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Inspired by Jodi Stolove’s YouTube video ‘Life's A Celebration’, artist Nicola Smith and her collaborators break down the uniformity of the well-rehearsed participants precisely following verbal instructions to examine the ways that conditions and disabilities impact on a person’s mobility, or how they interpret information.
Although attempting inspiration from this traditionally framed video regime, each performer’s contribution is conditioned by their own interpretation and disability.
Smith’s ADHD impacts on her ability to follow verbal instructions, and she’ll be working with wheelchair performers Kevin French who works across choreography, dance and live art, Monique Jarrett who is a model, public figure, and professional ballroom chair dancer, and Adele Fowles (Another Adele), a neurodivergent artist, freestyle dancer and former chair dancing teacher.
With a combination of visible and invisible disabilities, these artists and performers reinterpret Chair Dancing, challenging perceptions that everyone should move and look the same way, revealing how each individual’s social reality causes them to move in their own unique ways, directing their own bodies in space.
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Supported by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from Arts Council England.
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