For the third consecutive year, Operaestate festival hosted an international meeting during B.Motion, its festival-within-a-festival dedicated to contemporary small-scale productions. Known as B.Network, its previous editions had opened conversations about networks and cooperation; this year the focus was on accessibility and it included among others three exceptional performances: La Terra Gira by Tumbleweed company with the local dance community of elders whose majority lives with Parkinson’s disease; Where is Everybody?, a collaboration between Zoo collective and the inclusive dance company Platform-K; and Chiara Bersani’s Michel: The Animals I Am, performed by three performers with physical and motor disabilities. B.Network was enriched with a movement workshop led by founder of Zoo collective Thomas Hauert with the support of members of the two companies participating in Where is Everybody?, and a one-day symposium that invited participants to rethink equality in the performing arts and challenge established representations of disabled bodies. The questions raised during the three-day event (28–30 August 2026) concerned the structures that determine who gets to make dance, who is recognised as a professional artist, and whose bodies belong to the stage.
Accessibility is not only about access
Accessibility is a familiar term but it is still important to define it, especially if the aim is to change the performing arts system.
Flavia Dalila D’Amico, a researcher on accessibility and invited co-curator of B.Network’s symposium, offered two propositions. First, accessibility is not simply about allowing disabled people to enter a space that was not built with them in mind – for example, by adding a ramp for a wheelchair user. It also means accommodating the needs of non-conforming bodies and enabling them to feel comfortable in spaces that may not have been designed for them. In such cases, architectural interventions may be the first step towards removing physical barriers, but if accessibility is addressed only after a space or a project has been designed, the outcome remains limited. After all, when accessibility works well it can become almost invisible – not because disability disappears, but because access feels natural. Building accessibility from the outset constitutes D’Amico’s second proposition: rather than correcting what has already failed, accessibility should anticipate what might exclude disabled people and ideally involve them in decision-making and co-creation processes. This shifts accessibility from a service provided to a disabled audience into a participatory or collaborative way of making accessible work.
Following this line of thought, performer and choreographer Chiara Bersani, co-founder of the Al.Di.Qua.Artists collective, urged the symposium’s participants to approach disability as a creative method. Director Matteo Maffesanti, founder of the anti-ableist theatre company Elevator Bunker, affirmed that ‘disability is not an obstacle but a creative opportunity’ when considered early in the artistic process. An example: Where is Everybody? draws on improvisation tasks developed by Thomas Hauert in which movement and relationships can emerge between performers with different disabilities. Rather than memorising fixed sequences, performers work within open structures, making decisions in the moment and sustaining their presence throughout the performance. This is not only a choreographic choice but a way to redistribute agency, when disabled people are often raised in a culture where non-disabled people make decisions on their behalf. The physical workshop on the following day used this kind of improvisation-based practice to challenge who leads, who follows, and how real-time choices shape an artistic work. Simple instructions for leading and following non-verbally gradually became more complex, maintaining balance between clear shared frameworks and creative freedom, between individual expression and connection to the group.
Thus accessibility in Where is Everybody? manifests as a process whereby different bodies can make decisions together to affect a collective presence. The workshop connected to this performance, addressed predominantly to cultural professionals, indirectly proposed a modus operandi in which curation may be informed by physical experience, rethought through shared leadership and above all through the encounter with people with disabilities.
The curatorial habitus: who gets to curate, who gets to work?
The second co-curator of B.Network’s symposium Fabrizio Panozzo, professor at AIKU/Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, named a familiar contradiction: ‘I want but I cannot’, referring to disabled artists, who may want to enter the performing arts as professionals but find that the field denies them access. The problem, then, cannot be located within an individual body or justified as a lack of ability. It also lies in the ableist assumptions and institutional frameworks that decide who is employable, programmable and professionally legible. Aiming towards a scheme of equal opportunities requires us to ask who curates and programmes the performing arts, and who has the power to change the system. Freddie Opoku-Addaie, artistic director of London’s Dance Umbrella festival, called for diversifying curatorial stewardship to include disabled people and to move away from what he described as the three Ts (trends): ‘tick-box, tokenism and tolerance.’ Including a disabled artist, collective or accessible work simply to tick a box may make a programme appear inclusive but does not change the conditions under which disabled artists work. Representation matters, but it is not the same as redistribution of power, resources or opportunities.
Drawing on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Panozzo also called for a rethinking of the performing arts habitus: the repatterning of established habits and structures of artistic creation, production and distribution that determine not only what is selected, but which bodies and artistic approaches are recognised in the first place. To make room for disabled artists, the field must change how it commissions, produces, supports and circulates their work – not simply include artists in an otherwise rigid and ableist system without considering their needs. Disability can also be understood as cultural capital, thus a resource capable of challenging established social and cultural habits and enriching cultural life.
Training, recognition and the idea of the professional artist
How can disabled people train to become professional artists when many educational institutions lack the infrastructure, resources and staff preparation needed to support them?
There is no simple answer, but the question exposes the structural problem that professional programmes are often designed with a mentality of ableism around excellence.
The ‘I want but I cannot’ contradiction also runs through arts education. Creating accessible educational frameworks means reconsidering admission criteria, enrolment procedures and attendance requirements in higher education and professional dance training. Depending on the kind of disability (physical, sensorial, mental), some disabled artists may need more time to process material or alternative ways to undertake assessments. Others may require technical or personal assistance, which involves costs that institutions need to anticipate and cover. The school of the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes, France, briefly introduced by the international development manager Isabel Andreen, offers support across the different stages of artistic creation, from formal training to the production, distribution and communication of disabled artists’ works. Another example is the Centre National pour la création adaptée (CNCA), located in a repurposed tobacco factory in Morlaix, France, which advocates for the professionalisation of disabled artists across all artistic disciplines. Such examples raise a wider question about who is allowed to acquire the credentials, experience and confidence that are later used to define professionalism.
Access to training is also bound up with how disabled artists come to see themselves – and who gets to claim the word ‘professional’. Chiara Bersani shared a telling example from the making of Michel: The Animals I Am. The work grew out of her solo The Animal (2021), a performance that challenges ableist ideals of what a dance body should be and how it should behave on stage. Bersani wanted to transmit the work to performers with physical and motor disabilities, and during her B.Network brief intervention she explained that the open call, initially aimed at ‘professional dancers with disabilities’, received very few responses, if any. She suggested that artists with non-conforming bodies who have not had access to formal professional dance training may not feel entitled to call themselves professional dancers. When the word ‘professional’ was removed from the call, more responses came in, and the work is now performed as a trio by Anna Maria Pes, Annalisa Franscari and Carolina Ellero. The episode reveals how the label ‘dance professional’, intended to describe experience and expertise, can also deter artists who have been denied the opportunities through which that category is acquired, namely a formal dance education.
In its final form as a performance, Michel: The Animals I Am unfolds like a slow awakening. It is a subtle yet powerful vocal concert that sharpens the senses: a choral lullaby, a psalm, a melodic dissonance. The performers seem to release the gentle animal within their bodies, each working within a distinct physical space, including a wheelchair and two raised platforms. Alongside the vocal interplay and the minute choreography of gestures that asks for close attention, the work’s pioneering choreographic operation is its contribution to a dance repertoire for bodies that do not conform to an idealised image of the dancing body. It does not merely invite different bodies into an existing canon; it asks what that canon might become if those bodies were central to its making and transmission.
Across B.Network’s performances, discussions and workshop, accessibility emerged not as a technical supplement to a dance performance but as a challenge to the structures that shape the field of performing arts. Accessibility concerns whether a work can be experienced by disabled audiences; whether disabled artists can access training, employment and sustained professional opportunities; and whether disabled spectators and participants can encounter dance on their own terms – as a leisure activity or a practice of well-being. Especially within the last category, La Terra Gira by Tumbleweed company is another relevant example from B.Network‘s programme. Besides the indisputable value of the creative process for the well-being of the Dance Well dancers (people from the local dance community of Dance Well – movement research for Parkinson), the exact same process also impacts the commissioned artists at different levels. The founders of Tumbleweed, Angela Rabaglio and Micaël Florentz, adapted and expanded their movement language through their encounter with people whose performativity is shaped by their age and physical abilities that, in turn, are conditioned by Parkinson’s disease. This exchange between artists and the community of Dance Well Dancers has been repeated in almost every artistic commission since the inception of the project, resulting on the one hand in the creation of a community of elders with enhanced well-being and strong performative skills and on the other in artists who grow both artistically and as citizens through the embodied practice of accessibility.
Accessible work, disabled artists, spectators and participants are interconnected, and the decisive questions are therefore not only how accessibility is delivered, but when it enters the artistic process, who has a say in shaping it and how accessibility becomes a sustainable and credible practice with long-term outcomes. Treating disability as a creative method – and as cultural capital – asks the performing arts to reconsider its habits, hierarchies and definitions of artistic and human value, not simply by making space for disabled people within existing structures, but by letting their presence and practices influence and enrich those structures from within. ●