Inclusive Dance The Story of Touchdown Dance

This book is about dance and movement involving visually impaired and sighted participants, about social and cultural inclusion facilitated by touch based methods. Case studies and vignettes provide thick descriptions of the practice Contact Improvisation and reveal how lives change, how sociocultural inclusion is imperative. 35 b/w illus.

Inclusive Dance offers a concise ethnography of disability arts and a historiographic overview of the field in the 1980s, when many new disability arts groups emerged in the UK. It focuses in particular on the inclusive teaching modalities of Touchdown Dance, which was the work of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre-maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne. It involved visually impaired and sighted adults in a dyadic movement form called Contact Improvisation. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and for this book draws on archives, participant accounts, and personal experience to detail the work of Touchdown Dance and its effects on its participants since its founding. Three guests from Touchdown Dance contribute eye witness accounts of the methods and performance projects.

Katy Dymoke is a touch specialist, dance practitioner, somatic movement educator and dance-movement psychotherapist. As director of Touchdown Dance she directs projects with all ages and abilities.

Inclusive Dance is an ethnography of disability arts, and historiographic overview of the 1980s when many new disability arts groups came to fruition. Touchdown Dance was the research 'ambition' of dancer Steve Paxton and theatre maker and psychotherapist Anne Kilcoyne, involving visually impaired and sighted adults in Contact Improvisation - a dyadic movement form requiring physical contact. Katy Dymoke took over Touchdown Dance in 1994 and refers here to archives, accounts and personal experience to share the learning that has been shared over the years to today.

Touch and movement are vital for accessibility and inclusion and modality specific approaches were devised to ensure a democratic process towards the inclusion of visually impaired people in a pro-touch activity. The continuum of movement based methods fills the gaps in polarities of visual and nonvisual and a two-way membrane interlinks all the participants in a body focused learning experience. The mutable membrane becomes a heuristic device for the relational realm, a locus for debate, for change. Touch deprivation, exclusion and inequality are the consequence of an inaccessible visually dominant society.

Three point of view chapters - from two visually impaired and one sighted company dancer - further describe the performance work, revealing how lives are changed and why sociocultural inclusion is imperative.