding for the arts generally is under threat. In its most recent Plan, ACE, a key gatekeeper, articulated a number of goals for the creative sector, one of which is to ensure that the arts are 'resilient and innovative' (ACE 2011a). One way to achieve that, it concludes, is through 'strengthening business models in the arts [and] helping arts organisations to diversify their income streams including through private giving' (ACE 2011a: 7). Stakeholders are therefore strongly urged to diversify their dissemination and business strategies by diversifying (1) their approaches to creativity; (2) their workforce; (3) their audiences; and (4) their markets. Similar recommendations have been made in relation to dance specifically, which has been encouraged to take better advantage of commercial opportunities through better coordination and knowledge-sharing (ACE 2009a: 26). Indeed, the dance pages of the ACE website state that it will:
[...] support the development of entrepreneurial skills to ensure that companies, artists, and producers have a deeper sense of their markets and how to position themselves.
(ACE n.d.)
The message from ACE is clear: artists (and art-forms) will only survive and thrive if they diversify, commercialise, and cultivate a greater sensitivity to the market. One very practical consequence of this approach to culture creation is that other arts gatekeepers become critical to safeguarding the health, and securing the future, of specific art-forms.
The first are 'mediating institutions', which comprise a diverse collection of 'production organisations' (e.g. theatre and dance institutions), and 'memory repositories' (e.g. museums, galleries, libraries and archives). However, the attitudes and interest of these mediating insitutions are informed, in part, by audiences, which serve as another arguably ancillary gatekeeper. To truly benefit from the power that lies in the hands of these mediating institutions, which may reasonably be characterised as a pragmatic collection of sometimes competing institutions, artists will have to capture the imagination of audiences. This is doubly so in an arts setting that is explicitly commercialised and commodified. In such a setting, consumer likes will have a much greater role in dictating the success (if not the value) of an art-form. In such an environment, if audiences 'stay away in droves', the future is bleak regardless of the legal protections that might apply to the practice.
Recognising Quality in Disabled Dance
Audiences are more likely to be drawn to a practice if they have an understanding of, or a 'literacy' in, the practice, for this allows them to more effectively appreciate, assess and share it, all of which is important to the art-form's vitality (and indeed its commercial viability). As such, it is important to gather evidence relating to audience abilities to recognise and discuss the slippery idea of 'quality' (and the role of virtuosity) in disabled dance. In an effort to generate this evidence, InVisible Difference undertook investigations around lay and expert literacy, and practitioner experiences with lay and expert audiences.
We started by examining YouTube comment boards associated with video clips of differently abled dance artists attached to the project, and then expanded the sample using a snowball method. We ultimately viewed eighteen clips, with many of them visited on multiple occasions between July and November 2013. We acknowledge that social media sites, including YouTube comments pages and other computer mediated communications, are not commonly associated with deep critical thinking, and that their structure imposes limitations on argumentation (Lange et al. 2008). However, the power of such online discussion forums for enhancing education and facilitating the exchange of ideas and the formation of identities is well known. And this makes an examination of their content relevant and justifiable.
These data were supplemented by three discursive events. The first was a closed expert meeting (of the InVisible Difference Advisory Committee) in June 2013. The second was a by-invitation 'Intersections Forum' in November 2013. Both were attended by individuals from a range of disciplines, including those intimately connected with, or embedded in, dance. The third was an open Symposium held at Siobhan Davies Studios in London in November 2014. These resulted in detailed 'conversations' around the substantive questions posed by the project, which were then discussed collaboratively by the research team.
Finally, micro-ethnographies or 'field observations' were undertaken at dance studios in Glasgow, Coventry, and Nottingham, by eight members of the project team working from a common observational template. Notes were shared within the team and the conversations and observations helped inform semi-structured interviews with three disabled dance choreographers/dancers. Indeed, each participant was interviewed multiple times, sometimes by two or more team members simultaneously, and sometimes by team members in succession. All interview notes were shared amongst the team and discussed collaboratively to identify themes, concepts and claims deserving of follow-up through other methodologies. We acknowledge the small sample size, but note that the UK-based 'disabled dance' community is very small, limiting the potential participant pool. Moreover, in resisting scientism (such as that represented by sample-size politics), Geertz teaches us that 'culture is context', and we must grasp it from the culture-creator's understandings (1973, 1980; in Shankman 1984). Geertz states:
Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.
(Geertz 1973: 5)
Our multi-pronged and multi-person collaborative approach permits a strong triangulation of evidence so that we can arrive at 'thick descriptions' and multiple-substantiated findings around the culture under review (Geertz 1973: 10).
Lay Literacy of Disabled Dance
Our lay literacy analysis relies heavily on a survey of YouTube comment boards associated with video clips, the aim being to uncover how people discuss disabled dance in public spaces. The videos exhibited wildly different levels of engagement, with some having zero comments, and others having many, most notably The Best Dance Ever, which had over 2.5 million views, and pages of comments. A holistic analysis of the comments, many of which were ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations, exposed five broad and overlapping typologies of responses:
1. gushing;
2. projecting/sympathising;
3. questioning;
4. resisting; and
5. critiquing.
The first and most populated typology is the 'Gushing Typology', which was dominated by representations about being inspired or amazed, and which resonates strongly with the image of the 'supercrip' discussed in Disability Studies. The following comments are representative:
That's amazing that their [sic] continuing to dance despite their disabilities. Very inspirational :)
Majestic display of the human spirit! Bravo!
This is the most inspiring thing ever too me.
You can never say I can't do it because these two incredible dancers dance while missing an arm or leg. ... since they are determined to do their dreams then so can you!
These comments are ambiguous in that while they might refer to the dance itself, they more probably refer to the courage of the dancer for applying effort and achieving something (i.e. for managing to do anything in the face of their physical difference). In this way, they are almost certainly examples of the 'heroic' discourse from which disabled people (and dancers) generally wish to move away (Hardin and Hardin 2004). And the sentiment expressed seems closely allied to the observed reality of people too often purchasing tickets to see disabled dance to watch the disability rather than the dance (O'Smith 2005).
Not far removed from this typology is the 'Sympathising Typology', which is characterised by statements such as: 'I feel sad for them' and 'I feel bad but it was wonderful'. Again, this could be a response to multiple things, but the suggestion (if we discard the possibility that the second commentator was actually feeling unwell) is that they are regretful for the dancer's physiological and/or social situation, but impressed by what they have seen. However, their sympathy seems to overpower any critical view they might take about the dance itself. For example, in response to 'dislikes' clicks, one commentator said:
OK ... who are those 'dislikes'?!? but seriously WHO R THOSE 138 DISLIKES THATS JUST RUDE!!!!!
The suggestion here is that one could not possibly dislike the dance on its merits; because the dancers are disabled, it is rude to dislike it, an assumption supported by the commentator's neglect to engage with the dislikes on a critical level. In many ways this typology straddles the 'Gushing Typology' and the 'Questioning Typology'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dance, Disability and Law"
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