Tag Archives: dance

Recommended Reading for Wednesday, September 29

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Insomnia Anna says: “Yawn”

Raising My Boychick: On The Ubiquitous Use of “Crazy”

Now you’re just being melodramatic. Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?

Sure. I have mental health disparity because of racism and other bigotries, and exorbitant prices of prescription drugs, and insurance that won’t cover the medicines that work for me, and mental health wards closing, and overcrowding and dehumanizing protocols in the ones still open, and cops shooting people they know are unwell, and mental health used as an excuse to take away our kids, and a lack of effective treatments, and a terrifying mortality rate that people treat as a dishonoring failure in morality. I got lots of bigger stuff to worry about.

Where’s the Benefit: No Wonder People Think We’re All Scroungers

The coalition government’s attack on disabled people isn’t limited to reassessing benefits or encouraging members of the public to shop “scroungers”. Something rather more terrifying is going on: the government and associated entities are repeatedly, and persistently, describing Disability Living Allowance as an out-of-work benefit – which helps convince the general public that it’s a waste of “their” hard-earned tax.

As I wrote in this piece for Guardian Comment is Free, the government’s State of the Nation report offers a woefully misleading representation of the nature and purpose of DLA. “There is a high degree of persistence among claimants of many low-income and out-of-work benefits”, it says. “For example … around 2.2 million people, including 1.1 million people of working age, have been claiming disability living allowance for over five years”.

New Muslim Comic Book Superhero on the Way [Comments are horrible]

The new superhero is the brainchild of a group of disabled young Americans and Syrians who were brought together last month in Damascus by the Open Hands Intiative, a non-profit organization founded by U.S. philanthropist and businessman Jay T. Snyder.
The superhero’s appearance hasn’t been finalized, but an early sketch shows a Muslim boy who lost his legs in a landmine accident and later becomes the Silver Scorpion after discovering he has the power to control metal with his mind.

Astrid’s Journal: Autism, Intellectual Disability, and the concept of Primary Disability

The other point I have huge disagreements with, is the excusing of the lack of attention for intellectually disabled autistics from autistic advocacy groups. This excusing comes from the reasoning that these groups are concerned with autism, not intellectual disability, but you cannot specialize multiple disabilities away. In my opinion, autistic advocacy groups should be concerned with all autistics, including those with multiple or severe disabilities.

Disability Now interview with Dan Daw of Restless Dance Company in Australia: Dancing Dan: The Wizard from Oz

What’s the best thing about being disabled?
Watching people’s faces as the cogs turn when I use the words “dance” and “disability” in the same sentence – priceless!

What funny things get said about your impairment?
My favourite is at airports when the metal detectors beep and they presumptively say, “Oh, you’ve got a metal hip”. “No”, I reply, “I’m wearing a belt”.

Marissa at This is Hysteria: Go Where? Gender, Ability, Intersectionality and Constructivism Please note this is an image-heavy post, and the disability-specific stuff starts about halfway down.

This flawed way of understanding identity – each deviation from the default seen as a discrete layer – is reflected in the washroom signs indicating wheelchair access. Often, there is a male figure, a female figure, and a third non-gendered figure in a wheelchair. Disability is depicted as a discrete aspect of identity, to be layered on top of gender.

Simon Darcy at Accessible Tourism Research: Inherent Complexity: Accessible Accommodation Room Components

Most research had identified the generalities of accessible accommodation requirements without having any specific empirical approach to understanding the needs from a mobility, vision, hearing and cognitive perspective. Each individual has their own access discourse where they value the relative importance of certain room components based on their individual access needs (e.g. many wheelchair users require a roll in shower & hand held shower hose Photo 1). While the overall building codes and access standards identify a myriad of components, the individual only understands at least complex technical documents from what they require in an accessible room (Australian Building Codes Board, 1990; Standards Australia, 1992, 2001, 2002). On the other hand, the accommodation manager manly as a understanding that their establishment has a “disabled room” that people with disability should be other stay in. Hence, once an individual hears that establishment has an accessible room they believe that it will meet their needs (Darcy, 2010).

In The News:

Canada: Dead Veteran’s Last Battle Was for Disability Cheque. “On Feb. 27, he died at the age of 93 in Barrie, Ont. Three weeks later, the $55,000 disability cheque he had been expecting arrived, becoming part of the assets in his small estate. That is, until officials with Veterans Affairs Canada ordered the money seized. Quick may have qualified for a disability but now that he was dead the government wanted its money back.”

UK: MSP Drops disabled clause from assisted suicide bill “Bill Scott, Policy Officer at the campaign group Inclusion Scotland, welcomed the decision, saying: ‘That clause was dangerous, particularly at a time of cutbacks, to say to people you can’t live independently but you can apply for state-assisted suicide as if it’s a way out.'”

Australia: Disabilities ‘forgotten’: opposition “Senator Fifield said more needed to be done to help people with disabilities because neither Labor nor the coalition had “covered themselves in glory” on the issue.”

A.I. spotlight: Keepon and Paro

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At the risk of understatement, exciting things are happening when it comes to robotics and artificial intelligence and the potential applicability of these fields in the lives of PWDs.

[Description: A small, bright yellow robot with two eyes and a black nose stands in front of a white background. Outlined in orange and bright blue, the robot leans slightly to the left while it sits atop a small black pedestal]  Image courtesy of this page on the CMU website.

The little ‘bot pictured above is Keepon, developed by Hideki Kozima and Marek Michalowski at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Keepon’s purpose is to interact with children with emotional, neurological or sensory processing disorders, and who otherwise may have difficulty interacting with other children, relatives, or caregivers. However, Keepon has become something of an internet sensation in recent years, most notably when a 2007 video of the robot dancing to Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On” became extremely popular on YouTube, and inspired a Wired Magazine-backed promo video for Spoon featuring Keepon. As this 2008 excerpt (accessibility warning: video is not close-captioned) from Discovery Channel’s show “The Works” demonstrates, there is quite a bit of potential for Keepon’s original purpose; it may be cute (and a great dancer), but the potential for this sort of technology to help children with disabilities is worth further exploration.

A New York Times article from this past July, written by Amy Harmon, discussed another A.I. creature, Paro, which is made to resemble a seal cub. Paro was first developed by Takanori Shibata, a researcher working at Japan’s national science institute AIST.  The NYT article describes Paro thusly:

Paro is a robot modeled after a baby harp seal. It trills and paddles when petted, blinks when the lights go up, opens its eyes at loud noises and yelps when handled roughly or held upside down. Two microprocessors under its artificial white fur adjust its behavior based on information from dozens of hidden sensors that monitor sound, light, temperature and touch. It perks up at the sound of its name, praise and, over time, the words it hears frequently.

The whole article is worth a read, as it covers the success that some senior residential communities in the U.S. have had with using Paro as an assistive device — sort of akin to animal therapy without an actual animal (which might cause problems for, say, residents with allergy issues) — for some residents.  There is also a video at the NYT’s website (unfortunately, sans transcript) that shows Paro in action. The article also discusses at length some of the benefits of this sort of technology, as well as some of its limitations.

Of course, Keepon and Paro are only two examples of the amazing possibilities of artificial intelligence, and it remains to be seen as to whether this technology — which, like many new technologies, currently comes with a rather hefty price tag — can be made more accessible to people or organizations that cannot afford to pay $6,000 U.S. for a Paro. Hopefully, these A.I. breakthroughs will not be as pricey in the future, and will be made accessible to a wider variety of people — including PWDs.

Interview: Ingrid Voorendt, Dance Theatre Director

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Ingrid Voorendt is a choreographer and director as well as the former Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre. Restless is an integrated dance company based in Adelaide, Australia, featuring young disabled and abled dancers. Their latest show, Beauty, has just finished its run at the Adelaide Festival Centre. You can visit the Restless Dance website for more.

I spoke to Ingrid about her thoughts on disability and dance, creativity and the nature of beauty.

Please tell our readers about what you do and about Beauty. Can you tell us about your creative process in dreaming up and putting the show together, working with the dancers and those behind the scenes?

Ingrid: It’s a collaborative process, so I come up with questions and tasks to get the dancers creating movement material. I don’t choreograph ‘on’ them, we work together to devise the movement that’s in the show. In Beauty some of the movement came from interpreting the shapes, postures and gestures we found in images of women in classical visual art. The dancers responded to the images, creating movement material. We also developed material through improvisation. My job is to initiate the process and then edit, shape and compose the developing material to create a show, and to work in collaboration with the set and costume designer, sound designer and lighting designer through dialogue and decision making.

Why was it important for you to explore the notion of beauty? What do you think it is, and how to explore it in a world in which disabled people aren’t often thought of as beautiful?

Ingrid: I was interested in exploring the notion of beauty for a range of reasons, one being simply that I’d rebelled against ‘the beautiful’ in a couple of previous Restless shows I’d directed, in terms of content and aesthetic. Beauty was inspired by some of the dancers themselves, in particular Dana Nance, who is a stunning young woman with physical and intellectual impairments. I was interested in the oscillation audience may perceive or experience between Dana’s beauty and her impairment. With Beauty, I wanted to make a work in which the disabled performers would be viewed as beautiful first and foremost. My favourite moment in the show was when Dana stepped into a projection of the Venus de Milo (a classic image of beauty), in which she fits perfectly.

I think beauty is much more than surface, as I believe we all do, but we live in a culture increasingly driven by the visual, by a world of images. It’s true that in our society disabled people aren’t often thought of as beautiful, and I hope Beauty questions this in a subtle way. Beauty is also linked to sexuality, which is also often denied in disabled people.

How do representations of women’s bodies tie in with disability in Beauty?

Ingrid: I found it interesting to discover during our research that (unsurprisingly) many of the poses found in images of women in classical visual art are echoed in contemporary fashion photography and advertising. So in a subtle way in the show we were playing with these images which reference both the past and the present, but disabled women were the ‘bodies’ being looked at, and on their own terms. The opening of the show was a solo by Jianna Georgiou, a gorgeous young woman with Down Syndrome, who is a beautiful, quite voluptuous dancer. I loved watching this solo, because the movement within it is so evocative of classic images of ‘beautiful’ women – and Jianna is very beautiful, and is also a proud disabled woman. I liked the fact that Jianna was representing herself, yet referencing the bodies of others. I hoped that the audience would question their perceptions around who is/whose bodies are beautiful.

Now that the run is over, do you have any thoughts you’d care to share looking back on the experience?

Ingrid: It’s always such a fast and intense process making a show, and there’s so much I’d like to change and develop further. I think Beauty could have gone a lot further and deeper than it did. Hopefully there’ll be a chance to revisit it in the future.

Recommended Reading for July 13, 2010

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Problem Chylde at Feministe: Storytelling as a Radical Act

They won’t speak out for fear of losing something: losing a relative, losing control of their lives, or losing their stories. To them, it’s not a myth that their stories will be repeated without their names to guide them. Anyone can pick up a textbook and read case studies about H, a 26-year-old African-American woman from X with cerebral palsy, or see pictures of happy smiling children online referred to as “happy smiling children in the Y mountains/Z desert/Q farmland.” These people — their bodies, their plight, their stories — are Other. No names in the street, in the book, in the mind, and people only recently have been asking why they are nameless.

Jeannine Stein, Los Angeles Times: Movement therapies may reduce chronic pain

Movement-based therapies such as yoga, tai chi, qigong and more mainstream forms of exercise are gaining acceptance in the world of chronic pain management. Many pain clinics and integrative medicine centers now offer movement-based therapy for pain caused by cancer and cancer treatments, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases and conditions.

lisa at Sociological Images: Norms, Normality and Normativity

Sociologists distinguish between the terms “norm,” “normal,” and “normative.”

The norm refers to what is common or frequent.  For example, for Christian Americans, celebrating Christmas is the norm.

Normal is opposed to abnormal.  Even though celebrating Christmas is the norm, it is not abnormal to celebrate Hanukkah.  To celebrate Hanukkah is perfectly normal.

In contrast to both of these, normative refers to a morally-endorsed ideal. . .

Wheelchair Dancer: Equivalencies:Days 2 and 3

We use equivalent to suggest that two separate and often very different things are the same, or, at least, of equal value. But the very insistence on equivalence underscores the potential for the thing that is being compared to be somehow less than the original. Rather than “same but different,” it’s more “different but same.” My mind jumps to “separate but equal.”