Corporeal Lived Experience of Covid-19

In March 2020 the world was plunged into a new normal when the Covid-19 pandemic triggered lockdowns across the world. With this came a radical change in working practices, including remote working from home and the closure of all performance venues, universities, and rehearsal spaces. Many disabled artists and researchers advocated using these new, imposed working practices as a catalyst for change, considering how work, interaction, and communication could be more inclusive and prioritize accessibility. This entailed consideration of how bodies negotiate new dance spaces, both digital and physical. This paper will focus on two main concepts: adaption and lived experience. It will explore how lived experience of UK-based disabled dancers before the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated adaptive capabilities that many had to develop instantaneously during the lockdown to access work and engage audiences. This contributes new knowledge to collective understandings of bodily informed ambitions for increased inclusivity and accessibility in the dance sector, considering spaces, processes, and attitudes. Negotiating home spaces that became performance and teaching venues, thus blurring the public and the private for many dance artists, heightened our awareness of bodily navigation through space during the pandemic. Drawing on research from interviews with disabled dance artists, most of which were UK based, this article examines how adaption was necessary due to challenges faced from either the pandemic or from ableist norms, and explores the adaptive skills developed by disabled dancers to negotiate these challenges. Disabled dance artists’ corporeal lived experience offers critical insight into how inclusive ways of working could better transform the experience of dance participation for all and the workplace more broadly as assumed normality returns post-lockdown.