We begin with a contradiction. I love dance, I hate dance — the words of our dancer/teacher Astrid echo as both declaration and question, and they have stayed with us.
They open up something: a split, a double bind, a moment of friction between identification and experience. What does it mean to love something that doesn’t always claim you in return?
Who has access to “dancer”?
Am I a dancer — if I use a wheelchair? If I’m 54? If I no longer move the way I once did?
We know: the only requirement for dance is to be born.
And yet, dancer identity remains conditional — caught in the eyes of the beholder.
This project is a response. A two-week development for movement, aerial research, witnessing, and reorientation. We are not trying to resolve the contradiction — we are composting it.
An exploration of integrated dance in dialogue with aerial work - through the meeting of two physical performers/dancers - one a wheelchair user.
AERIAL WORK / TYRANNY OF THE VERTICAL
At the core of our work is the aerial harness — the experience of being lifted, suspended, off-balance. We look at the materiality of gravity, the mechanics of being held, and the politics of verticality.
We ask: what happens in the body when lifted? What happens to the viewer when witnessing that lift?
We explore how the vertical has been naturalised as neutral, when in fact it privileges certain bodies. Standing becomes a norm, a benchmark — but not a universal one. As Nicolawrote: the tyranny of the vertical is a real and felt condition.
This is not only about aerial technique — it’s about relational movement, suspension, and attention. The aerial harness becomes a site for political, poetic, and embodied research.
EMBODIED POSSIBILITY
This project is rooted in the physical possibilities of all bodies — not despite difference, but because of it. Aerial dance offers a space where weight, resistance, suspension, and surrender create new languages of movement.
We work with bodies that lift and are lifted, that find balance through imbalance, that orient through intuition, strength, vulnerability, and play. Each body brings its own intelligence, its own timing, its own gravity.
Movement is not about conforming to an ideal. It is about discovering what emerges when we follow sensation, risk new pathways, and stay present to what the body knows — even when the mind doesn’t.
In integrated aerial work, difference is not accommodated — it is generative. It expands what we thought dance could be.
You don’t need to define something to liberate it – Sarah Ahmed
COLLABORATORS AND MENTORS
Our aerial work is led by Esther Wrobel of Sparrow Dance, a Danish company specializing in vertical dance and cross-disciplinary stage arts. Esther brings extensive experience in site-specific aerial performance and inclusive movement practices.
We are also supported by two UK-based companies as mentors: Gravity & Levity, a disabled-led aerial dance company renowned for their vertical dance performances and artist development programs, and Head Over Wheels, a multidisciplinary company combining aerial, music, and theatre to create inclusive performances.
Both Gravity & Levity and Head Over Wheels will participate online in our final seminar, alongside representatives from other inclusive dance companies such as Candoco Dance Company, Stopgap Dance Company in the UK, and Unmute Dance Theatre in South Africa.
Partners in Aarhus include Generationernes Hus and Foreningen Bevægelsen.