The toolkit
Welcome to the course
In this video from Caroline Bowditch, you will find out where the toolkit came from and how you can use it to bring about positive changes in your professional context.
Watch the film.
Resilience and Inclusion: Dancers as Agents of Change
The core part of the toolkit is the film Resilience and Inclusion: Dancers as Agents of Change which you saw above.
It was felt that this would be a visually interesting and contextually-relevant way to introduce and underpin some of the themes in the course.
There are many awareness-focused films that set out to inform and change perceptions about disability as part of inclusive agendas.
These are all valuable projects but there is a tendency in these other projects to assume that the object of the gaze/study is disabled and the viewer is non-disabled.
We wanted to avoid ‘othering’ in how we approached the film and its content, thereby avoiding reinforcing an unhelpful binary between non-disabled audiences and disabled dancers, or a hierarchy in the directing/making/performing process.
We commissioned two experienced film makers with a background in performance practice, Charlotte Darbyshire and Tony Wadham. Although neither are disabled themselves, they each brought different, but relevant skills and experience.
We also commissioned three disabled artists: Kate Marsh as the artistic lead (who was PhD candidate on InVisible Difference and has subsequently joined C-DaRE as post-doc Research Assistant), with Welly O’Brien and David Toole as the collaborating dancers.
Watch the film and make a note of any themes, words or questions that come to mind.
Permission to Use and Reproduce the Content of the Toolkit
The material contained in this toolkit produced by the Resilience and Inclusion team is protected by copyright. You are welcome to use, and to reproduce it. When you do, please attribute the Resilience and Inclusion team and add a link to the toolkit.
You will see that we have linked to a lot of third party material. Please respect copyright in that material, and use, and attribute it in accordance with the copyright requirements for the individual works.
Subtitles
The film and associated excerpts of the film on the toolkit which include dialogue all have subtitles. Click on the CC (closed captions) icon in the bottom right side of the screen to activate these.