We first met AXIS Dance Company when their work Roots Above Ground was presented digitally during our onstage season at the Joyce Theater last fall. AXIS’s mission is to collaborate “with disabled and non-disabled artists to create virtuosic productions that challenge perceptions of dance and disability.” July is Disability Pride Month, a chance to reflect and act in solidarity with Disabled communities.
Earlier this year, Parsons dancers visited AXIS in Berkeley, CA. There, we experienced AXIS’s mission in action as we studied inclusive, accessible speech and gestures to use in our own classrooms.
The day began with a warmup led by AXIS alum Katie Faulkner, called The Inter-Active Body. Grounded in Laban/Bartenieff principles, this session limbered up our physical and mental faculties; breath work and movement improvisation supported a playful examination of inner and outer sensations of the world around us.
Warmed up and ready to dance, we continued on to Fundamentals of Inclusive Teaching and Working with Diverse Students. AXIS Artistic Director Nadia Adame and her company dancers David Calhoun, Louisa Mann, Zara Anwar, Alaja Badalich, and JanpiStar led the Parsons team through new forms of inclusive language that will make our spaces more welcoming and accessible to students we teach all over the country and world.
In the afternoon, the Composition Masterclass paired off AXIS dancers with Parsons dancers to study—and then translate—a movement phrase created by Nadia. We learned how to break down her choreography to its underlying intentions, then expand those intentions into creative new movements that can be danced by a broad range of disabled and non-disabled dancers. A final showing capped the session with each pair’s own unique interpretation of Nadia’s phrase. As Parsons Dancer Megan Garcia reports,
Working with the dancers of AXIS was so inspiring–it was beautiful to be part of a space for dancers of all abilities. I loved learning how to implement new teaching methods in our everyday lives.
We’re proud to have met and worked with the talented artists of AXIS Dance Company; future students of Parsons Dance will also benefit from the many valuable lessons we learned during our time together. Here’s how you can support the work of an innovative company bringing accessibility to the dance industry, one deep breath at a time.
Attend an AXIS event or performance online, or in person when they tour to your city
Book an AXIS class or workshop of your own to share and spread the inclusive techniques we learned from AXIS
Read AXIS’s Equity Pledge and its distinct approaches to Radical Inclusion, Accessibility, Racial Equity, and Land Acknowledgement.
Study, and then adopt, AXIS’s accessibility principles for online events and in-person gatherings in your own spaces.
Land Acknowledgement
Parsons Dance travels all over the contemporary United States and the world. The Berkeley studio where we collaborated with AXIS occupies unceded land that was forcibly and violently taken from many different Native tribes, nations, and peoples. These include the Muwekma Oholone and the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. We are actively developing practices that seek authentic engagement with contemporary Native descendants, their ancestral homes, and other communities harmed by ongoing colonial injustice. To learn more about Parsons Dance’s commitments to antiracist, intersectional inclusion efforts within our artistic community, you can visit parsonsdance.org/diversity.