For almost 40 years, Parsons Dance has brought life-affirming performances and joy to audiences worldwide through education and outreach programs, cultivating and sustaining an appreciation for dance. With a mission grounded in developing a more positive, creative, and welcoming world, we embrace the need to examine our history, traditions, and legacy practices to ensure that we are firmly aligned with this work.
If done correctly, this introspection raises complex questions. How do we approach discussion and discourse around dance? Movement? Art? What concepts and methodologies do we readily embrace and cling to in order to justify our choices and work? Who do we envision engaging with our craft? Who are we subconsciously or consciously excluding? Is our work accessible? Answers to these questions are not readily available, nor should they be. Instead, they require time, research, learning, and evaluation at varying levels.
Parsons Dance continues to interrogate and answer these questions while identifying opportunities for improvement, accessibility, and excellence. July is Disability Pride Month, which we celebrate this year by partnering with UserWay to ensure that our website presence is not only ADA compliant, but an inclusive experience for all website visitors. We first discovered UserWay’s comprehensive web toolkit through our friends at AXIS Dance Company, longtime leaders in integrated dance. Now, our own website visitors can click a badge on any page at www.parsonsdancce.org to deploy a range of accessibility tools and create a custom user experience. Look at the bottom-right corner of this post for the round, red wheelchair user icon, and click or tap to give it a try.
When you do, you’ll see a slide-out drawer like the one below to apply all kinds of accessibility accommodations to our site—from simple changes like enlarged text, to more complex behaviors like dyslexia support. These changes not only create the most comfortable browsing experience for those who need them, but they remind ALL visitors that opportunities for inclusive design are everywhere.
A sample of the UserWay pop-up menu that allows users to configure their own unique browsing experience for maximum legibility and ease of use.
With this small step and others like it, we join a growing community of organizations invested in bringing inclusive website experiences to the world. And having accomplished one goal, our work must continue toward others; a more accessible website is just one piece of broadening and deepening access to EVERYTHING we do. As tenets of our culture are rightfully redefined and scrutinized, we champion the notion that art neither exists nor can survive in a vacuum. Leadership is all around us: click here to read UserWay’s blog post about the history and legacy of Disability Pride Month, and click here to read AXIS Dance Company’s comprehensive Accessibility Statement for their own programming and services.
Art is a universal medium and should not be gate-kept or out of reach. Guided by these and other frameworks, we continue to update our cultural practices to ensure that our spaces are as inclusive and welcoming as possible for everyone who engages with Parsons Dance.
Summarized from Userway.org:
The Disability Pride flag and Disability Pride Month colors are a unique and direct representation of the community, focusing on inclusion, similar to the LGBTQ pride flag. The original Disability pride flag was designed by Ann Magill, featuring a brightly-colored lightning bolt on a black background. With the feedback that the Disability Pride flag colors could negatively impact people with epilepsy, Magill redesigned the flag with muted colors symbolizing the diverse facets of daily life for people with disabilities.
-Charcoal gray background: In memory of the victims of ableist abuse and violence, including children or those killed, suicides, or individuals who suffered from negligence.
-Diagonal band: Cutting across the barriers blocking people with disabilities from full participation, integration, and inclusion in society
-Red stripe: Physical disabilities (chronic pain/fatigue, mobility impairment, loss of limbs)
-Gold stripe: Neurodivergence (autism, ADHD, dyslexia)
-White stripe: Undiagnosed and invisible disabilities
-Blue stripe: Psychiatric disabilities (depression, PTSD, anxiety, etc.)
-Green stripe: Sensory disabilities (hearing loss, visual impairments, etc.)