Paper short abstract:

This paper critiques notions of moderate to severe disability and perceived “impairment” as experienced in the dancing patient. It does so through an assessment of arts in health collaborative creative placements and performances involving students, service users and dance choreographer/artist.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critiques notions of moderate to severe disability and perceived "impairment" as experienced in the dancing patient. It does so through an assessment of arts in health collaborative creative placements and performances involving students, service users and dance choreographer/artist. The placement and performance developed an interactive participatory model of art engagement where the students and staff come together with a group of service users availing of mental health and disability services to explore, inform and potentially transform perceptions and experiences of mental illness and disability. Service users with wheelchairs metamorphisise into a dancing body of flesh, steel and canvas using non-human and human technologies to create a challenging aesthetic in the creation of a contemporary dancing text. The shared non-human and human material demonstrate a capacity for creativity, spontaneity and humour that informs students on a traditional medical education journey of a new way of developing professional creative care relationships. Here, the wheelchair becomes an enabling and enhancing tool that goes beyond the functional to the collaborative aesthetic through to the transformative .