Disability in the arts is an aspect within various arts disciplines of inclusive practices involving disability. It manifests itself in the output and mission of some stage and modern dance performing-arts companies, and as the subject matter of individual works of art, such as the work of specific painters and those who draw.
Disability in the arts is distinguished from disability art in that it refers to art that includes people with disabilities, whether in themes, performance, or the creation of the artwork, rather than works focusing on disability as the central theme. Disability in the arts can also refer to work that is made as a political act toward shaping a new community, fostering disability culture:
People with disabilities sometimes participate in artistic activities as part of expressive therapy (also known as "expressive arts therapy" or "creative arts therapy"). Expressive therapy may take the form of writing therapy, music therapy, drama therapy, or another artistic method. While creativity and artistic expression are parts of expressive therapy, they are secondary to the goal of achieving a therapeutic benefit. This article describes disability in the arts where artistic achievement is the primary goal.
Performing arts
Dance
The physically integrated dance movement is part of the disability culture movement, which recognizes the first-person experience of disability. This means disability is integrated not as a medical model construct but as a social phenomenon, through artistic, literary, and other creative means.Pelka, Fred (1997). ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. p. 97. .
Music
The Italian organist and composer Francesco Landini (—1397) was the central figure of the Trecento style in late medieval music, his blindness makes him among the earliest figures in the history of disability in the arts.
Beethoven is remembered for his ability to compose classic music after completely losing his hearing. He tried several ways of using his deteriorating hearing before it completely disappeared. He had the legs of his pianoforte cut off, so that it was sitting directly on the floor. By lying on the floor in front of the keyboard, he could feel vibrations while he played, helping him to compose. Different attempts were made to help Beethoven with adaptive or assistive technology. Thomas Broadwood, the Streichers, and Conrad Graf were all piano manufacturers who tried different methods of adapting the instrument to make it louder for Beethoven: ear trumpets were attached to the soundboard, resonance plates were added to the underside of a piano, and using four strings for every key were all tried. Beethoven ultimately lost all hearing, and could no longer rely on an instrument to help him compose. Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony at this time in his life.
Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was a 20-year-old, accomplished guitarist when his left hand was severely burned in a house fire, leaving him with only the use of two fingers for playing the fretboard on the neck of the guitar. While he recovered from his burns, his brother gave him a new guitar. Reinhardt devised his own physical therapy, practising daily to stretch his fingers. He also invented new techniques to compensate for the lost fingers: Reinhardt continued to work as a guitarist, and became world-famous as a recording artist. Reinhardt's creative techniques became part of the jazz guitar repertoire.
Melody Gardot, a jazz vocalist, sustained a traumatic brain injury after she was hit by a car while riding a bicycle. Gardot's injury impaired her memory, including her ability to speak. She spent a year recovering in hospital. While in hospital, her therapy required her to relearn the process of completing simple tasks, such as remembering to shut off a water tap after brushing her teeth. Remembering words to complete sentences was a challenge for Gardot. A doctor suggested that Gardot try singing sentences as an alternative to speaking them, as a way of improving her ability to remember longer sentences. Gardot discovered that this method improved her memory. Gardot gained a music following by adding recordings of her music to Myspace in 2006. Gardot is now a world-famous recording artist, in both French and English, and gives concerts around the globe. She sometimes still has memory lapses while performing, and Gardot needs to wear sunglasses to protect her light-sensitive eyes. She carries a cane as she occasionally experiences vertigo.
In 2011, British composer Charles Hazlewood formed the British Paraorchestra, an orchestra that aims to consist entirely of skilled disabled musicians to counter his belief that orchestras do not contain enough disabled musicians. The formation of the orchestra was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, and it also performed during the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London.
In the UK the One Handed Musical Instrument Trust has the objective of removing the barriers to music-making faced by physically disabled people. It comments: "There is currently no orchestral instrument that can be played without two fully functioning hands and arms, denying unlimited participation in musical life to those with congenital disabilities and amputees, as well as the millions who may have been injured, had a stroke or developed arthritis. The primary obstacle is the absence of suitable instruments."
The EyeHarp and the Clarion are examples of electronic musical instruments controlled by the player's eye or head movements. People with severely impaired motor function can use these instruments to play music or as an aid to learning or composition.'The Clarion', Music Teacher, 17 April, 2025
Theatre
In modern times, the treatment of disability in theatre works has reflected an evolution in mainstream social attitudes towards disability. In Western culture, disability was once rarely mentioned in plays. Notable exceptions include Shakespeare's Richard III. The character of Richard III was depicted as "deformed, unfinish'd" has served as an example of an "anti-hero" and illustrated the depiction of people with disabilities in the arts as villains. Richard's physical disabilities are used to symbolize the fundamental weakness in his character. Yet Shakespeare was conscious of the common mistake of equating physical beauty with personal or moral qualities, or the reverse perception, that physical unattractiveness represents personal flaws (he satirizes such attitudes in his Sonnet 130). Richard III is portrayed as a complex character, one whose tragedy is in surrendering to his moral weaknesses rather than overcoming them.
The inclusion of performers with disabilities in theatre has developed in tandem with wider public acceptance of integrating people with disabilities in mainstream society. French theatre actress Sarah Bernhardt was already famous when she had a leg amputation at age 71. She continued her acting career. Bernhardt disliked her prosthetic limbs and chose to use a sedan chair.
The National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped (NTWH) was a repertory theatre company based in New York City that worked in advocacy, training, and production in theatre for performers with disabilities. It was primarily inclusive of performers and playwrights with physical disabilities when it was founded in 1977. NTWH oversaw projects such as the Writers' Program for Wounded Warriors, which served as both a therapeutic and artistic program for war veterans to explore the psychological, emotional and spiritual experiences of war. Famous People Players, founded in 1974, is a touring black light theatre company based in Toronto, Canada that employs people with disabilities as performers and staff.
Some notable 20th-century plays have dealt directly with disability. American playwright Tennessee Williams wrote many plays with female leads who were at least in part inspired by his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and then left severely disabled by a lobotomy as a young woman. Characters who reflect Rose's struggle with mental illness include Laura in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Catherine in the screenplay Williams wrote for the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer. In Williams' plays, such women are seen as suffering tragedy as a result of their illness.
Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free, about a young blind man who wins his independence from an overprotective mother, debuted on Broadway in 1969, was made into a film in 1972. The main character was played by non-blind actors in both the original run of the play and the film version. In contrast, the play Children of a Lesser God, written by Mark Medoff and debuting in 1980, included a deaf actress playing the female lead role of a character who is deaf. This continued in the 1986 film version; Marlee Matlin, who is deaf, won an Academy Award for Best Actress. In addition, the musical Spring Awakening (based on the 1891 German play), a production by Deaf West that debuted in 2015 on Broadway, featured a large cast of Deaf actors. The play featured both hearing and Deaf actors that performed using American Sign Language. In 2019, Ali Stroker became the first wheelchair-using actor to win the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance of Ado Annie in the revival of Oklahoma!.Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!|The American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards®
In Canada, one of the earliest plays by and about people with disabilities is David Freeman's Creeps, originally published by the University of Toronto Press in 1971, and it is this work that “broke new ground by bringing to life stories about people with disabilities." Freeman was born with cerebral palsy, and by the age of seventeen, he found himself sanding blocks in Toronto's Adult Interfraternity Workshop for a meagre seventy-five cents every two weeks; a deadening experience he wrote about for Maclean’s Magazine in 1964. Freeman penned a screenplay for CBC-TV based on the same subject matter, but it was passed over (the characters were deemed “too unattractive for television).” In the early 1970s, in his search for new Canadian work, Bill Glassco suggested Freeman rewrite the work as a play, a process Freeman found “painful” because he “lived it.” The result was Creeps, and it was a “major success” when presented by Factory Theatre Lab in February 1971. The play was then revised and remounted as the inaugural production of the newly established Tarragon Theatre in October 1971, and it was “an even bigger hit” than the premiere. That production won the first Chalmers Award for Outstanding Play in Toronto in 1972, and a Washington, DC showing in NYC garnered a New York Critics Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Playwright in 1973. Since then, the play has been produced frequently in Canada, the US, and the UK.