Designing Accessible Movement Spaces

When I took my most recent full-time teaching position as a movement instructor, I knew that this would be a different kind of class than I’d taught before. Not because of a new space or new students, but because my body, my abilities, my perspective through which I view movement practice has irrevocably changed in the past few years in ways that I couldn’t have predicted, particularly when faced with the able-bodied ghost of my training as a student.

I’ve been a teacher longer than I’ve been disabled, and a performer even longer than that. That’s some twenty plus years of experience in theatre and ten in education, but only four (and counting) years treading the shifting terrain of disability. In this processing and negotiating, I am also working to root out ingrained ableism within myself, intentionally nurturing compassion and interest for my body in place of scorn and shame. It’s tough, and the success rate is definitely below 100 percent. I have been immersed in this process as I navigate what it means to be in this physical body doing this physical work, but have only recently begun to understand how this desire to break ableist frameworks in my everyday life translates to my pedagogy. Navigating physical ability not just for me, but for my students, has opened up a new pathway to building equitable spaces, from using simple surveys to reimagining entire frameworks for embodied movement.

We constantly encourage our students to dive into the unknown, to be vulnerable, to risk failure. We have to be willing to do the same.

Lead with Curiosity

If you are a movement instructor that is interested in building more accessibility into their teaching practice, it can be scary to figure out where to start. There is a fear of messing up, of leaving someone out, of causing unintentional harm. But here’s the thing—no one has laid out the blueprint for this. We are flying the spaceship as we build it. And it is messy, and you probably will mess up. But that fear shouldn’t override curiosity about your students, and about your own practices and biases. We constantly encourage our students to dive into the unknown, to be vulnerable, to risk failure. We have to be willing to do the same. In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire speaks of “student-teachers,” where teachers are able to relearn or re-contextualize information when reflected through the different lenses of their students. This requires a dialogic room, one in which the instructor listens and learns from their students, bending and reworking their praxis when their teaching is at odds with the lived experience of a student in the space. The reciprocal nature of this student/teacher relationship creates a firmer foundation on which to build a more equitable and accessible space.

Accessible movement spaces should be designed for everyone in the room. This means asking questions of your students’ comfortability and ability and really listening when it’s pointed out that a part of your lesson is incongruous with the bodies in space. If possible, create a survey that students can fill out in advance of the first class, going over their previous movement experience, any injuries/limitations/disabilities the instructor should be aware of, and any challenges they’re coming into the space with including preconceived notions of ability, difficult experiences with movement in the past, whatever it may be. This information can be checked against your syllabus, ensuring your students are able to participate fully in your lessons.

The rewards of the survey are two-fold: As mentioned above, a survey gives you vital information about your students and their background and abilities. It also demonstrates curiosity for your students before joining in the space, allowing them to assert their autonomy and limitations without having to be put on the spot in class. The survey brokers good will with your students, opening the lines of communication and trust, setting the tone for what to expect from you as an instructor. The survey can also safeguard you from surprise limitations in the course of delivering a lesson, having to pivot to create inclusion. With this in mind, it might be helpful to consider a new framework for movement pedagogy altogether.

Consider a New Framework

“I’m just having trouble with the body of the hippo. They have such short legs and mine are so much longer, so sitting looks so weird, and I think crawling on my knees feels like it doesn’t look right.” One of my first year acting students in my Movement I class was lamenting about their struggle to fully embody their chosen animal for a project in their acting class. 

“Of course you’re having trouble. Your legs are longer than a hippo’s. You can’t change your anatomy.” I'd done a fair amount of animal work as a grad student pursuing an MFA in physical theatre and understood this plight. That work unearthed an important lesson for me, one that I posed as a question to this student. “What’s more important: the anatomy of the animal movement or the quality of the animal movement?” I saw the lightbulb brighten my student’s eyes. This clicked, and I continued to share this sentiment with my first year students struggling to faithfully and fully embody these creatures so very different from them. They began to focus on the qualities of movement, and from there they began to play with those qualities, while also releasing their bodies from unrealistic and often painful contortions.

The struggle between precision and interpretation is a fine but distinct line to balance in movement work. Each end tugs at the other, negotiating the desire for faithfulness while allowing the performing body to be itself, to be hopelessly and beautifully human. 

A light bulb clicked on for me too during that discussion about animal work. In my movement classes, I‘d been working on identifying and reassessing parts of my teaching practice, lessons, and curriculum that assume physical ability before I even meet my students. When talking about animals’ quality of movement, I began thinking about how these students were trying to master a skill. But that exercise isn’t about how skilled of a mover you are. That exercise is about the principle of translating animal qualities into character. 

Chewing on this discovery, the building blocks of a framework began to take shape. This is a work in progress, and while this framework is intended to be explicitly accessible, I am still learning and listening. The goal of this framework is to examine physical curriculums and take out any pedagogical elements that not every body can engage in, replacing them with accessible alternatives that demonstrate the same principle. Aligning with Universal Design, the crux of the framework is this: You can divide your lesson objectives into principles and skills. Principles can be interpreted in various bodies. Principles do not need a requisite facility of movement in order to be demonstrated. Skills, however, particularly when dealing with physical theatre, often demand a level of facility or ability of the student before knowing them. 

Example: A Movement I teacher wants to teach core control and balance. They decide students will be working on handstands throughout the semester. 

The above is a real example from a college Movement I syllabus I came across a few years ago. It is easy to distill the principle of the importance of core control and balance in movement work. But the skill of teaching handstands assumes a whole lot about your students in advance of meeting them. There are many ways to build core strength and balance while making sure that the bodies in the space can engage with the work. Handstands for a group of students whose backgrounds and skillsets and physical abilities you don’t know is setting yourself and your students up for disappointment and failure. There are myriad ways to teach the principle of core stabilization, almost all of which are more physically accessible than the handstand. 

The proposed principle/skill framing is not only useful for disabled spaces, but also inter-abled spaces in which physical ability is no longer a barrier to play, but part of its landscape. I wrote about this in my previous essay on movement work, which was about prioritizing the ephemeral “doing” of the thing over any presupposition of how a product should look. But there is also the question of rigor and assessing a student’s understanding of the material presented in class. Applying the framework to assessment, a rubric that reflects understanding of principle rather than demonstration of skill can help guide the rest of the course. Continuing with the animal work example, a principle-focused rubric might include things like: 

• Quality of breath present and consistent with animal study (scale of one to five)
• Strong gaze consistent with and derived from animal study (scale of one to five)
• Three to five identifiable qualities of animal movement (using whatever established physical language, be it Lecoq, Laban, Viewpoints, etc.)

It cannot only be those of us in disabled bodies that commit and contribute to accessible frameworks.

I should note that I am in no way against skills-based studio spaces in which students with the requisite ability can learn things like hand balancing or precise choreography. Those spaces must exist to serve those able to attend and to share that skill and artistry with the world. But rather than being the default, able-requisite spaces should be an option. Part of what has kept physical theatre and movement work in general so exclusionary is the lack of curiosity of alternative methods to approach physical work. While this omission is likely more due to ignorance than malice, it nonetheless upholds ableism as the norm and disability as the “other,” not worthy of engaging with movement practice. I myself am guilty of this. As an able-bodied person, I was not curious about disability and physical theatre, and many of my peers weren’t either. It wasn’t our concern or realm of inquiry. And while I am living proof that necessity breeds invention, it cannot only be those of us in disabled bodies that commit and contribute to accessible frameworks. Ableist, exclusionary practices from past to present necessarily means that there are not enough trained pedagogues in this field that are also disabled to put this work in the broader educational theatre conversations and conventions. 

The Necessity of Intentional Accessibility

The disabled community is the largest marginalized community—and the only marginalized community that anyone can join at any time. Ableism keeps disability in the periphery, letting able-bodied people off the hook for being uncurious, for not reflecting on their own biases around disability. Ableism has created a fear around disability, a pity culture that allows folks to just feel relieved it’s not them, to feel sorry for disabled folks without feeling any responsibility for changing the framework that keeps disabled folks on the margins. This lack of engagement perpetuates lack of access. It cannot only be disabled folks advocating for and creating these spaces. Able-bodied people need to care, need to reflect, need to help build access and equity into artistic spaces. 

Ableism has instilled fear and pity as a baseline for engaging with disability. It is too much to acknowledge that your body might break down on you when you least expect it, that an accident or illness can rob you of some or all of your mobility, senses, cognition. It is indeed scary to think about, but we have collectively and tacitly decided that disability is a fate worse than death, too hard to look at too closely lest we see ourselves reflected back. As we untangle the threads of ableism that have been woven into our societal tapestry, be kind to yourself. Un-learning is so much harder than learning. Identifying areas of ignorance takes time, and sometimes only happens when it’s pointed out from the outside.

Disability is also a huge umbrella, with so many different access needs. That fact alone can be enough to turn an instructor off to committing to accessible, inter-abled, and disabled spaces. How can you possibly accommodate everyone? I wrestled with this question myself while talking to a friend, also an educator. They told me that when they are faced with questions of accessibility, they are up front with their students and acknowledge that they are learning. And learning comes with mistakes. Acknowledging, correcting, and learning from those mistakes is where growth happens.