12.02.2026

4 min read

Meeting? Offering? Valuing… in dances with people with profound and multiple learning disabilities

By Cheshire Dance Creative Director and Wanna Dance? artist Jane McLean

How do we meet? How do we meet in this sensory, most often non-verbal world? What is it to meet equally, to really meet one another where we are at?

Sometimes a meeting needs to begin with an offer? (Is that always the case?) What do I offer when I meet… join dancers in the space…?

I offer presence. I offer to witness you as you are and me, how I am.

I might offer a touch, a connection point.

I offer a willingness to listen, be still, respond, play – to notice the small dance and the potential in all movement.

I commit to staying in uncertainty, to staying with the moment, to listening… and, when I am unsure, to listening even more deeply.

I am moved in finding a dance with you, no matter how that might be. The offer of stillness remains, an offer to wait, to slow down. I find my breath and notice yours.

You develop my ability to notice, not only what is within our dance but what frames it, the space, the imagination.

Moving this morning I noticed elderberries, my own tiredness, the plane trails in the sky – I recall dancing with Adam and noticing the seasons changing through the trees outside as our dance together takes me window to window. I notice with Patrick, I can sit with uncomfortable, unclearness… developing my skill to be patient, to really wait, to listen.

Finding patterns, connections with people, catching waves together, journeying into a portal of being that isn’t an alternate reality, but perhaps a truer reality – where we meet in breath, gesture, eyes, fingertips connecting.

I follow your lead and in doing so I offer back something, and the back and forth creates a magic middle where the dance happens.

What is exchanged… shared, becomes the dance – therefore I must also stay with, be with me, in order to be with you. Sometimes my focus is so on the being with you, in your dance that I lose myself – but maybe it’s ok to lose myself and to follow for a while… in following you perhaps I find myself differently? Find a curiosity, a way of moving, an understanding that I wasn’t aware of before.

But it’s also ok to be with me. To not hold on to any pre-determined expectation or desire for the dance to be a certain way, or thing.

Sometimes I’m not having the dance I would like… and I’m remembering a prompt from Cai Tomos, ‘what do you do when you’re not having the dance you want?’

Pause, witness, notice, be surprised, stay with… never forcing but sometimes choosing to stay with it – to see what this dance has to show. Perhaps I can learn something about the other person, but I almost certainly learn something about myself.

So, what do I offer? An opportunity for movement, creative expression to be noticed, shared, valued. An opportunity to co-create a dance which might (or might not) have something else to teach us. An opportunity to see, experience differently…

This work feels like a gift, an offering from people with PMLD (profound and multiple learning disabilities) of different experiences and perspectives that are normally hidden, ignored, interpreted by others.

The live-ness and immediate-ness of a dance, its ability to teach us what we need to know in the moment [this moment]. The idea of an alternate, truer reality where we experience each other differently.

Challenges of space, time, funding, understanding… this work can be seen as ‘extra’, but it’s fundamental, and power-full in a world of ‘fake news’, where connection, empathy, compassion are lacking and where contributions are measured in monetary, capitalistic terms.

In this work we value the important contribution that we all have to give, the unique ways we experience the world and the unique insights we have to offer to it.

Below are two poems inspired by dances with individuals during the Wanna Dance? residencies, written by Jane.

Or not?

Do you want me here?

Is it ok just to be here, be with you?

Be with you in movement and in stillness…

Be with breath, and struggling to catch your breath

Be with eyes still and eyes darting

With small sighs and sudden jerks

There is so much in this perceived dance of nothing

Head rolling

Eyes searching? Finding?

Arm rising, floating, I catch it with mine

Back to stillness

But the breath moves your whole body chest and stomach in and out

I guess my choice is to stay with you, or not.

“Or not’ feels like the easy choice

Staying feels like support, for whatever you’re feeling, experiencing

I’m here, for these 20 minutes

For 20 minutes I will be the one who doesn’t choose, “or not”

I will be here, I will notice

Everything there is in this perceived dance of ‘nothing’

Jane McLean, June 2025

You Teach Me

You teach us (me) to slow down

To be

With

Birdsong, light in concrete pavements

Noticing patterns, tones, irregularity

Framed by the beating of my heart

Breath, now steady, but with its potential to tell…

To share… infinite stories

Clues to the world inside (within)

Connections to the world with out

You teach us (me)

To be

With

To be with waiting

To notice the space and time we might need

To respond… to process

For beauty, wonder, excitement… questions

To ripple through our bodies

Wave like

Wordless

Filling up hearts, spaces inside with potential

Effervescent

You teach us (me)

To connect

With

Myself, the world around, a way of being

Full

Of details, wonder, uncertainty, possibility

Wordless

Stories told through lungs, hearts, eyes

In the curl of a lip or a fingertip

And yet, through these wordless teachings

You teach us (me)

To find words

Ways

of honouring this experience

This dance

That others might learn too

From you

That together we share and spread

The importance of small moments of joy, connection

Presence

Ways

Of being with

Filling up with meaning

Of what it is to be in this world

And why

You teach me (us)

To be

With it all

Jane McLean, September 2024

Find out more about our work with people with PMLD here.