Dance - Full circle

Douglas Scott first discovered the world of physically integrated dance in 1992, during a two-day Atlanta workshop sponsored by what was then Very Special Arts (now VSA arts) when he attended a session led by Mary Verdi-Fletcher.

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Verdi-Fletcher had founded the nation’s first physically integrated dance company, Cleveland’s Dancing Wheels, in 1980, and helped legitimize the new form as legitimate dance. “Before that, it was just dance therapy classes,” says Scott, now the artistic director of Full Radius Dance, which brings both disabled and able-bodied dancers together in a professional dance company.

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This weekend, Dancing Wheels joins with Full Radius and Oakland, Calif.’s AXIS Dance Company to present Dance Synergy, an adjudicated festival celebrating 25 years of physically integrated dance.

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“There were so many organizations run by disabled people that offered services to people with disabilities,” says Verdi-Fletcher, recalling why she first founded the company. “This is very different. I’m a disabled person, and I’m offering something to non-disabled people. I think that exchange is very important.”

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AXIS Dance Company artistic director Judith Smith first learned to dance in 1983 through a class in contact improvisation, a form that emphasizes spontaneous movement emerging organically from how each individual body can and wants to move. In 1987, she and several other dancers (both with and without disabilities) founded AXIS. “We’ve had dancers with amputation, dancers with spinal chord injuries that use a crutch,” says Smith. “We like having our physical integration be more than people who use a wheelchair, because it really makes for an interesting movement palette. And the more difference you bring in, the more possibilities you bring in.”

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That sense of the unique possibilities offered by physically integrated dance — which is often compared to figure skating for the speed, glide and momentum that no dancer without a wheelchair could ever achieve — has gradually won the form genuine artistic credibility. All three companies now commission original work by some of the nation’s top choreographers. According to both Verdi-Fletcher and Smith, those choreographers frequently say the experience has a lasting impact on their choreography, which brings the history of physically integrated dance around full circle.

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Full Radius Dance presents Dance Synergy, Sat., June 3, 8 p.m. $20. Rialto Center, 80 Forsyth St. 404-651-4727. www.fullradiusdance.org.