Ge Huichao: Building Body On&On and Making Access

In this episode, I stay with the Beijing-based curator and producer Ge Huichao 葛慧超, also known as Dew Ge, the founder of Body On&On (身身不息). The episode frames her work through a simple but consequential proposition: access is not an add-on to art, but a craft that shapes how public culture is made. Read through the lens of regenerative aesthetics, access becomes an aesthetic practice of livability—pacing, legibility, rest, and multiple modes of communication—so that different bodies can remain in the room together.

Moving through Body On&On’s programs, the episode traces how inclusive arts are built as infrastructure rather than isolated events: the Luminous Festival and its workshops, the exhibition To See the Other at Drum Tower West Theater, and the development of the China/UK/Singapore d Monologues, presented as And Suddenly I Disappear, where aesthetics of access become part of performance form. It also follows Dew Ge’s field-building work through the UK–China Disability Arts Forum and the Access for Change platform, and highlights major productions such as Handling Hands. The episode closes by considering Body On&On’s recent programming at the intersection of climate, mental health, and cultural participation, including the Down to Earth theme and the staging of Latour and Aït-Touati’s Terrestrial Trilogy, asking what kinds of public life become possible when access is treated as a shared social practice.

Keywords

Ge Huichao 葛慧超, Dew Ge, Body On&On 身身不息, inclusive arts, disability arts, accessibility, aesthetics of access, regenerative aesthetics, Luminous Festival 星空艺术节, To See the Other 看见他者, Drum Tower West Theater 鼓楼西剧场, sign language poetry, sensory integration, d Monologues, And Suddenly I Disappear, Touch Contact Improvisation Festival, UK–China Disability Arts Forum, Access for Change 艺术无障碍, Handling Hands, Terrestrial Trilogy, Down to Earth, Women In Motion at West Bund, Body Matters

Key references 

British Council. “And Suddenly I Disappear: The Singapore ‘d’ Monologues.”  https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/ccu/arts/theatre-kaite.

British Council. “The 5th UK–China Disability Arts Forum Launched in Guangzhou.” December 2, 2023.  https://www.britishcouncil.cn/en/about/press/5th-uk-china-disability-arts-forum-launched-guangzhou.

Cheng, Yuezhu. “Beijing Exhibition Celebrates Inclusive Arts and Cultural Exchange.” China Daily, May 20, 2024. 

Cheng, Yuezhu. “Cross-cultural Collaboration Takes Center Stage.” China Daily, July 5, 2024.  

Cheng, Yuezhu. “Luminous Festival Lights Up Beijing.” China Daily, August 28, 2024. 

Hamraie, Aimi. Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Kering. “Kering Announces the 3rd Edition of Women In Motion at West Bund Initiative, in Partnership with the West Bund Museum, Celebrating Women’s Creativity in Choreography.” September 6, 2024. 

Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 2018.

Lu, Jiajun. “Art from the Heart.” Beijing Review, December 13, 2023.  https://www.bjreview.com/Lifestyle/202312/t20231213_800351716.html.

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. “The 5th Luminous Festival Series of Events” [UCCA × 第五届星空艺术节系列活动].  https://ucca.org.cn/program/the-fifth-luminous-festival/.

My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang

Transcript

You are listening to Regenerative Artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures. Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

Before we meet today’s practitioner, I want you to picture a very ordinary cultural ritual: arriving at a theater.

You step through the lobby. You look for the restroom. You scan for your seat. And somewhere in that small sequence, you make a calculation: will my body be okay here for the next hour?

If you are non-disabled, that calculation might feel like minor logistics.

But if you live with disability, chronic pain, sensory sensitivity, or neurodivergence, arriving can be the hardest part of the entire evening. The barrier might be a staircase with no alternative route. It might be lighting that feels like a migraine in slow motion. It might be the total absence of captions, sign language interpretation, audio description, or simply clear information about what is going to happen and how intense it will be. It might be an unspoken social rule that says a good audience sits still and stays quiet, even when stillness and silence are not physically possible.

And here is the twist: in many arts institutions, those barriers are treated as a side issue—something to fix later, if the budget allows.

In today’s episode, we meet someone who refuses that logic. For her, access is not an afterthought. It is the condition of possibility for art to exist as public life. It is a curatorial method. It is a social practice. And increasingly, it is also a way of thinking about how communities hold together as the ground beneath us becomes less stable.

Her name is Ge Huichao (葛慧超), also known as Dew Ge. Born in 1987 and trained in journalism as an undergraduate, she is now a Beijing-based curator and producer working in contemporary performance. She is the founder of Body On&On, an organization that has become one of the most important drivers of inclusive arts in China.

If you have heard of the Luminous Festival, often described as China’s first inclusive arts festival, it is closely linked to Dew Ge’s work. If you have followed the UK–China Disability Arts Forum, co-hosted with the British Council, that too is part of the same long project: building infrastructure rather than one-off events.

My argument is this: Dew Ge curates conditions, not just programs. She treats access as a craft. Here, I also want to name it as a kind of regenerative aesthetics. Instead of treating beauty as a finished surface or a singular virtuoso moment, it treats beauty as a set of conditions that make life more livable: pacing, legibility, rest, multiple ways of communicating, and the social choreography that lets different bodies remain in the room together. In this frame, the artwork is not only what happens onstage. The artwork is also the hosting: how you arrive, how you understand, how you participate, and how you recover.

And when you take that craft seriously, something shifts. You stop thinking of access as a special accommodation for a small group. You start seeing it as a way of redesigning public life: how people enter, how they communicate, how they rest, how they take care, and how they share space without pretending they are all the same.

To understand her method, it helps to start with how Body On&On describes itself.

The organization takes the body as its starting point, with an organizing principle that can be paraphrased as everything starts from the body.

That statement sounds obvious until you notice how much cultural life is designed as if bodies do not exist—or as if only one kind of body exists: the body that can climb stairs, sit still for long stretches, see small type, hear fast speech, and tolerate sensory overload.

Body On&On treats that assumed body as a political fiction.

Founded in 2019, the organization has built an ecosystem of programs: the Luminous Festival, the Touch Contact Improvisation Festival, a series of contemporary body workshops, and longer-term research and exchange initiatives that circulate across different translations under names such as the Body Interview Project and the Body Nomad Project. It has also co-developed international exchange structures, including the UK–China Disability Arts Forum and the Access for Change platform.

What matters is not the list itself, but the strategy underneath it.

This is field-building. It creates pathways for people to move from audience member to participant, from participant to collaborator, and from collaborator to organizer. It makes disability-led and disability-centered cultural work feel like a field with continuity, not a rare event that vanishes as soon as the lights go down.

And once you see the field, you can see what inclusion looks like on the ground.

Now, if you are new to disability arts, you might wonder what inclusive actually looks like.

Sometimes it looks like the basics: captions, sign language interpretation, audio description, clear wayfinding, wheelchair-friendly routes, and information that helps people anticipate sensory conditions. And in a regenerative aesthetics, those basics are not background; they shape the experience itself.

But in Dew Ge’s practice, access does more than remove obstacles. It changes form. It changes staging. It changes pacing. It changes what counts as language. It changes what the audience is allowed to do with their bodies. It changes who is expected to be present.

To see how this works, let me walk you through a few moments from the Luminous Festival over time.

In 2021, the festival met in Beijing and framed its theme through a Chinese idiom, min bao wu yu, meaning all people are my siblings, and all things are my companions. This draws inspiration from the philosophical core of the 11th-century educator Zhang Zai’s teachings. The festival aimed to bridge ancient and modern understandings to reinterpret the notion of inclusivity and to evoke kinship, mutual recognition, and a sense of being bound together.

What matters most, though, is how the theme became practice. That year, the festival paired performances with a forum, screenings, and workshops, including a dance therapy workshop designed for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and their caregivers.

I want to pause right there, because this is not a decorative add-on. It is a curatorial decision about what culture is for.

It says: cognitive change, aging, and caregiving are not private burdens that happen offstage. They belong in the space of public culture. They belong in the same calendar as performance. They deserve the same planning, the same attention, the same dignity.

And it also says something about time.

Caregiving time is not efficient time. It is interrupted time. It is repetitive time. It is exhausted time. When you plan cultural events with caregivers in mind, you plan against the fantasy of the frictionless audience. You build a different tempo into public life.

In 2022, the festival was presented in late September. It was developed in a moment explicitly described as anxious and uncertain, and it built its program around the theme Technologies of the Self. By that, the festival was asking a practical question: what do we use to steady ourselves—habits, routines, care networks, creative practice—when life feels uncertain?

The opening forum carried a title that can be translated as the meaning of action, and it gathered speakers from China and abroad to think together about what inclusive action and inclusive institutions might mean under layered uncertainty.

Here is where Dew Ge’s craft becomes especially concrete: the festival spelled out access support as a normal part of the program.

Video programs included Chinese subtitles and sound effect descriptions. Discussion events included Chinese sign language interpretation. The venue was wheelchair friendly. And registration invited participants to share access needs in advance.

This is not abstract inclusion. It is operational inclusion.

And once you see it clearly, you can also see the larger curatorial move. The festival included international exchange programs that introduced inclusive arts works from different countries, alongside a care-oriented workshop program. That combination does two things at once: it widens the reference points for what inclusive arts can look like, and it links access to care as a long-term practice.

Then, with the Fifth Luminous Festival in September 2023, the theme To See the Other becomes important not only as a slogan, but as an organizing rhythm that extends beyond a single event.

In early 2024, Dew Ge and her team ran a sequence of inclusive workshops as part of that longer continuity: a dance workshop for people with learning disabilities, a sign language poetry workshop co-hosted with a sign language organization, and a sensory integration workshop for people with vision loss.

Notice what is happening here.

First, the festival does not simply end. It leaves an afterlife of workshops, sustaining relationships over time, which in turn make a field durable.

Second, these workshops are not generic. They are specific. Different communities. Different capacities. Different facilitation methods.

A dance workshop for people with learning disabilities demands a different rhythm of instruction and a different approach to group dynamics and consent. A sensory integration workshop for people with vision loss asks you to rethink how information travels through a room, and how guidance can be offered without over-control. A sign language poetry workshop disrupts an assumption that poetry belongs primarily to speech and print, and it treats sign language as an art medium in its own right.

One workshop report describes an icebreaker that begins with bodies. Participants gather in a circle, move their fingers through the air, and then massage the person next to them.

That small detail tells you a lot about the pedagogy.

Dew Ge has also spoken openly about how her team keeps trying to expand formats and reach communities they have not reached before. That effort carries value because it shows how this craft evolves. Access-making is not a fixed solution. It is a method that keeps learning, keeps adapting, and keeps reaching.

And then, in May 2024, the theme To See the Other took on a different form: an exhibition at Beijing’s Drum Tower West Theater. It was described as a retrospective exhibition that gathered research and activities conducted during the Fifth Luminous Festival, divided into three sections: Voices of Disabilities, Sign Language Poetry, and Life Archives.

This is a curatorial decision with big implications.

It treats process as knowledge. That is regenerative aesthetics in archival form: making process durable, shareable, and repeatable.

It resists the disappearance of disability-led cultural labor into the quick cycle of event culture.

And it suggests something else: Dew Ge is not only staging performances. She is trying to build memory, documentation, and continuity for a field that is often forced into invisibility.

Another project makes her access thinking especially legible, because it shows how access can become part of artistic form: the China/UK/Singapore d Monologues, presented under the title And Suddenly I Disappear.

At its core, the d Monologues are built from lived experience. They gather stories from Deaf and disabled people and shape them into short monologues performed through spoken language, sign language, movement, and projected text. Instead of one single disability narrative, you get many voices, many tempos, many ways of being present—and the audience has to adjust how it listens and how it looks.

The project was screened in the context of the Luminous Festival, and then developed into a Chinese version through international cooperation. The Beijing presentation in 2023 was performed by non-professional performers with different disabilities, using spoken language, body movement, and sign language. Sign language interpretation was present for the audience.

If you stop there, it might sound like a standard disability-themed performance. But the deeper method is in how the work treats multiple languages and multiple modes as structural, not supplemental.

In program descriptions, elements like subtitles, sign language interpretation, and audio description are framed not only as functional support, but also as part of the performance’s aesthetic design.

This is the heart of Dew Ge’s approach.

Access is not backstage.
Access is not the price you pay to let art happen.
Access is part of the art’s form.

And that changes what audiences learn to see.

Once you have seen a performance where interpretation, captioning, projection, and embodied translation are integrated into the stage picture, it becomes harder to accept the old model where access is optional and invisible. Cultural norms shift not by moral scolding, but by making a different form feel normal, even elegant, even inevitable.

Dew Ge’s work also moves through dance practice in a way that helps us think about another aspect of access: the social design of movement.

She is closely linked to the Touch Contact Improvisation Festival and to a set of body-based workshop platforms. In practice, that means gatherings where people learn by doing: workshops, guided scores, open jams, and conversations about consent and access. It is less about watching dance from a distance and more about building a shared culture of movement.

Contact improvisation is built around shared weight, mutual listening, and improvisation. The promise is easy to grasp. Movement is negotiated in real time. Balance becomes collective. Technique becomes relational.

But here is the honest part: contact improvisation is not automatically inclusive. Any dance space can reproduce norms, including assumptions about who leads, what touch is acceptable, what bodies are seen as skilled, and whose boundaries are respected.

So when a platform foregrounds contact improvisation alongside disability arts and inclusive practice, what it is really foregrounding is facilitation: consent protocols, pacing, safety, and a culture of listening.

I think of this as trust choreography.

Access-making is not only ramps and captions. It is also the social design of how bodies share space without harm. And you can see the same body-centered logic in Body On&On’s broader workshop formats. The point is not that every workshop is explicitly about disability. The point is that the organization treats embodied practice as a way to build connection and to make different tempos of participation possible.

If workshops are where methods are tested at the level of the room, then forums are where methods become field standards.

The UK–China Disability Arts Forum began in 2019 and has continued across multiple editions, bringing together disabled artists and arts leaders in the UK and China to share practices and strengthen disability arts development. Think of it as a working convening: artists and organizers share case studies, debate what inclusive production requires, and leave with tools and contacts that can change how institutions operate.

What stands out, especially in descriptions of the Fifth forum in Guangzhou, is that access support is not treated as optional. The forum highlights sign language interpretation, simultaneous interpretation, real-time subtitles, and guide-dog-friendly arrangements.

I see that list as an argument.

When you design a forum with real-time subtitles and interpretation, you are asserting that Deaf communities and disabled participants belong in the room where the field defines itself. And when you run a forum across multiple years, you create continuity. You make inclusion ordinary.

This is also where Access for Change comes in: a platform developed with the British Council where organizations share methods and build practical standards for access.

It is how access becomes repeatable. And repeatability is how a craft becomes a field. You can see the payoff when that field is able to mount major productions.

In July 2024, Body On&On produced a dance theater work titled Handling Hands, collaboratively created by Swiss disabled artist Alessandro Schiattarella and Chinese disabled artist Liu Yan. It debuted at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, with Dew Ge serving as producer and dance playwright, and with support from a Swiss cultural funding body.

What stands out to me here is the combination of scale and premise.

The venue is not a fringe space. It is a top national institution. That matters because it signals a shift in cultural visibility. It does not mean that the system is suddenly fair. But it does mean that disability-led collaboration can move into the center and renegotiate what counts as value.

And the motif of hands is not incidental.

Hands are where we meet the world. They are also where many forms of disability are felt materially, socially, and symbolically. To build a dance theater work around hands is to stage a question about expression itself: how bodies communicate, how technique is invented, how constraint can become a language rather than a tragedy script.

This is another way Dew Ge’s craft works. She helps build conditions where disability is not reduced to a medical story or an inspirational story. It becomes a creative and political vocabulary.

Now we reach a turn that particularly matters for this podcast.

In August 2024, the Sixth Luminous Festival opened in Beijing with the theme Down to Earth, inspired by French philosopher Bruno Latour’s book. The program included Latour’s theater work Terrestrial Trilogy, a set of lecture-performances designed to push audiences to rethink how we represent the Earth and how we locate ourselves within ecological crisis.

They sit somewhere between a talk and a performance: part storytelling, part demonstration, using theatrical staging to make climate thinking feel bodily and immediate, not just informational.

Alongside the performances, the festival also featured workshops and a seminar inviting participants to reflect on climate change and forms of action.

The festival turns big ideas into shared practice. It gathers people to reflect and to try to name where we stand, ethically and bodily, as the ground shifts.

And within the same festival window, it also programmed a play focused on depression, along with workshops addressing self-help and mental health strain.

Here is the careful way I want to read this.

I am not saying disability arts should be used as a vehicle for climate messaging. My point is that Dew Ge’s programming makes a structural connection visible.

The same societies that build staircases without ramps also build climate policies without care infrastructure. The same cultures that assume a universal audience also assume a universal climate subject: someone who can evacuate quickly, access information easily, tolerate heat, and recover without long-term support.

In that sense, inclusive arts is not a niche concern. It is a laboratory for realistic futures.

Climate crisis makes the conditions of arrival unstable for everyone. Floods reroute cities. Heat reshapes public space. Air pollution changes what it means to breathe. Pandemics change what it means to gather. And mental health strain becomes not only an individual issue, but a collective environmental condition.

So when Dew Ge places climate lecture-performance alongside workshops, and then places mental health programming alongside inclusive arts, she is curating an ecology of vulnerability and support. She is saying, quietly but firmly: bodies are not separate from politics. The nervous system is political. The lungs are political. The ability to be in a room with others is political.

This is exactly why her work is a form of regenerative artivism.

Regeneration, as I use it here, is not a fantasy of returning to a clean, undamaged world. It is the craft of building livable ways of going on in a damaged world. It is relationship repair. It is capacity building. It is designing for interdependence rather than pretending autonomy is the default.

Dew Ge’s work is regenerative because it builds capacities for interdependence.

It normalizes rest and variation.
It treats communication support as a shared responsibility.
It insists that participation must be designed, not assumed.
It makes care visible as cultural labor.

And it models a kind of realism that climate crisis is going to demand from all institutions: you cannot plan for public life as if everyone has the same body, the same senses, the same pace, the same resilience, and the same access to support.

One last scene helps us see how Dew Ge’s approach travels across institutional ecosystems.

In 2024, Kering’s Women In Motion global program, launched in 2015 to highlight women’s contributions to arts and culture, held the third edition of its Women In Motion at West Bund Museum in Shanghai, with Dew Ge serving as guest curator under the theme Body Matters. The program included performances, talks, workshops, and an improvisational dance evening open to the public. In interviews about the event, Dew Ge emphasized the body as a foundation for empathy and described dance as a language that can link people across difference.

I am not bringing this up as a celebration of corporate cultural programming. I am bringing it up because it shows something strategic: the access-making mindset is moving into larger public-facing platforms. And when methods travel, they begin to shift defaults.

If you can make a body-centered, access-oriented way of curating feel normal in a museum-linked program in Shanghai, you expand what people can imagine as standard practice.

Let’s end where we began: arriving at a theater.

Imagine arriving at a performance where access is visible and ordinary. The usher does not whisper apologies. They offer options. Information about the event is clear and readable. Communication support is treated as part of the event’s form. The audience is not disciplined into one narrow definition of attention. It is invited into respectful variation.

That is the ethical pressure Dew Ge’s practice brings into focus.

Inclusive arts, in her hands, becomes regenerative aesthetics in practice: representation, yes, but also the redesign of public culture at the level of bodies. It is about building collective access: the shared work of making it possible for more people to show up, participate, and shape the world.

So here is a practical prompt to carry with you.

The next time you attend a talk, an exhibition, a workshop, or even a department meeting, ask yourself: what are the conditions of arrival here? Who can enter easily, and who has to do extra work just to be present? What kinds of bodies are assumed, and what kinds of bodies are made to feel like a problem?

And then, if you have any influence at all over the space you are in, try one small experiment. Treat access not as a burden, but as a creative method. Treat it as a way of learning what community actually means.

Because Dew Ge’s work suggests something both practical and forward-looking: when we make access, we do not merely become kinder institutions. We become more realistic institutions. We acknowledge that everyone is living in a vulnerable body, on an Earth that no longer promises stability, and that livable futures will be built through shared design, shared attention, and shared care.

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app. Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.

Show notes

In this episode, we stay with the Beijing-based curator and producer Ge Huichao 葛慧超, also known as Dew Ge, the founder of Body On&On (身身不息). The episode frames her work through a simple but consequential proposition: access is not an add-on to art, but a craft that shapes how public culture is made. Read through the lens of regenerative aesthetics, access becomes an aesthetic practice of livability—pacing, legibility, rest, and multiple modes of communication—so that different bodies can remain in the room together.

Moving through Body On&On’s programs, the episode traces how inclusive arts are built as infrastructure rather than isolated events: the Luminous Festival and its workshops, the exhibition To See the Other at Drum Tower West Theater, and the development of the China/UK/Singapore d Monologues, presented as And Suddenly I Disappear, where aesthetics of access become part of performance form. It also follows Dew Ge’s field-building work through the UK–China Disability Arts Forum and the Access for Change platform, and highlights major productions such as Handling Hands. The episode closes by considering Body On&On’s recent programming at the intersection of climate, mental health, and cultural participation, including the Down to Earth theme and the staging of Latour and Aït-Touati’s Terrestrial Trilogy, asking what kinds of public life become possible when access is treated as a shared social practice.