Reactions to Ballet with Wheelchairs: Reflections of Attitudes toward People with Disabilities

Subjects watched 2 videotape excerpts and recorded their reactions along a negative-to-positive continuum on the Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI). One excerpt was a classical ballet performance-the final 2 minutes of Stravinsky s Symphony in C by Balanchine. The other excerpt was a 2.5 minute Cable News Network (CNN) newscast about a collaborative performance between the Jeoffrey Ballet and a Chicago-based group of dancers in wheelchairs. Subjects included 32 middle school students, 32 high school students, and 32 undergraduate college music majors. Each age group had equal numbers of male and female subjects. Order of presentation of excerpts was controlled by reversing the sequence for half of the subjects by gender in each age group. A repeated measures ANOVA of mean CRDI ratings by excerpt order, gender, and age revealed a significant difference between newscast ratings and ballet performance ratings. Newscast mean ratings were more positive than ballet performance mean ratings. Order of presentation and gender were not significant factors. Age was the only factor affecting the difference. Newscast mean ratings were highly positive for all 3 groups and minor differences were not significant. Ballet performance mean ratings by college students, however, were significantly more positive compared to the younger groups mean ratings. High school students neutral ratings and middle school students slightly negative ratings were not significantly different. Individual subject s timelines revealed similar levels of discriminating attention with the CRDI across different age groups, different video formats, and different content. Middle and high school students reactions to visual images of dancers in wheelchairs talking about dancing and performing with nondisabled ballet dancers are positive and apparently unrelated to their reactions to classical ballet.