The piece is called "Decorum," and it starts with what looks like two dancers seated on a couch and, next to them, a woman in a wheelchair. But as soon as they begin to move, it becomes clear that something else is happening.

The woman in the chair wheels herself around the couch, then turns one of the women on the couch towards the other. The three, in chain reaction, begin to act out a series of staccato movements that seem to surface the feelings embedded in the tiniest daily moments of interaction: indifference, disdain, need.

One has no thought now to the wheelchair. By the time one of the nondisabled dancers backs onto the dancer in the wheelchair and the three roll back and forth, one's attention is on the increasingly complex narrative—in which the woman in the wheelchair reveals herself to be a matriarch and the two abled women perhaps her daughters. On a much deeper level, AXIS Dance Company has brought the viewer into the process of learning their new physical language of emotion, a language through which notions of who can dance and what is dance are completely transformed.

"Decorum" examines the way people suffer each other’s daily indignities, attend to each other's suffering, and create beauty and meaning out of interdependence—and not, as many disabled people would point out, a hierarchical sense of co-dependence. It is also an amazing example of what AXIS calls "physically integrated" dance, movement created for and by dancers with and without physical disabilities . For over 20 years now, the Oakland-based company has smashed barriers for disabled dancers, changed the ways bodies can be perceived and expanded the ways that movement can be conceived.

Founding member Judith Smith serves as the Artistic Director and resident philosopher of AXIS off the stage. The way AXIS understands the idea of "physical integration," she notes, has multiple levels. When discussions about diversity and inclusion in the arts are conducted, for instance, disability always gets left off the list. "Disability crosses all lines, and that's both a challenge and a huge opportunity," Smith says. "There's still so much mystery about it, misinformation, stereotyping."

On this most basic representational level, AXIS has raised the flag for the collaboration of disabled and nondisabled dancer dancers since its inception in 1987. Half of their work is "educational," including dance education classes for kid, teens and adults "of all abilities," and community outreach programs in schools, universities, businesses, and government institutions. But their art is also critically acclaimed, and has caused the likes of choreographers like Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petronio, and Joanna Haigood, let alone its audiences, to reexamine their own notions of how movement gets created, who can make movement, and what the range of movement can be.

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