Reflections on the 2021-2022 Arts’ Civic Impact Project

In this article, Aaron Richmond develops the foundations for an evaluation framework that has the potential to impact how notions of embodied accessibility in creative performance will work in the near future. Richmond focuses on the specificity of discourse and decision-making that enables the inclusion of various audiences, choreographers, and performers in the field of dance. In the process, Richmond thinks through a series of questions grounded in a field of study that first emerged upon noticing several recent Montreal-based dance projects aimed at making dance accessible for blind and low-vision communities. These questions include: What does accessibility look like when it doesn’t look like anything? When, above all, it cannot be imagined as an interface of constraints neatly lifted and boxes suitably checked? What is an accessibility that accepts and defends the functional gains of earlier activists, while also setting new horizons for disability justice⁠? Conducted between 2021-2023, this investigation enquires deeply into the discourses circulating around and through the actual production processes being observed. More specifically, the research brings critical disability studies into conversation with current forms of expression on the stage in more nuanced ways than have been previously investigated. What results is a framework that Richmond names Access in Counterpoint. The framework consists of five pairs of terms - each pair introducing a particular set of questions for those working in the field of accessible dance, and aiming to understand their own investment in impact, defined broadly. At first glance, these terms could be thought of as binaries or opposites, but as Richmond demonstrates in the concluding section of the article, these contrasting terms begin to trace out a spectrum of possibility: a way of thinking while doing in the field, in design, in development, in performance, and upon reflection.