The professional world of dance is largely discriminatory. If you’re too short, too fat, too ugly, too brown, too black, too different – forget about becoming a professional ballerina. I know, because it was once my dream to become one. However, the act of dancing itself does not discriminate. Neither, apparently, does this year’s Strictly Come Dancing recruitment team. Ellie Simmonds, OBE, former Paralympic swimmer and gold medallist for Great Britain featured on this year’s Strictly Come Dancing line-up. This is another exciting step on the path towards creating inclusion in the commercial and professional world of dance, but naturally Ellie has consistently been met with a stream of ignorant and hateful messages. ‘How’s the dwarf going to dance?’, she says, is the question which has frustrated her the most.
Although insensitively posed, and fuelling negative ableist attitudes, this question is not necessarily a silly one. Traditional forms of dancing such as ballet or ballroom typically don’t accommodate physical impairments. As a woman with dwarfism, her height and proportions make following the conventions of certain dance styles difficult, particularly when coordinating with a partner on stage. But whilst the dancers have worked innovatively in order to adapt to a disappointingly novel challenge, it is the genre itself that has the most work to do. By this I mean that the interaction between disability and dance inevitably opens creative doors. It will push the limits of almost every dance style and pose the challenge of merging creativity and convenience into one. If this is done successfully, it is the job of the dance form to then embrace and accept the resulting performance.
Despite public concerns, Simmonds’ professional dance partner, Nikita Kuzmin, didn’t ever seem troubled by the prospect of dancing with Ellie. In an interview with The Sun, she revealed that before the show, when asked how he felt about her being “small”, his response was simply: “I want to dance with you, I want to try it out”. Almost nonchalant, Kuzmin reminds us that dancers themselves are free, open, expressive people. In their eyes, all bodies are dancing bodies.
Rose Ayling-Ellis, who is deaf, was last year’s Strictly champion. The fact that she won the contest is very important. Ellis didn’t just serve to reach a quota; she was a formidable dancing force. It can be easy to get caught up in performative support of disability inclusion without actually viewing disabled contestants as worthy in the same way as their non-disabled counterparts. These are not just box-ticking exercises to ease the nation’s conscience, but a real chance to stop waving the banner of diversity and start redefining what diversity actually is. Given that the disabled population of the UK was 22% in 2021, we will soon stop celebrating the one or two disabled contestants a year on hugely popular shows like Strictly Come Dancing or Love Island, and start questioning why there aren’t more.
But for now, this is an occasion worth celebrating. Really, this is an exciting opportunity to prove that dancing actually is for everyone. It is not a sneering aristocratic form of expression, reluctantly agreeing to accept imperfection, but rather a form that belongs to people who can make it adhere to their standards, and then succeed within that triumphant space. Because without people, dance is nothing.