“I think what’s so beautiful and perfect about [ASL] as a language is that it and dance are so similar, you can express everything with just a look or your posture,” shared Bailey Vincent, the 2025 keynote speaker for Disability Awareness Month convocation. For her convocation, Vincent specially choreographed a duet addressing the relationship between the deaf community and those who hear. Longtime friend Sam Barrett joined her in performing the piece, the two representing each group’s experience moving through the world. A deaf storyteller and professional dancer, among other things, Vincent lives with Atypical Cystic Fibrosis (ACF), causing her dance career to follow a very unconventional path.

“There were a couple years where I was fully voice off, and those were some of my most psychologically healthy times ever,” said Vincent. The dance world can be an environment filled with peer pressure in many forms, she notes, and refraining from speaking was one way she felt she could step outside those bounds as an artist. Vincent is self-described as hearing passing, which for her means when people are unable to communicate with her via signing, she relies heavily on reading their lips to understand what they are saying. Due to being born hearing and English being her first language, Vincent’s journey of hearing loss has forced adaptation in all aspects of her identity. As a dancer, this means she has to learn to rely on visual cues and feeling the air of the music shift around her to keep in time. Living in a world without the listening cues other people so heavily rely on has greatly informed how Vincent incorporates deaf advocacy into her work.

“Most of the artists that I am the most captivated by… are people who created a passion and a purpose from their pain, and so to me some of the most beautiful art was created in some of the darkest or most painful times,” shared Vincent. The piece Vincent choreographed for the keynote event comes amidst continued surgeries she has had to undergo due to her ACF. The movement is a testament to the resilience required in prolonged situations like these, incorporating elements of the contemporary and ballet dance styles. Additionally, Vincent integrated many sign gestures into the movement to help in addressing the piece’s main theme, the constant struggle for accessibility for the deaf community.

“At first when I told Sam the idea, I said, ‘You are going to be the human embodiment of ableism, enjoy your time dancing in this,’” Vincent said. Barrett’s character in the piece represents the hearing world that rarely acknowledges the lack of accessibility for the deaf, while Vincent’s character represents how the deaf community moves through life despite these inconsiderations. The pair first met when they were both a part of a theater program together a number of years ago, Vincent as a choreographer and Barrett as a student in the program. In 2016 at the age of just 16, Barrett joined Vincent’s newly founded dance company as an intern, later becoming a professional with that group.

“All of my professional dance experience is through our company…with Bailey, and now we are still dancing together,” Barrett said. The original iteration of the studio has undergone several rebranding efforts since the nationwide Covid lockdown in 2020, one of those shifts being the end of the performing company in late 2022. Barrett now works as the Administrative Coordinator for Theatre and Performance in the dance department at The College of William and Mary, continuing to perform with Vincent whenever she gets the chance to.

“The dream was the company, it is weird to achieve your dream and then be like, ‘now what do I do,’” said Vincent. As she has “mono-maniacally” gotten back into the professional world of dance following a hiatus due to health complications, Vincent sees her convocation as one aspect of her new dream. Taking the show on the road and visiting different companies, studios, and colleges to present and explore ways to destigmatize dance for the next generation is extremely important work in her eyes. 

Vincent concludes, “I am deaf, but the world really likes to just think of one type of everything. When we think of a ballerina… I just want us to all as artists and future generations to get to a point where…if you say ‘I talked to a dancer today,’ that you don’t think they are hearing and they talk, you just think ‘it’s a human, it’s going to be cool to see what type of human they are.’”