At times, the Opening Ceremonies for last year’s Paralympic Games was a beautiful celebration of the talents of the disabled dancers and athletes onstage, like when the brilliant South African dancer Musa Motha made magic with his crutches. But then came a moment that many in this disability dance community found upsetting: The nondisabled performers who comprised the majority of the dance ensemble performed a sequence where they seemed to try to emulate Motha’s movement, picking up their own crutches and using them as props.
“That was quite shocking to see, for those of us in this field,” says Elisabeth Motley, a disabled dancer and choreographer based in New York City.
It was a particularly pointed example of the surprisingly common occurrence of disability being simulated, appropriated, or mimicked in dance performance. There’s the recent music video for Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra,” for instance, in which the pop star and her backup dancers use canes to simulate impaired movement as part of their choreography. There’s Marie Chouinard’s 2005 work bODY_rEMIX/gOLDBERG_vARIATIONS, where dancers use crutches and prostheses as tools to explore the limitations and potential of their movement. And characters with disabilities are still frequently played by performers without those identities on Broadway and beyond.
This type of simulation can perpetuate harmful ideas about disability, and deny opportunities to disabled artists. “There’s a huge problem with people trying to mimic movement of disabled people without having the lived experience of being in the world as someone who shows up in that way,” says Raquel Meseguer Zafe, co-artistic director of UK-based Candoco Dance Company, which centers artists with disabilities. “It’s not authentic, and I don’t understand why we’re still doing it.”
Why It Happens
To Zafe’s question of why this is still happening, Laurel Lawson, a dancer, choreographer, and founding member of disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light, says she frequently hears the same incorrect answer. “The answer people always give us is that there just aren’t enough qualified performers,” she says. “There are plenty of disabled performers. We all know this, and yet there’s still the encouragement of nondisabled performers to take up that space.” (As Alice Sheppard, founder and artistic director of Kinetic Light, puts it: “If disability is desired, you should hire disabled dancers.”)
New York City–based performer and choreographer Jerron Herman, who explores disability aesthetics in his work, points to a more likely explanation. “The fear around saying ‘disability,’ or engaging with disability, is how these things come out,” he says. “It’s thought of as cheaper and easier not to engage.” Marisa Hamamoto, founder of Infinite Flow Dance, which employs disabled and nondisabled dancers, puts it more bluntly: “I think a lot of people are just uncomfortable around people with disabilities,” she says.
In cases like the Paralympics, it may be that nondisabled dancers have mimicked disability as part of a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to “create allegiance between nondisabled dancers and disabled dancers,” says Victoria Marks, a choreographer and scholar who directs the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA. “But the social and political identities aren’t equal, so it’s a false equality.”
Marks fears that choreographers are drawn to appropriating disability “to extend the innovative possibilities of dance,” she says. “Like, ‘Look what I can do with my body; now look what I can do with a chair on wheels.’ It’s an expansion of the ableist enterprise of dance—to innovate, to rise to the top, to do more cool things, to expand virtuosity for its own sake.”
“The fear around saying ‘disability,’ or engaging with disability, is how these things come out,” says dance artist Jerron Herman. Photo by Liz Ligon, Courtesy Herman. Image description: Jerron Herman, a Black man with close-cropped hair and a beard, stands on a platform in a large, wood-paneled room, gazing over his left shoulder. He wears a sheer white cape-like garment that drapes from his shoulders down past his feet.
The Problems With Appropriating Disability
The harm of appropriating disability goes beyond questions of casting. “There are deep implications for mimicry,” Herman says. “You’re saying, ‘We don’t need your body for this embodiment and this expression,’ so it makes the body disposable.”
The idea that disability can be represented by using a mobility device like a wheelchair or a crutch also points to a problematic misconception about what such devices really are. “What people think of as medical equipment is part of our bodies, our embodiments, and our personhoods,” says Sheppard. “When a nondisabled person dances in a wheelchair, the chair is detached from its social and political context,” says Marks. “They’re not neutral objects. They’re not interesting things on wheels.”
Disabled dancers bring training and technique to their movement that can’t be quickly learned or replicated. Lawson says it’s obvious when a dancer isn’t trained in, say, dancing with a wheelchair, and compares it to how easy it is to spot an untrained model wearing pointe shoes for an advertisement. “It’s not their body, they don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t have the technique for it,” she says. “Like all dance technique, it’s something that is learned through years and years of repetition.”
Confining the performance of disability to a series of rehearsed movements rather than an embodiment of a lived experience is always going to be inaccurate, says Herman: “The performance of disability can’t be exact,” he says.
Infinite Flow Dance founder Marisa Hamamoto and company member Adelfo Cerame Jr. Courtesy Infinite Flow Dance. Image description: Marisa Hamamoto, a Japanese American woman wearing a purple satin costume, drapes backwards across the shoulders of Adelfo Cerame Jr., a Filipino male wheelchair dancer wearing all black. Dark curtains hang in the background.
Moving Towards Authentic Representation
There’s evidence of growing awareness in dance and theater spaces that disabled characters should be played by disabled performers, and disability shouldn’t be mimicked. Perhaps most notably, Jenna Bainbridge became the first disabled performer to play Wicked’s Nessarose, who uses a wheelchair, earlier this year, more than 20 years after the show opened on Broadway. (This followed disabled performer Marissa Bode playing the role in the 2024 film adaptation.)
This kind of authentic representation has real impact. “When I was 18 and didn’t understand my disability or what it meant to be a disabled performer, that representation was not available to me,” says Candoco Dance Company co-artistic director Dominic Mitchell. “I think people underestimate the power it has. It changes the cultural perspective, and it creates opportunities for younger folks to be able to witness themselves. I think it would have transformed my life as an 18-year-old to witness Candoco.”
There’s still considerable work to be done, both on- and offstage. “It takes money, it takes time. It means supporting disabled artists and helping us build the training pipeline that is extremely incomplete. It means commissioning disabled choreographers, and making work accessible to disabled audiences,” says Lawson.
“It means valuing the lived experience of disability offstage so you can value it in the cultural field,” adds Sheppard. “The learning in our bodies, some of it from dance studios and some of it from the street, cannot be replicated. What we know about moving is sacred.”
Candoco Dance Company and Dan Daw Creative Projects’ Over and Over (and over again). Photo by Hugo Glendinning, Courtesy Candoco Dance Company. Image description: A diverse group of performers dances on a dimly lit stage. Two pose close together in the foreground; the other three gather in the background, one sitting in a wheelchair. Neon-green words are projected onto the backdrop.
Beyond Representation
Disability justice in dance doesn’t start and end with the identities being represented onstage. It’s also about power, resources, and access offstage—and who is creating the work we’re seeing. “If we think about a nondisabled person orchestrating the power dynamics that are onstage, that sets up a place of distrust for me as a disabled person,” says Elisabeth Motley, a New York City–based choreographer and performer.
Alice Sheppard, founder and artistic director of disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light, agrees. “It’s not just about putting someone onstage,” she says. “What are you doing with them? Do they have interesting choreography to perform? We can’t ignore these questions solely to deal with the question of representation. Just putting disabled people onstage isn’t going to solve the problem—you need people who are skilled in understanding the choreographic potential that a disabled dancer brings.”
Candoco Dance Company, a UK-based troupe that has historically included both disabled and nondisabled dancers, is reckoning with these questions right now. “We’re experiencing a transformation in our company because we had the lived experiences in terms of the performers being disabled, but the narratives and aesthetics and the stories have come mostly through nondisabled choreographers,” says co-artistic director Dominic Mitchell. “We recently made a pivot to commission a disabled choreographer, and the content, the approach, the politics, and the ethics around ways of working has completely changed, in really exciting ways.”
Seeing the work of more disabled makers onstage will require dismantling the barriers that currently exist for them. “The labor that is required of disabled dancers to get their work produced is so much more intense than it is for nondisabled dancers,” says Motley. “The folks who are doing this really brilliant work are reaching fatigue so much earlier.”
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