Working with Adrian Jones, dance artist

This article describes and discusses performance work devised by a learning disabled person. The generative process and the relationship between the author and the artist are examined. Central to the argument presented is the potential of this work to manifest a challenge to, and an alternative reading of, notions of beauty in live performance, that is predicated upon the materiality of disability rather than any compensation for the disabled performer or dance author. The article foregrounds a specific, embodied and coherent practice that is revealed as a radical turn in the representation of a doubly marginalized cultural context, that of disability and that of rural Wales. Such conceptualization and manifestation of an ‘alternative beauty’ is seen as opening a new aesthetic address that does not owe its provenance to the discourse of art in the community or to the arts therapies, and is instead indicative of an imperative to consider ways of perceiving performance outside of current ideological perspectives.