Dis-ability

Speakers:
Dr Stephanie Burridge, Independent Scholar, Singapore
Circe Henestrosa, HoS Fashion, LASALLE

What’s in a name?  Perceptions of differently-abled bodies in Dance Performance and Practice
Dr Stephanie Burridge

The journeys of dance are diverse. Differently abled bodies create new movement vocabularies and pedagogical dialogues with their teachers, choreographers and fellow dancers. These conversations embody a diversity of narratives, contexts and cultures that are revealed through experiencing dancing and traversing from empathy to empowerment. Others are on a collision course where discrimination, historical and cultural prejudices impede and restrict the creative potential of the expressive body and different lived experiences.  Nomenclature of the field is contested throughout the world and the evolvement of the term is instrumental in changing perceptions and encompassing a goal for access and inclusion.

Deviant Muses: De-stigmatization of Disability, Through Fashion, Dress and Identity 
Circe Henestrosa

Little scholarship has been developed in the fields of fashion and disability to date. Most research comes primarily from the humanities and the social sciences. Newton (1976) and Yep (1977) viewed clothing as a rehabilitation tool. Kernaleguen (1978), and Chase and Quinn (1990) proposed disability as a design problem. Miller (1982), Nisbett and Johnson (1992) argued that disability is a perceptual cue. Disability scholars in the US have a tendency to use the “people first” approach (Lamb 2001) while the UK scholars claim that disability is an identity marker similar to gender, ethnicity, class, age, or sexual orientation (Lamb 2001). In this presentation, I will discuss my curatorial view of disability applying a medical and social lens to two different installations. The main focus of the presentation is Frida Kahlo, contextualised through two exhibitions in two different spaces.