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Shifting Apollo’s Frame Challenging the Body Aesthetic in Theater Dance owen smith When CandoCo emerged onto the British dance scene in the early 1990s, critics soon took note: they were new and they were different. At that time, Amici and Green Candle (both performing since the 1980s) were probably the most widely known dance companies in the United Kingdom that were not stuck in an aesthetic cul-de-sac characterized by corporeal exclusivity. Both worked with and included disabled and other “nontraditional ” dance performers. However, these companies were not perceived in the same way as CandoCo; they were perhaps identi‹ed closely enough with the community and disability arts movements not to pose a threat to the dominant, mainstream aesthetic tradition: CandoCo was different. From the company’s birth, artistic directors Celeste Dandeker and Adam Benjamin presented professionally trained nondisabled and disabled dancers together: dancers who represented one particular kind of training and aesthetic tradition with dancers whose physicalities represented a challenge to this tradition. They consciously resisted the “disability dance” label, thereby questioning historically and socially constructed boundaries that attempted to de‹ne and secure what had been considered aesthetically acceptable by dominant social and cultural hegemonies. The two founders had met at an integrated recreation center (funded 73 through ASPIRE: the Association for Spinal Injury Research, Rehabilitation and Reintegration) in London. Adam was artist-in-residence; Celeste was on the management committee. He saw her in The Fall (1990), a dance ‹lm made for television, choreographed by Darshan Singh Bhuller, and was inspired. During the 1970s, while dancing with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Celeste had fallen awkwardly and broken her neck; paralyzed by the accident, Singh Bhuller’s acclaimed ‹lm was her ‹rst public exposure as a dancer for over ‹fteen years. Realizing that dance might be a vehicle for bringing disabled and nondisabled people together for physical recreation, Adam and Celeste began discussing the idea of developing an integrated dance program at the center. A visual artist who had also trained in dance, Adam had a strong interest in both “new” dance techniques and traditional Eastern techniques of movement.1 They began teaching together and soon built up a core of students. A year later (in 1992) they were performing, holding workshops, and teaching across the country. The following year they opened Dance 93 in Nottingham and the Spring Loaded dance season at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (one of London’s prestigious performance venues) with a company that included three disabled and ‹ve nondisabled dancers. Their style was grounded in both contemporary and new dance techniques. They also sought a rigorous aesthetic quality with the wish that their work might be assessed according to the same criteria applied to any other contemporary dance company. Central to their creative ethos was the will to work in ways through which individual performers could complement each other’s strengths and abilities, not to highlight any one individual’s capacity—certainly not to create a frame in which disabled company members would be showcased and emphasized, simply because they were disabled people dancing. (Currently the company consists of two dancers who are mobility impaired through spinal injury and who use wheelchairs, one who has lost a leg below the midthigh, and three nondisabled dancers.) The establishment’s urge to place the company under the umbrella of “disability dance” was something the company had to struggle to resist. Their vision, to reinterpret dance in order to widen potential ownership of the art form, demanded that both non- and disabled people explore, work, and dance together; this would not happen if they were segregated within the category of the disability arts.2 The desire to pigeonhole and categorize the company, and an uncertainty about where to critically locate their work, represent a response to the challenge that they pose. Many critical reviews of their work during the 1990s appreciated their right to struggle for recognition and pro‹le along74 Bodies in Commotion side other companies, perhaps acknowledging the inroads toward aesthetic heterogeneity that had been vigorously pioneered through various “postmodern ” experiments within contemporary dance practice in Britain since the 1970s. However, other reviews expressed an unashamed conservatism in reaction to the company in defense of an assumed aesthetic integrity that appears to demand corporeal homogeneity and exclusivity. By placing themselves within the frame of contemporary dance’s mainstream CandoCo challenged that integrity through their rewriting of the dominant dance manual that insists on the exclusivity of a limited physicality. Moreover, though...

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