Sho Shibata reveals the systemic disadvantages in the dance industry that make it difficult for disabled people to become professional dancers.
Stopgap Dance Company’s Executive Producer Sho Shibata reveals the systemic disadvantages in the dance industry that make it difficult for disabled people to become professional dancers. However, Stopgap has worked for more than a decade to create change, writes Shibata.
If you were asked to imagine what a professional dancer looks like, you’d probably think of a non-disabled person with a certain physique and athleticism, and you would be quite blameless to think so too. Darcy Bussell and Fred Astaire are two famous dancers in modern history, not to mention the many other non-disabled dancers who enter the realms of stardom. But have you ever wondered why there are practically no disabled dancers who hold such a status? Are they simply not as good?
The problem of under representation in any field is often a result of systemic disadvantage, and it’s no different in the dance industry.
The problem of inequality
When a young child wants to learn to dance, the first port of call is the local dance school. At the point of entry, the lessons are generally geared toward participation, so most disabled children are able to take part. However, things get more difficult if a disabled child wants to take dance more seriously.
In order to progress through grassroots training, they would have to enrol to take classes that follow the appropriate syllabus and assessments. These prepare them for advanced training at tertiary level and to enter the industry as professionals. Unfortunately for a disabled child, most syllabi encourage students to aspire toward a traditional concept of an ‘ideal shape’ and assessments are designed to judge how close they can get to these set shapes. But this is particularly unattainable for disabled people who have physiques that are far from the average and many of them feel discouraged from progressing through training because of this. In effect, the existing syllabi and their assessment framework are imposing a barrier for disabled dancers pretty much at the entry level, which then prevents them from continuing on to tertiary level training and entering the industry. In fact, much training at tertiary and industry levels is quite often inaccessible in any case because they tend to lean toward the traditional pedagogical stance.
Some disabled dancers do become professional, but they are often self-taught, having to learn on the job by ad hoc participation in voluntary or small-scale dance projects. Because the training framework used in the workforce pipeline is designed solely with non-disabled dancers in mind professional disabled dancers face a disadvantage and are in short supply. It used to be the case that the industry ignored this inequality and simply claimed that disabled people just didn’t turn out to be great dancers. However, with companies like Stopgap developing exceptional disabled dancers through their training programme, there are very few people who would say that now.
Nadenh Poon in «The Enormous Room». Photo by Chris Parkes.
Solving the inequality
Stopgap Dance Company started off as a group of amateur disabled and non-disabled dancers but after nearly a decade of trial and error, they succeeded in producing a handful of professional disabled dancers.
