The Breath and Movement of Blindness
Run time: 10 minutes
This work does not understand sight as the sole choreographer of movement. Blindness has always-already been on stage moving, doing, and performing ... dancing. And yet, the reverberation of this dance is restricted on the stage of sight. Wedging open this restriction is what grounds our exploration. Our performance entangles us, one sighted and one blind, in a pas de deux.
This performance embodies a shared breath between blindness and sight. Through the choreographic task of encountering the gesture of an inhalation, blindness interrogates sight's performance as it inspires the exhalation of new stories, revealing the breathing body and its reverberations on the stage of everyday life. Through this performance we invite you to breathe along with us as we discover the improvisational rhythms between and among dancer, dramaturge, audience, collective breath, sight, and blindness.
» Devon Healey is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. All of her work is grounded in her experience as a blind woman guided by a desire to show how blindness specifically and disability more broadly can be understood as offering an alternate form of perception and is thus, a valuable and creative way of experiencing and knowing the world. She is the author of Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Devon is an award-winning actor and the co-founder of Peripheral Theatre. In 2020 she was awarded a commission by Outside the March (Dora award-winning Toronto theatre company) to both write and perform in Rainbow on Mars, a sensory reclamation of blindness.
» Jose Miguel (Miggy) Esteban is a Filipino-Canadian dance/movement artist and educator based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Miggy is currently a PhD student at the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where his research is oriented through disability studies and dance/performance studies. Influenced by disability arts and culture, Black radical traditions, Indigenous storytelling, and queer performance, his work engages in embodied practices of improvised research-creation to encounter the interpretation of gesture as a site for inspiring pedagogies of/through dance. His work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Disability Studies Quarterly, Journal for Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, and in various edited volumes.
