Candco's Disabled Dance

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Recommended: Relationship of the Greeks to their gods

Owen Smith’s essay starts his essay by focusing on the dance company known as “CandCo.” It is a British company that is seen as different; “they were perhaps identified closely enough with the community and disability arts movements not to pose a threat to the dominant means tram aesthetic tradition” (73). The founders of the company created a new movement to incorporate disabled performers with non-disabled performs to dance together to let the audience and society know that it is normal to dance, regardless of the functionality of your body. Because of this new movement, Owen has stated in his essay that this reshapes the history of Greek God Apollo’s fame of dance. Apollo is known to be the ideal dancer who is not only strong and handsome, but a huge indicator that he is abled-body, completely leaving out the fact that disability wasn’t even considered, it was seen as weak and limits one’s body to move, especially in dance. “Disabled dancers do not just break the chain of signifiers that might secure the Apollonian frame, they reconfigure the codes that inscribe and privilege a particular representation of corporeality within performative dance specifically, and indirectly within other dominant economies of cultural exchange, countering the tyrannical trajectory that fetishes a …show more content…

It was also resisting to think that those who are disabled, is unable to perform as a dancers just because of what society has structured them to be. As a dancer myself, after reading this, I like to dance and collaborate with a disabled dancer to also educate viewers like Smith and CandCo to normalize the body as a body. Bodies are made to move and function differently and does not mean that disabled-bodies should and are limited. It is important to focus on the performance and what the performance can do to the viewer, and the focus should not be if disabled people can dance like those who are

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