You can dance if you want to

Caroline Bowditch dances in a wheelchair with ablebodied colleague Ruth Jansen Picture: Phil Wilkinson

ASKED to describe a typical dancer, most people conjure up an image of strength, agility and, above all, mobility. Which is a fair enough assumption, given the physical demands of the genre. Yet those three qualities come in more than one flavour.

Anyone who has seen London-based Candoco Dance Company will know that dance and disability are not mutually exclusive. Since 1991, they've been using disabled and able-bodied dancers to present entertaining and engaging contemporary dance. And now, thanks to the vision of artistic director Janet Smith, the same pioneering work is happening at Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT).

Although seeds were being sown for many years beforehand, the real journey began in 2007, when SDT staged Angels of Incidence. Choreographed by Candoco's co-founder, Adam Benjamin, the work was a revelation for all those who thought a wheelchair had no place on the dancefloor. In particular, a duet between disabled dancer Caroline Bowditch and SDT performer James MacGillivray was as beautiful as any pas de deux the ballet world has to offer.

Bowditch joined the Dundee-based company purely to work on Angels of Incidence, but when the tour was over she was reluctant to leave. For her, a mainstream company performing integrated work as part of its everyday repertoire was something too special to walk away from. "I felt as though we hadn't maximised all the benefits of the project," she says. "Janet had achieved something that had never been done before, and I really wasn't prepared to let that go unacknowledged. So we talked about what we had all learned from the show, and how we could build on it."

Born in Australia with Osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease), Bowditch grew up constantly aware of her body's limitations, until a series of dance workshops, tied in with a visit to Melbourne by Candoco, changed everything. "It was the first time I realised what my body could do, rather than all the things I'd been told it couldn't," recalls Bowditch. "And that was a complete liberation. I had one dance class a week, and each time it was like somebody handing me the biggest box of chocolates. I was completely hooked."

Bowditch has been involved in dance ever since, both as a performer and choreographer, and is committed to helping other disabled people discover it. A grant from the Scottish Arts Council allowed her to stay on at SDT as their Dance Agent for Change, with the aim of challenging notions of "what is a dancer and who can dance". Bowditch assumed that convincing the dance fraternity to become more accessible would be the hardest part of her new job – she was wrong.

"The biggest challenge has actually been convincing disabled people to try dance for the first time," she says. "And also for the people who work with disabled people to let them try." Bowditch persevered, however, and a Saturday morning dance class at Dundee Rep populated by new recruits is just one of her many achievements.

Smith didn't bring Bowditch onboard purely for outreach work, however, as the company's spring programme will testify. Part of a double bill, NQR (based on the former medical acronym Not Quite Right) was co-created by Smith, Bowditch and SDT's associate director, Marc Brew – also a wheelchair user. "The thing I love is that we're taking inclusive work to a mainstream dance audience," says Bowditch, "and we're exposing them to something they wouldn't ordinarily buy into."

During the piece, Bowditch spends time both in and out of her wheelchair, which must demand a huge amount of trust between performers. "Absolutely," she says. "The dancers here are amazing and I do trust them – but it took time. I remember how terrified I was when I first worked with SDT, whereas now I'm much more willing to chuck myself around."

It's a testament to Smith's leadership that she has seen Bowditch and Brew's appointments as opportunities rather than challenges. Trained as a professional dancer in Australia, Brew lost the use of his legs in a car accident in 1997 but refused to give up his profession. Today he runs his own company, as well as helping Smith to run hers. Along with Bowditch, Brew's choreographic contribution to NQR has allowed the SDT dancers to move in new and innovative ways they might not have explored otherwise.

As Smith says: "Sometimes in integrated work, dancers dance in elegant ways and people with disabilities have to somehow emulate that and adapt to what the others are doing. And we thought, why not do that the other way around sometimes?"

Scottish Dance Theatre is at Dundee Rep, 17-20 February, then on tour. www.scottishdancetheatre.com