Gesture, Dance, and Learning Disability

Dance created by learning disabled dancers makes use of gesture as a medium that, through a combination of abstraction and mimesis, moves dancers of varying abilities and capacities towards communication with audiences. Learning disabled dancers produce aesthetic value that emerges from their decision to assemble and mobilize. Such movements towards a concatenation of capacities and communication create aesthetics and interrogate the politics of inclusion, materializing identities that challenge smooth modern dance practices, as gestures are passed between differing bodies.