Dance Video | 2020

Rise! is a drive to democratize dance for all abilities.  

Abled, Differently abled…

Aren’t these just labels?

Let’s open our mind to possibilities.

If you have a body, you can dance.

Let’s celebrate the differences. Let’s meet in dance.

Rise! was sparked by a desire to revive a choreography created 5 years ago with Ancy Alexander, a differently-abled dancer and founder of Kriyability.

It became a photo-video project about finding the dance in one’s body and respecting the dance in other bodies. It is not a dance duet with one person leading and the other passively following. It is a give and take between bodies of different abilities to find meeting points and points of departure.

Rise! is about elevating our mindset and democratizing dance. It urges dancers to break free from deep-rooted stereotyping to become truly inclusive. It is about inspiring each other to stretch, to become more than we can be.

“Ancy is a friend I met through dance. She has partial cerebral palsy. It is part of her, her physicality, but it does not define who she is. She is a dancer by spirit and practice and has over the last few years focused on changing the perception of dance for differently-abled bodies. So, when we began to revive an old piece of choreography, we decided to use it as a springboard to talk about our ideas of what dance should be, especially when it is a collaboration between bodies of different abilities. It questions the ideals of dance and strips it down to the fundamental idea that dance is about expressing through movement. If you have a body, you can dance.”