Celeste Dandeker-Arnold I’d like to start with my background and why I co-founded Candoco. I used to be a professional dancer with London Contemporary Dance Theatre, but in 1973, mid-performance, I fell badly and sustained a spinal cord injury. I’ve been a permanent wheelchair user ever since, and I thought I would never dance again. Then, Darshan Singh Bhuller, also a member of the company, invited me to perform in a short film called The Fall (1990). From there, I met my co-founder, Adam Benjamin, who encouraged me to run some integrated workshops at the Spinal Cord Unit of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. We put up posters inviting disabled and non-disabled people to these workshops, with no experience in dance required, and to our amazement, 15 people turned up. We started very slowly, asking each person to make a little solo about their name, and the work that emerged was remarkable. It was almost like writing in a new dance language, because it drew largely on ordinary movements, like walking or wheeling. Everyone got on well together: it wasn’t as if non-disabled people wanted to help the disabled dancers dance, they were there like anybody else. Everyone was there as a dancer. The first piece we made, Between The National and The Bristol (1994), was choreographed by Dame Siobhan Davies. She had to think outside of the box, but I told her to do exactly what she would with any other company: to ask the dancers whatever she needed, and not to worry about what disabled people can or can’t do, just go with it. She created a fabulous, pure dance piece.

When the company started, I looked for up-and-coming choreographers who were beginning to make an impact on audiences, like Javier de Frutos and Fin Walker. We also worked with Marc Brew, who, for the 2012 London Summer Olympics opening ceremony, made a large piece with Candoco and other invited participants, disabled and non-disabled. I’m very proud of those commissions. We travelled internationally, visiting over 60 countries in that time, and we always took the education programme with us. Every performance we did was accompanied by workshops for people who wanted to attend, and that was very moving to see. In one place in Eastern Europe, some wheelchair users lived on the top floor and hadn’t been outside since their accident. Their wheelchairs were old, and weren’t able to move like the wheelchairs we have now. We managed to get people to help them down the stairs, and they came to the workshop. We even went to Russia: in 1980, it was said that “there [were] no invalids in the USSR”, but of course, there were, and are, disabled people in Russia. Some of them came to watch our performances.

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There are no invalids in the USSR was used by the Soviet dissident and activst, Valery Fefelov as the title of his 1986 memoir detailing the harshness of disabled life in the Soviet Union.

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Melanie Precious I started in September 2024, and one of the first things I did was get in touch with Celeste to reconnect with the founding vision. I was struck that the company had been founded because of the interesting movement that could be created between disabled and non-disabled dancers working collaboratively. It wasn’t about disability justice or rights, although those things mattered and were all folded into how the company worked. It was fundamentally about the art form of dance being richer because everybody could be included.

When Celeste started the company, disabled bodies simply weren’t seen on stage. Audiences were not used to seeing anything other than what we might consider the traditional perfect stereotype of a dancer, often a ballet dancer. The work that Celeste was doing with the company, and her approach to bringing that new way of moving into the world, was absolutely the right one in my view. It wasn’t about pity; it was about taking everybody for what they could bring and who they were.

CDA We were the first professional inclusive dance company, but I always wanted the work to be excellent, judged like any other dance company and seen in the mainstream. That happened because people wanted to see what these choreographers were doing; they were interested in the work itself. For a long time, our website just stated that Candoco was a professional company of disabled and non-disabled artists. None of us who were disabled said anything about our disability, because what would be the point? On stage, it was so obvious that someone was different. Some of the early reviews were quite cruel, forever describing the disability and ignoring the brilliance of the non-disabled dancers. Then Donald Hutera, who writes about dance, came on tour with us and saw the hard work that everyone was putting in: the rehearsals, the performances and the workshops. He got it. He understood exactly what we were doing, and from that point on, people began to review us more generously.

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“Piss on Pity,” coined by activist Johnny Crescendo in 1990, became the slogan of the UK’s Block Telethon protests, rejecting charity’s portrayal of disabled people as pitiful in favour of demanding equal rights.

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MP Here at Candoco the conversation about what it means to be disabled has been very rich over the past year, and much of it directed by wonderful people on our board. Sarah Howard, head of access at Shakespeare’s Globe and currently serving as the Cabinet Office’s Disability and Access Ambassador for Arts and Culture, has led and informed our thinking. We were prompted to define disability for this conversation, but to put it bluntly, we don’t believe it’s our right to define disability, so we choose not to. If someone tells us they identify as having lived experience of disability, that’s enough for us. We’re trying to move away from enforcing disclosure because this is private information, and once disclosed, it becomes public knowledge. Our mission is to reduce barriers and to celebrate artists who identify as disabled, but we will not devalue the contributions a non-disabled person or artist brings to that story. We believe dance is better when difference is celebrated, and that includes everybody, that’s all the intersections that we carry as we show up within a piece. Everyone’s access needs differ. The ways they want to dance or be danced with sometimes contradict each other. Some artists want to work a certain way, so we try to create the conditions that are right for them, which might be completely different from what another group of artists needs. That requires us to remain flexible and to resist, where we can, the urge to label people and put them in boxes. There are layers of complexity beneath what disability is. What Candoco has to remember is that we’re here to make excellent dance, to create the conditions for brilliance to happen.

CDA It takes talent to be in a performing company. Early on, one of our dancers, David Toole, enrolled in a community dance course at the Laban Centre. He was an absolute talent. He walked on his hands and his arms formed an extraordinary wingspan. A single raised eyebrow of his could be read from the back of the theatre. He was extremely funny in some pieces.

MP I was a dancer myself, and my first experience of Candoco was when I was performing in a gala. I remember being in the wings and looking through and seeing David, and being absolutely transfixed that dance could be done with a different kind of body. It was completely different from the years and years of training I’d had. It was really liberating: even as a non-disabled dancer, I was inspired by the idea that all bodies can dance, and dance differently, and that difference brings richness. David could do what nobody else could.

I remember […] being absolutely transfixed that dance could be done with a different kind of body. […] It was really liberating: even as a non-disabled dancer

CDA He was a one-off. When he left the critics said he left a big black hole. He was a wonderful member of the company, but we found other dancers who were different, who were disabled and who stepped up to the mark. Sadly, David died a couple of years ago. We miss him a great deal.

MP The way we used to be trained, you were taught moves, and you repeated them. Contemporary dance, in particular, pushed against that. Dance became much more about improvisation and about what you could bring as an individual mover. The world of dance has progressed in how it thinks about the resources that are available through the company of dancers. As the art form evolves, it has to be done by new artists bringing new ways of moving, whatever instigates or inspires those ways of moving. You can become a bit overtrained in college: you’re given all the same tools so you come out saying the same things and moving in the same way. The movement that you start to create is unique to you. If you are in that position of creator working with company dancers, you have a range of decisions you need to make about how you’re going to work with those artists: whether you’re going to draw upon their artistry, and whether you’re going to give them tools or instructions for how you want them to recreate the methodology that you’ve gone through. Any choreographer will have their own unique way of working. It brings some really interesting conversations about credits. Often, you’ll see on a poster that a piece has been choreographed by an individual, but sometimes that’s not the case because it was a collaborative process involving the dancers. I think we’ll increasingly start to see a different kind of crediting process on works created collaboratively. I’m not a choreographer, and never have been. It’s an art, and a maker will have many different ways and approaches that they will take to that art, as a painter would, or a musician would. We have about 70 works in the archive, and 35 years of legacy. I’m working out how to activate that archive as we move forward examining the intellectual property considerations for all these works and a resource for artists to draw upon. Some of the works are already tucked behind websites that are no longer operational, so retrieving them is going to be a job in itself.

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The word choreography originally had nothing to do with inventing dances. Coined in 1700 by French dancing-master Raoul-Auger Feuillet as the title of his book Chorégraphie, it literally meant “dance-writing” a system for notating steps on paper with symbols, much like sheet music records sound.

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CDA Candoco started working with choreographers who collaborated with the company dancers. Once we were working with Siobhan Davies, she started asking about improvisation, which was a key part of the practice of most of the choreographers we worked with. In dance, improvisation leads to collaboration. From the improvisation, the choreographer takes certain parts and edits and embellishes the work. I invited Stephen Petronio, an American choreographer, to come over and make a piece for us, and he sent me an email saying he was going to make a really nice slow piece, because he had just done a very busy work, and was exhausted. At the time, we wanted a fast piece, something that was dynamic and challenging. When we were in rehearsal with him, the first thing he asked the dancers to do was improvise. I had said to the dancers beforehand, “Make sure you move and really do your thing.” When they started, he turned to me and said, “Oh boy, those dancers can really dance.” Then he made a beautiful piece called The Human Suite (2003).