AXIS Dance Company is a professional physically integrated contemporary dance company and dance education organization founded in 1987 and based in Oakland, California. It is one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities. Their work has received seven Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and nine additional nominations for both their artistry and production values.
Founded in 1987[1] by Thais Mazur, Bonnie Lewkowicz, Judith Smith and others, AXIS was one of the first contemporary dance companies in the world to consciously develop choreography that integrates dancers with and without physical disabilities, while maintaining a strong commitment to excellence in physical and emotional expression.[2][3]AXIS dancers with disabilities have included wheelchair users (both manual wheelchairs and power wheelchairs), crutch users, and people with amputations using prosthetic limbs.
AXIS dancers who are not disabled come with extensive training in a variety of contemporary dance, improvisation and other movement practices. Through interactions between these dancers and nondisabled dancers, a new dance vocabulary began to be developed. This started a trend, which eventually became known as physically integrated dance, which seeks to broaden the definition of ‘dance’ and ‘dancer’ and increase opportunities for artistic expression through movement for a wide spectrum of physical attributes and disabilities.[4][5] The physically integrated dance movement is part of a broader disability culture movement, which recognizes and celebrates the first-person experience of disability, not as a medical-model construct but as a social phenomenon, through artistic, literary, and other creative means.[6] The AXIS Dance Company has commissioned works by a number of renowned choreographers, including Ann Carlson, Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Joanna Haigood, Margaret Jenkins, Bill T. Jones, Victoria Marks, and Stephen Petronio.
The Company has created more than sixty repertory works, two evening-length works, and commissions for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bates Dance Festival, San Francisco Exploratorium, and CAL Performances-UAM/PFA.
AXIS has performed in more than sixty cities, Europe, and Siberia. Notable performances include the Olympic Arts Festival, 2002; Meredith Monk’s 40th Anniversary Celebrations at St. Marks & the World Financial Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Scottsdale Center for the Arts; UC Santa Barbara; Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago ; SF Internat’l Arts Festival; The Kentucky Center for the Arts; Paralympics 1997; Walker Arts Center;Dartmouth College; Flynn Center for the Performing Arts; UMass Fine Arts Center; University of Koln, Germany; Dance Umbrella’s Internat’l Festival of Aerial Dance; and Railroad Theater, Novosibirsk, Siberia.
AXIS’ education programs, Dance Access and Dance Access/KIDS! offer an extensive array of events for adults and youth of all abilities. AXIS is working with CSU East Bay to develop and launch the first BA program in Physically Integrated Dance in the US.
AXIS has received numerous Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (IZZIES) including:
- Ensemble Performance in 2008 to Rodney Bell and Sonsheree Giles in To Color Me Different by Alex Ketley
- Choreography to Joe Goode in 2008 for the beauty that was mine, through the middle, without stopping...
- Ensemble Performance in 2002 to Nadia Adame and Jacques Poulin-Denis in Sans Instruments choreographed by Sonya Delwaide
- Costume Design in 2001 to Mario Alonzo for AXIS’ entire Home Season Voyages Elsewhere and Between, choreography by Sonya Delwaide, Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petroni, AXIS’ Stephanie McGlynn and Uli Schmitz and AXIS’ Alisa Rasera and Megan Schirle
- Company Performance in 2000 for AXIS’ entire Home Season The Ground, the Air and Places in Between, choreography by Sonya Delwaide, Joe Goode, Joanna Haigood and Bill T. Jones
- Choreography to Bill T. Jones in 2000 for Fantasy in C Major
- Individual Performance in 2000 to Uli Schmitz, the first disabled dancer to receive this award
The company has also received numerous IZZIE nominations for artistic work and production elements. [7]
AXIS was the recipient of the 2015 East Bay Express Readers' Poll Award for Best Dance Company.
