Contrary Dancing Bodymind: Impairment Elision and the Binaries of IDD Dance

Over the last fifty years, disability dance has offered a challenge to the aesthetics of normative Western concert dance. While the work of dancers with physical impairment is well documented by researchers and dance industry writers, dancers with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) have received markedly little attention, and their contributions to the field in the United States are unacknowledged. We suggest this gap is a result of impairment elision, where, through a hierarchy of disability, privileged impairments come to stand for all disability experiences. In the case of disability dance, this impairment elision is rooted in the assumption that artistry requires intention and that dancers with IDD lack intention.