African Disability Dance Network

Central to the UKRI-funded project ‘Encountering Disability through Integrated Dance’ was the establishment of the African Dance Disability Network (ADDN),created to explore how disability has been conceptualised in different African contexts via local views and in negotiation with legacies of colonialism. It traces how integrated dance, as an embodied form and practice, can challenge these views and expand citizenship for people living with disabilities in Africa. Through the network, our website and events that include symposia and festivals, we have createdsustainable working relationships across African borders and arts sectors that also include artists in the global north. We have set up viable mechanisms for knowledge exchange about dance and disability that is contributing to a growing sense of community across Africa that is having a significant impact on professional development and creative practice in integrated dance.

Yvette Hutchison set up the African Dance Disability Network (ADDN) with Dr. Loots (University of KwaZulu-Natal, SA) in 2023 to connect over 60 individual researchers and choreographers working in integrated dance across Africa and the global north. This network has forged connections between African individual artists and companies in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa with little or no access to disability arts training or sense of comparable practices elsewhere. This has enabled them to share approaches and extend one another’s methodologies and choreographies, while shifting understandings regarding disability in local communities. It will continue via Hutchison’s involvement in the Centre for Performance Studies at UKZN.

The network has exceeded its remit to connect researchers and practitioners in integrated dance in Africa by expanding to include practitioners and researchers from the UK, Europe, USA, Brazil, China, and Japan. Researchers working in areas like occupational health, the post-human, mainstream dance, and education have joined events. By sharing specific innovations and practices from the global South to wider academic and dance communities, it has shifted perceptions and approaches to disability. Most importantly, it has created a critical mass that has highlighted the importance of this work and found ways of actively involving disabled participants in the research and writing up of the work, thereby honouring the ‘nothing-about-us-without-us’ approach and foregrounding co-production of knowledge and representation. Hutchison is also hoping to innovate in accessibility in publishing by including QR Codes with direct links to videos of interviews and performances in her forthcoming book on disability dance.

The dialogue facilitated between researchers and practitioners in the global North and South and between countries in Africa via the network and events organised (festivals, colloquia/workshops) has resulted in practitioners in Africa being invited to work with companies in Europe (Austria, Netherlands, Finland, USA) and vice versa (in SA); and in facilitating exchanges in Africa: Ethiopia-Uganda and Kenya-South Africa. The interdisciplinary book 'Encountering Disability through Dance in Africa' (Routledge, 2026, Open access https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003506126Link opens in a new window) brings together Dance and Disability Studies from an African perspective, including voices of the artists themselves, for the first time to challenge perceptions of disability and understandings of citizenship in Africa.

 

For more detail see https://africandancedisabilitynetwork.org/Link opens in a new window