"Oh you look so pretty talking about disability..."

This chapter offers an autobiographical perspective from a disabled artist researcher. Reflecting on the experience of dance making and performing. It includes an exploration of how the disabled dance artists body on stage is read through a lens informed by societal, cultural and historic understandings of impairment. In preparation for this Chapter the author was in contact with another disabled dance maker practicing in Brazil, there are excerpts of this communication within the writing. Explicitly bringing together two disabled artist-researchers in this publication offers a new and unique perspective to an existing canon of writing about dance and disability, specifically it gives voice to the lived experience of disability and dance-making. Doing so allows these perspectives and experiences to inform and shift traditional ideas of so-called ‘inclusive’ practice away from a binary of ‘normal’ and other and towards a perception of disabled artists as autonomous agents of their own artistic inquiry