In 2015 we organized the first edition of DanceAble, a mini-festival that, as a prelude to the biennial Holland Dance Festival, focuses attention on inclusion dance, the dance in which people with and without physical or intellectual disabilities share the stage together. From the beginning, it was our dream, once Dutch audiences were ready, to let go of this “label” of a separate event, and incorporate DanceAble into our regular festival programming. We feel that moment has now arrived after three extremely successful DanceAble editions.
Symposium, workshops and performances
Within our festival programming this year, then, we present a symposium on inclusive dance, several inclusive dance workshops and two inclusive dance productions, the first of which, All Inclusive, is specially produced by us for the occasion. In All Inclusive, you will be introduced to the extraordinary work of the German inclusion company Un-Label and a work by Portuguese dancer and choreographer Diana Niepce, who, at the height of a successful career as a professional dancer, was paralyzed on four limbs by an accident.
Meeting in the subway
Irene van Zeeland, head of Holland Dance Festival in Society and curator of All Inclusive, actually came into contact with German Un-Label through corona. She saw a duet by the company, Gravity (and other attractions), during a livestream of a symposium on inclusion dance, and was so moved by it that she immediately knew: I want to share this with a lot of others. Gravity (and other attractions) is a moving and at the same time extremely virtuosic duet for a deaf and a hearing dancer, Tiki and Lolo, who meet in the subway. The special thing is that everyone can fully experience the duet, because from the start of the creation process, sign language and an English-language audio description - very poetic and creative - were incorporated into the dance story. And not as an addition to make the production accessible, as is usually done until now, but as an essential and indispensable part of it.
Physical Duet
In addition, the choreography Dueto by Diana Niepce will be featured during All Inclusive. Hugo Cabral Mendes and Diana Niepce exist with the other in a conflict that brings together love and death. A transformation, with and against the body of the other, in which lies the hidden violence of a subversion of roles. A dance that arises from the intimate distortion of the quality of the perceived body.
