This past June I attended the International Festival of Wheelchair Dance in Boston, Massachusetts. To my knowledge, it was the first event of its kind held in the United States. My newly-founded organization, Dancing Day, had been invited to teach the dance outreach workshop for the general public, at the Kennedy Library. Although it was an imposing (and intimidating) venue, the event turned out to be a joyous affair, held in a large, wood-paneled room overlooking the harbor and city, with President Kennedy's presence felt in photographs and through inspiring and visionary quotes on the walls of the Library. I particularly remember a Native American circle dance led by my co-director Jo Matos: a slow, side-stepping dance, adapted to wheelchairs, holding hands in an enormous circle, drums beating, and participants spreading their arms like wings, flying like eagles in the sacred center area.

The Festival drew "mixed ability" dance companies from across the United States, Latin and South America, Europe and the Asia for two weeks of classes and workshops, a conference, and four nights of performances. I wish you could have seen the performances! One newspaper review began with "Leave your stereotypes at home..." During a panel discussion at the conference, the term "wheelchair dance" was challenged by Festival participants as being too restrictive, while its benefits as an outreach label were noted. "Mixed ability dance" was offered as an alternative, although that could mean a variety of talents, rather than dancers with and without disabilities. One teacher/choreographer from Oregon calls his work "Danceability" (compare with "disability.") The search for an appropriate name to capture so vital a field reminded me of the discussions sometimes heard at psychosynthesis conferences about the name, "psychosynthesis." How about "dancesynthesis" for both fields?! Seriously, contending with a name is a healthy and creative struggle, and an initiation into each field.

Writing about dance and disability here makes me search for the psychosynthetic foundations for my involvement in this emerging dance form. I am reminded of a colleague in the field of movement analysis, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, who founded a system of experiential anatomy called Body-Mind Centering. In an interview in the dance journal, Contact Quarterly, she spoke of questions she had pursued over a quarter of a century regarding mind, brain and body. Her search has led her to such formulations as: "The mind is like the wind, and the body like the sand: if you want to know how the wind is blowing, you can look at the sand." Here's another quote: "I think that all mind patternings are expressed in movement, through the body. And that all physically moving patterns have a mind. That's what I work with."

So what are my own guiding questions regarding dance, disability and psychosynthesis? First I ask, "Where do thoughts, feelings and movements arise from?" Second, "How and when does movement become dance?" And third, a more technical, research-oriented question, "What role can kinesthetic (movement) imagination play in the psychosynthetic process of people with disabilities?"

Returning to the Festival, it is not a coincidence that so many dance groups from so many parts of the world have begun working in this area in the last ten or fifteen years. It seems like "an idea whose time has come," to quote Victor Hugo, as was the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the civil rights movement. Along with such larger cultural forces, the involvement of people with disabilities in dance has precedents, as I see it, in the emergence of dance therapy, modern and post-modern dance, and contact improvisation.

Dance therapy focuses on personal goals: greater self-awareness, awareness of emotions and relational patterns, and a flexible and self-expressive body. These replace the traditional goals of perfecting dance technique or stage expression. This orientation, along with the increasing popularity of modern (expressive) dance, which contrasts the formalism of ballet, has led to wider populations of students taking dance classes.

Post-modern dance, emerging out of modern dance, is an aesthetic movement in dance, or rather a rebellion against prevailing dance conventions and aesthetics. Among its dance experiments have been the use in performance of untrained dancers and everyday movements. This has also had the effect of opening the doors to wider participation, in the dance studio and on stage.

Contact improvisation, an offshoot of post-modern experimentation, is an improvisational dance form based on two dancers maintaining a shifting point of physical contact. It explores in particular the use of the floor as a support for rolling and falling, and ways in which dancers can support each others' weight with different parts of their own bodies. A late-twentieth century American folk dance form, contact improvisation rejects the traditional dance hierarchies of the most talented or the most aesthetically pleasing body types being the most featured, and also rejects rigid gender roles in partnering. It has been well-suited to introducing people with disabilities to dance training, focusing as it does on the dance relationship, and offering approaches for experimenting with out-of-wheelchair movement.

I began choreographing for dancers with physical disabilities in 1990, working with a paraplegic friend named John Breasted, and was no doubt influenced by these trends. John was the first person in a wheelchair with whom I had spent more than just a few minutes. During the early stages of our friendship, I was quite self-conscious in relation to his paraplegia and wheelchair, and my feelings and thoughts were magnified in public, where I imagined other peoples' reactions to his disability. I imagined people experiencing a mix of curiosity and pity, and myself as something of a "good Samaritan." I imagined reactions of discomfort. Our dance work chronicles, in part, my "settling down" in relation to John's disability. I became acculturated to disability. During this time he went through his own acculturation process. The decision to perform publicly seems now to be an extension of this process on both our parts: John learned about creating, rehearsing and performing a dance, and the dancer's culture, and I became accustomed to John's disability and his wheelchair, taking a choreographer's interest in the chair's motion, in John's movement in and out of the chair, and in our moving together.

In 1995 I met Jordy and Ashley Thompson (pictured on page 1 and 6 herein at eight and nine years old) at the studios of the Hartford Ballet, where I teach a course in Laban Movement Analysis. Ashley was taking a ballet class, and her mother would bring Jordy along to wait with her in the halls of the ballet studios for Ashley to finish her class. Jordy was not content to sit around watching, and one day he was discovered in an unused studio teaching ballet barre exercises from his wheelchair to some young girls. One thing led to another, and later that summer Ashley and Jordy performed a duet to Vivaldi's "Concerto in A" at the Special Olympics World Games. The dance partnership was beautiful to watch, but not without traditional sibling stresses, including a dress rehearsal where they were slapping at each other in an escalating "you hit me first" argument, kneeling and facing front in an on-the-floor section of the dance. Does one exercise one's authority as rehearsal director at that point, or call Mom?

My interest in this field has led me to study the sociology of disability, and to see encounters in public between people with disabilities and those without as a kind of dance, often awkward and full of nonverbal messages, meanings and misunderstandings. From a dancer's perspective, I see such encounters as movement improvisations. All too often, these improvisations go awry, due to the differing languages of social cues necessitated by particular disabilities, which give rise to uncertainties that are reflected and magnified in the dance of communicating. The normal social intercourse that new relationships are founded upon is undermined. This difficulty in establishing genuine connections is exacerbated by the prevalence of stereotypes regarding disability, which often extend a person's disability by assumption to the body as a whole, and then to emotional, intellectual and even moral aspects. How ridiculous! How much need there is for education in this area, for the altering of misperceptions.

I see dance performances as a way to encourage new perceptions about people with disabilities. I believe that the aesthetic realm in general, like the spiritual aspect of human nature cultivated through the practice of psychosynthesis, is an area of transcendence. In this realm, our shared human condition is more obvious. Similarities, rather than differences, are more readily apparent at many levels of consciousness. In the privacy of one's own seat, an audience member gets to "encounter" disability in a heightened visual, emotional and intellectual climate. Comments from audience members at our performances are telling of the experience: "graceful... loved the interplay of bodies, a wonderful metaphor for our need for others in life"; "we are all challenged on some level, be it physically, emotionally or spiritually"; "I often think of disabled bodies as ugly, and to be ignored... dance focuses a lot of attention on the body, and when I looked I found no ugliness there"; "I loved the way the dancers touched each other... [I] feel I am a different person after this." Seeing a person with a disability dancing can have a profound effect on the eyes and mind.

I would like to ask you, dear reader, a few questions, and would enjoy hearing your responses: if a person with a disability takes a dance class or performs onstage, is it expressive therapy or art? What is your relationship to disability? And finally, what are your own guiding questions?

Brad Roth teaches movement-based counseling skills at the Connecticut Center for Psychosynthesis in Stratford, CT, and the Synthesis Center in Amherst, MA. He is currently convening an international "Body in Psychosynthesis" study group to research and promote uses of body and movement in psychosynthesis training and practice. Dancing Day provides movement experiences for people of all ages, abilities and disabilities who like to move and dance. Videotapes of "Dancing with Disabilities" activities and the complete essay, "Dancing with Disabilities," are available for a nominal cost: 27 Miles St., Milford, CT 06460 USA. E-mail: dancingday@aol.com.