The UCLA Disability Inclusion Lab’s DANCING DISABILITY will offer experienced and emerging disabled dance artists from across the world an immersive engagement in disability studies scholarship alongside movement exploration and choreographic inquiry. Participants and their instructors will create a new performance work that challenges “ability paradigms.” The experimental, weeklong exploration will combine small group study of the histories and social discourses surrounding disability justice, aesthetics and culture with movement exploration and choreography.

Facilitators

Victoria Marks

Description: Head shot of Victoria Marks, smiling, from about 10 years ago, photographed on her front patio, late afternoon sun.

Victoria Marks is an Alpert Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and Rasuchenberg Fellow, and Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, who has been making dances for stage and film for the past 38-ish years. Marks is a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and serves as the Associate Dean in the School of the Arts and Architecture and Chair of UCLA’s Disability Studies minor. Her choreography has long considered the politics of citizenship, as well as the representation of both virtuosity and disability. These themes are part of her ongoing commitment to locating dance-making within the sphere of political meaning. Her projects migrate between ‘choreo-portraits’ for individuals who don’t identify as dancers and dances for and with dancers that fuel her inquiries into movement. 

Alice Sheppard

Description: Dressed in black with the frame of her wheelchair visible at the edges of the frame, Alice Sheppard — a hand to her face and elbow on her knee — smiles softly into the camera. Alice is a light-skinned multi racial black woman with blonde and red striped hair; a gold necklace shines in the opening of her shirt collar.

Alice Sheppard trained with Kitty Lunn and first performed with Infinity Dance Theater.  Alice then became a core company member with AXIS Dance Company.  Her choreography has been commissioned by CRIPSiE, Full Radius Dance, and MOMENTA Dance Company.

Alice is the Artistic Director of Kinetic Light, a project-based ensemble, working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology to create transformative art and advance the intersectional disability arts movement.  

A USA Artist, Creative Capital grantee and Bessie Award winner, Alice creates movement that engages intersectional disability arts, culture, and history, challenging conventional understandings of disabled and dancing bodies.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. She is the author of the 2016 op-ed, “Becoming Disabled,” which was the inaugural article in the ongoing co-edited, weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities, and Staring: How We Look, along with several other books. She is also a professor of English and bioethics at Emory University, where she teaches disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies and the health humanities to bring forward disability culture, access, and justice to a broad range of institutions and communities.

Georgina Kleege

Description: This is the head shot of a middle-aged white woman with chin length white hair. She is smiling broadly and appears to be looking directly at the camera , but the white cane resting against her left shoulder suggests otherwise.

Georgina Kleege teaches creative writing and disability studies at the University of California, Berkeley.  Her recent books include: Sight Unseen and Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. Kleege’s latest book, More than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art, (2018) is concerned with blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented in art, how blindness affects the lives of visual artists, how museums can make visual art accessible to people who are blind and visually impaired. She has lectured and served as consultant to art institutions around the world.

Participants

Stephanie Bastos

Stephanie Bastos, Daughter of Bernadette Chaves Nunes and Aluizio Ribeiro Bastos, started her performance career as a child with the Miami Ballet and in her teens, became one of the founding members of the internationally acclaimed Isadora Duncan Dance Ensemble of Miami, FL directed by Andrea Seidel and featured in Isadora Duncan Dance and Repertory by Princeton Book Company. After losing her right leg in a car accident and subsequently retraining herself to dance with and without a prosthetic leg, she graduated cum Laude with her BFA in Dance and has been performing, touring and teaching Contemporary Dance throughout the United States, Germany, Poland, Argentina and Brazil. Winner of the 2011 San Francisco “Izzies” Award for Outstanding Achievement in Performance Ensemble with Ase West Dance Theater Collective, she has also worked with the Urban Bush Women, Axis Dance Company, Deep Waters Dance Theater, Aguas Da Bahia, REVolutions Dance and Ron Brown’s/ EVIDENCE as a guest performer. Her teaching credits include SCD Summer Intensive, FSU/World Dance Festival, American College Dance Festival, ODC in San Francisco, Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, CA and Youth In Arts/ VSA. She is also a former mentee for Dance/USA Institute for Leadership Training (DILT), the 2016 EDGE artist- in- residence at Counterpulse, San Francisco, for her autobiographical work, Timeline directed by Leymis Bolaños Wilmott and most recently, a choreographer for Axis Dance Company’s first Virtual Choreo Lab 2020.

Dominic Bradley

Dominic Bradley (they/them) is an emerging disabled performer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Pelenakeke Brown

Pelenakeke Brown is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice spans art, writing, and performance. She is from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and is an Samoan/Pakeha disabled artist. Recently she has returned to Aotearoa after being based in NYC for six years to lead Touch Compass, Aotearoa’s only integrated company.

She has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Gibney Dance Center and The Goethe Institute. She is a 2020 Eyebeam Artist-in-Residence. She was selected as one of four choreographers for AXIS Dance Company’s 2020 Choreo-Lab.

In 2019 she received a Dance/NYC’s Disability Dance Artistry Award and was the curator for the Artists of Color Council Movement Research at Judson Church Spring season. She has performed and exhibited her work in the US and internationally. Her non-fiction creative work has been published in the Hawai‘i Review, Apogee Journal, and the Movement Research Performance Journal issue.

She attended the National Academy School of Fine Art, Studio Intensive Program, NY and received a BA in English literature and Pacific Studies, focusing on art and literature by Pasifika artists, from Auckland University, NZ.

Amelia Cavallo

Amelia Cavallo is a blind, USA born theatre practitioner, academic and workshop facilitator. They works as a multi-disciplinary performer, musical director, lecturer and consultant on access and audio description. Currently, they are a Phd candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama studying intersections of gender, disability and sexuality. They have also performed with disability led theatre companies such as Extant, Graeae and Birds of Paradise as well as with regional theatres such as The New Wolsey, Theatre Royal Stratford East and The Royal Exchange Manchester. Amelia is also co-founder of Quiplash, a theatre company making space for disabled people across the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Recent publications include a co-written chapter with Maria Oshodi in Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre, and Seeing the Word, Hearing the Image: The Artistic Possibilities of Audio Description in Theatrical Performance in RIDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre.

Rafi Darrow

Rafi is a queer, trans, multiply-disabled, white, Jewish femme. A dancer, illustrator, and intern at Sins Invalid, they believe in plants, sex worker justice, and the joy and intimacy of inter/intra-disability identification.

Shay Erlich

Shay Erlich is a hard of hearing, multiply disabled, community-engaged artist and wheelchair dancer. Shay is the co-founder of The Cyborg Circus Project with their partner Jenna Roy. he Cyborg Circus Project, a community art and social service organization for by and for disabled artists. The Cyborg Circus Project creates opportunities to engage in disability-centred arts and movement practices for folks at all levels of practice, with an emphasis on recreational and community programming. The Cyborg Circus Project has performed original dance work both locally and internationally including In Situ 2018, NextFest 2019 and the Contact Dance International Film Festival 2019.

Jerron Hermon

Jerron Herman is a dancer and cultural critic. He developed a panel series of disabled artists called Access 2.0: Mapping Accessibility for the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. Jerron was nominated for a Dance Fellowship from United States Artists. His latest works include Breaking and Entering at Danspace Project, Many Ways to Raise a Fist at the Whitney Museum, and Relative at Performance Space New York. He has served on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA since 2017. Jerron studied at Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from The King’s College. The New York Times has called him, “…the inexhaustible Mr. Herman.” jerronherman.com

Rosalia Lerner

Rosalia Lerner is a doctoral student in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation project, “Get Well Soon!: Sick Bodied Performance in Chronic Conditions” considers how chronic illness reframes embodiments of crisis as quotidian and ongoing rather than eruptive and ephemeral. She holds an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University and a B.A. in Dance and Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yo-Yo Lin

Yo-Yo Lin is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of human connection and embodiment in the context of emerging technologies. She uses intelligent projection/lighting, digital and hand-drawn animation, interactive objects, and lush sound design to create meditative ‘memoryscapes.’ Her work often examines human perception as a vehicle for self-knowledge and community growth. 

Jen Roy

Jen Roy is a disabled dancer and performance artist. They are one of the co-founders of the Cyborg Circus Project with Shay Erlich. Jen has a diverse arts-based and community education teaching practice which predominantly focuses on access and inclusion. She has taught both locally and within Canada including at educational institutions, community settings, and conferences. Her practice stems from their experiences as a queer, mad, multiply disabled person. They envision a future where art that centers the experiences and realities of disabled people permeates the fabric of the arts.