SPECIFICITIES OF BODY MOVEMENT IN WHEELCHAIR SPORTS DANCE

Abstract

This study focuses on wheelchair sports dance for people with physical disabilities, with the aim of analyzing how a body allocates/appropriates a wheelchair and produces new artistic movements, and especially how these artistic movements have been historically structured and solidified in a new sports proposal. The methodological trajectory of this research was based on the collection and analysis of data from twenty-two years of experience with wheelchair sports dance groups. The information was obtained through video recordings of the choreographies presented by the various wheelchair dance groups during the Brazilian championships in 2022 and 2023.  We also conducted formal interviews with dancers and choreographers from these same groups. In this way, we observed that the sport of dance has its own specificities. And thesespecificities were made possible by the countless experiences of new body movements with the wheelchair. And these experiences over the years have broadened the aptitudes of each body, the way the body is, without rigid model transfers. We therefore conclude that sport is a social phenomenon of great scope and visibility. However, there is an effort to overcome the difficulties encountered and the existing prejudices in their life and sporting trajectories, in order to be able to belong, grow in the sport, be recognized and valued in the sport they practice, because the sporting space is delimited and constituted by power relations.

Received: 2023/12/07

Reformulated: 2023/12/08

Accepted: 2023/12/08