Amici Dance Theatre Group was founded by Wolfgang Stange in 1980. The company integrates disabled and non-disabled dancers. There are members who have physical, sensory, learning disabilities, people with mental health problems, and non-disabled dancers.
The process of dance within Amici is a dynamic method based on improvisation. There is an emphasis on the personal strengths of each performer, regardless of their individual ability, cultural, or educational background. This celebration of individual creativity has in turn led to some of the members choreographing works for the company.
Amici produces new works bi-annually, and tours nationally and internationally to places including Austria, Germany, Poland, Spain, and Italy. Furthermore, they do quite a bit of outreach work. Company classes are held every Wednesday, there are Pre-Amici classes for a more relaxed and social environment, and there are creative movement classes for people aged 7-15. Amici also holds an open workshop once a term, aimed at professionals and students in the theater and dance world and teachers working with disabled and non-disabled people. The Amici Education and Participation Program is another outreach program. The project allows schools to participate in a dance and drama workshop, to experience and benefit from working with both disabled and non-disabled people, and to learn not only performance techniques but about integration.
- by Jacki Carter and Hannah Leingang, Dance 336, 2009

Dance Ability was created in 1987 by Alito Alessi, the founder of Joint Forces and his dance partner Karen Nelson. They were interested in exploring mixed-abilities and movement. Their interest turned to passion. DanceAbility is Joint Forces' international workshop program, teaching people, how to make dance more inclusive.
Joint Forces Dance Company focuses on professional performances to create awareness and advocate for greater inclusion in dance. DanceAbility aims to create access for all and challenges misconceptions about dance and what it means to be a dancer. It is the company's mission “to encourage the evolution of mixed-abilities dance by cultivating a common ground for creative expression for all people.” This is accomplished through performance, educational programs, teacher training and workshops with a wide range of diverse participants including (but not limited to) performers with cerebral palsy, down syndrome, autism, quadriplegia, and paraplegia. DanceAbility uses improvisation and Contact Improvisation, which focus on physical contact and the dancers finding ways to express themselves through movement with their own specific bodies.
Joint Forces and DanceAbility's work has been praised for representing the disabled body differently by not recreating the traditional/classical body/dance that other inclusive dance companies aspire to. DanceAbilit has many suporters and has received fourteen awards for their choreography and community leadership. Today Dance Ability offers regular workshops in 20 different locations in Canada, America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe.
- by Jennifer Adama, Sheena Brown and Jenica Funston Dance 336, 2009

Puppets, dolls, creepy, horror flicks are just a few words to describe this piece. Each movement was meant to be sharp and a scary. There were upside down movements, zombie walking, doll-like movements, quick sharp head turn and creepy crawl movements with the hands.The most difficult part was not creating the choreography but to integrated Universal Design and make the dance more accessible.
The performance consisted of three sections, each section allowed a different sensory experience for the audience. First we had the audience close their eyes and face the wall while we performed our dance with music while we alsop passed a teddy bear through the audience. Second we had the audience watch the dance without music and passed around a miniature ballerina slipper. We also played a slideshow with different kinds of dolls on a laptop. To finish off we performed the piece with music and projected the a visualizer screen connected to the audio. Both perfomers were also made up and dressed as dolls from the tutu on Cat to the suspenders on Van.
-by Cat Refuerzo and Vannera Yean, Dance 336, 2009

Gravitational Pull

Four Seasons

This performance piece for two people consisted of three parts: poetry reading, dance performance and audience involvement. We created an installation on the floor, placing the scripts for our piece as messages in bottles to be shared by groups of four audience members. We also placed a large variety of objects with associations to the different season on the floor. These props included flower petals, coffee beans, twigs, flowers and snowflakes. For each member of the audience we also placed name cards. For the opening we chose poems for winter, spring and summer by the authors Bernard Howe, Tu Fu and Shakespeare. We switched turns in reading them and chose creative ways to read with both our voices together. During the final poem, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s day, by William Shakespeare, one of us read and the other acted it out. The second part of our performance was a dance piece based on the four seasons. Dressed in colors of nature, this performance was an interpretation of our own feelings about each season. Beginning with fall and proceeding through the year we incorporated props that are associated with the seasons. These props included feathers, twigs, foam snowflakes, tissue paper flower petals, flip-flops, and sunglasses. The dance was accompanied by nature sounds from the collection “American Woodland 1.” To close we involved the audience by asking them to gather some of the props we had laid out in front of them with their name cards and place them in whichever seasonal box they associate the props and themselves with. We found that many people felt a connection with summer.
-by Joëlle Hanton and Bianca Mendonça, Dance 366, 2009

In this Place

Teaching Practice

Teaching Dance in a High School
Special Education Life Skills Classroom

This was a four week unit teaching social dance in a high school special edu-cation classroom that included students with mixed abilities, though all were mobile. The goal was for the students to experience and participate in a phy-sically active, social, leisure time activity, and my main objective was that the students would learn some dancing. The first class meeting was very intro-ductory and exploratory on both sides -- them of me and me of them -- since what I was proposing to do with them was radically different from anything ei-ther they or the classroom teacher had done before.

To ensure success for the students and the dance experience, I chose music and a dance that they said they liked: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” dance. This dance held a particular interest for these students because the cheer-leaders performed it at games. I serendipitously found a “Thriller” dance tea-ching video on line, which made adapting the choreography much easier and faster. I adapted and shortened the choreography from the teaching video and taught it in two, one-hour classes. Then put the two sections together in the last class and brought the music up to full speed. The classes were quite successful. The students, staff and parents all gave very positive feedback. To incorporate broader social interaction into the unit, the classroom teacher organized a “Thriller” party, attended by the class, other students and cheer-leaders. The party was very successful as well.

Resources:
Michael Jackson “Thriller” music video
Learning video, “Thrill the World” by Ines Markeljevic