Mary Verdi-Fletcher - Infinite Women

Born: 1955, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

The following is republished from the National Endowment for the Arts. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).

Professional artists with disabilities also continue to face barriers, and the Arts Endowment has striven to ensure they too have equivalent opportunities as their peers. This includes regular support for organizations like the Cleveland-based Dancing Wheels, which dancer Mary Verdi-Fletcher founded in 1980 as the nation’s first professional dance company to include dancers with and without disabilities. Arts Endowment grants have helped fund national tours, new commissions, the company’s dance school, and a new international exchange for dancers with disabilities.

“When I started dancing, there were no wheelchair dancers that I could emulate,” said Verdi-Fletcher, who was born with spina bifida and uses a wheelchair. Thanks in large part to her pioneering efforts, “Today a child with a disability that wants to pursue [dance], whether it’s for recreational purposes or for formal training, they know that it’s possible,” she said. “Setting an example of possibilities is really the key to opening people’s minds and [allowing them to make] choices in their lives.”

For Verdi-Fletcher, dance is an ideal vehicle to change not just a dancer’s sense of possibility, but audience members’ as well, and to show the huge range of physical and emotional capabilities of a population too often defined in terms of limitations. “Movement crosses all boundaries of language,” she said. “We love when audiences say, ‘The disability disappears. We don’t see the differences in people. You’re all dancers.’ Not that I want to hide my disability. By no means. But I don’t lead with my disability. I’m a woman and I’m a dancer and I’m an artist. It just happens to be that I’m disabled.”

While she lauded how the athletic world has many competitions for athletes with disabilities, she said it’s rare for a sports event to mix disabled and non-disabled together, as her own integrated dance company does. “In the arts, the beauty is that we’re working together, we have different strengths, we have different talents, and it all melds together to make a statement, whether that be a critical statement about inclusion or disability or access, or just a statement of equitable performance onstage,” she said. “You don’t have to preach about access and inclusion when you can see it firsthand.”