Reading a 2018 book about dance access and inclusion, I was surprised to come across the following: “One of our principles is that the dancers shouldn’t be dancing about cognitive things they don’t understand.
“You can’t overlay on them a set of complex emotions or a complex interplay of characters, but… sometimes body memory takes over that cognitive middle band of brain function.”
The quote is from a theatre-in-education teacher at a performing arts school for pupils with severe learning disabilities, which had a partnership with a ballet company.
The implication seems to be that people with learning disabilities cannot understand complex emotions but some form of body memory enables them to respond to such emotions in a physical way.
I beg to differ.
Who recognises reality?
When researching my book on learning disability history, Those They Called Idiots, I chanced upon an 18th century court record of the case of a young woman with severe learning disabilities called Fanny Fust.
Fust, heiress to an immense inheritance, was kidnapped by a young gold digger and spirited away to France; the man married Fust to grasp her fortune.
Fust’s mother, with help from French cavalry officers and English investigators, managed to retrieve her and had the marriage annulled.
Feeling excited about this discovery and the insights it offered about pre-asylum learning disability history, I presented it to an academic history conference.
The audience could not have been less interested. Judging by the rush for the exits when I finished, the only big thought going on was what to have for lunch.
My next presentation was to a performance group of people with learning disabilities in Somerset, Open Story Tellers. The attentive audience grasped what the 230-year-old case was about immediately. It sparked a discussion about mate crime, sexual exploitation, independence, freedom of choice, stranger danger and financial crime.
Open Story Tellers later produced a fabulous performance about these events. My audience of highfalutin academics couldn’t grasp the ideas yet the audience of people with learning disabilities understood them better than I did.
More recently, I participated in a brilliant course called Big Ideas led by Gosia Kwiatkowska, associate professor at the University of East London. The course is based on the principle that people with learning disabilities have the right to be informed about and discuss the theoretical ideas that are continually applied to them. They study alongside social work students using non-traditional teaching and study methods.
I was asked to lead the session on eugenics, a grim subject, an idea that sees no place for some people in the world. The whole room got it and began a lively discussion.
After we discussed the Nazi Second World War killing programme against disabled people, one woman said: “Well, the Nazis would have had to kill me once for being disabled, and then dig me up and kill me again for being Jewish.”
This struck me as a more powerful statement than any number of academic papers on intersectionality.
I often watch productions involving talented dancers with learning disabilities. I see people who may struggle with communicating through speech and writing who transform into expressive performers the moment they step onto the stage. They convey through dance ideas about love, sadness, death, belonging, joy, grief and fear that they may struggle to express.
They are not doing this through some unthinking “body memory” but from the depths of their own human experience.
They grasped what the 230-year-old case was about. It sparked a discussion on mate and financial crime, stranger danger and freedom of choice
Why would anybody think, for example, that a person with learning disabilities might not understand the idea of love in Romeo and Juliet – love across boundaries, forbidden love, uncontrollable love cruelly thwarted by social norms? They will often know it better than most people. And will therefore perform it better than most.
