ABSTRACT
What follows is more of a leap and a bound through history, an improviser's tale rather than a historian's. It is an attempt to connect some of the disparate threads of a fractured and fractious past. For its omissions I can only apologise, plead 'artistic licence' and hope that its shortcomings will stimulate those with a more historical bent to read, research and write in more depth. More than any other part of this book, it was for me a venture into the unknown, one that took me on a journey to look at the origins of western art and the complex and unpredictable dance that ensued. It is decidedly not a history of disability, which as Simon Brisenden has argued should be charted and written by disabled people themselves, but a history of fracture. The fracture and division of the elements that constitute dance. The fracture of time, place and movement.
