Sarah Bell (KCL) - 2023-24 Students
sarah.k.bell@kcl.ac.uk

The unwell dancing body: Discourses of illness, disability and corporeality

This project brings crip critiques of the social model of disability to dance practice, specifically with regard to chronic illness. Critically examining my own experience in a series of grounded contexts – the university, the accessible dance workshop, the recreational ballet studio, and the rheumatology clinic – I interrogate how the unwell dancing body encounters the critical discourses and paradigms by which it is circumscribed and understood. I argue that it is only by confronting the specificity of the unwell body that we can resist psychosocial disavowal and properly theorise what it means for an unwell body to dance.

Primary supervisor: Prof Kelina Gotman

Secondary supervisor: Dr Alex Mermikides