Caroline Bowditch on Reclaiming Frida Kahlo and Disabled Dance
- Peta
- Mar 3
- 20 min read
Caroline Bowditch is a performance artist, arts leader and one of the most influential voices in disabled culture in Australia and the UK. A recipient of the Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship for 2025 to 2026, she has spent more than two decades reshaping how disability is understood in dance, performance and arts leadership.
In this episode of The I Can’t Stand Podcast, Caroline reflects on wanting to be a ballerina and an ice skater despite never seeing a wheelchair user in those spaces. We talk about growing up under the constant gaze placed on disabled bodies and how she learned to reclaim that visibility.
We explore her pivotal work Falling in Love with Frida, and how reclaiming Frida Kahlo through a disabled lens transformed her artistic identity and voice. Caroline also shares her move from freelance performer to leading Arts Access Victoria, what disabled dance actually looks and feels like in practice, and why disabled people must be inside institutions if meaningful change is going to happen.
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Key Topics Discussed
In this episode, we discuss:
• Growing up disabled and wanting to be a dancer without visible role models
• Reclaiming the gaze placed on disabled bodies
• Creating Falling in Love with Frida and telling Frida Kahlo’s story through a disabled lens
• The transition from freelance performer to arts leadership
• What disabled dance looks and feels like in practice
• Leadership, emotional labour and sustaining cultural change
Transcript
00:00:02
Peta: Hello, and welcome to the I Can't Stand Podcast, the podcast that explores what it's like tell have with a disability. My name is Peta Hooke, I have sebral palsy and I'm your host. This week, I'm joined by the amazing Caroline Bowditch. Caroline is a performance artist, arts leader, and self described troublemaker who has spent more than two decades shaping disabled culture through dance and advocacy. In this conversation, we go back to the girl who wanted to be a ballerina or an ice skater, even without seeing anyone like herself in those spaces. We talk about being constantly observed as disabled people and how Caroline is learnt to take control of that gaze. We also discussed her pivotal work falling in Love with Frieda, and why she believes disabled people must be inside organizations if real change is going to happen. I loved this conversation. I think you'll be able to hear that, and I hope you do too, So without any further ado, here's Caroline.
00:01:32
Caroline: Hi, Peta. My name is Caroline Bodich and I am an artist, a performance artist, an arts leader, a recipient of the Sydney Maya's Creative Fellowship for twenty five and twenty six. Mother of furry pets. I have two cats. I am a partner, I am a sister, I am a daughter. I am a troublemaker. I am the one asks the questions that no one wants to answer. I would say I am a complete change addict.
00:02:14
Peta: I love it. I would also want to add disability rockstar, as you wish. You're a disability rockstar. You have done so much for the disability community. When I first started working in this space, a lot of people said to me, oh, you've got to get Carol out on the pod, and I have been trying for very, very years. So it was just great that we finally got to meet in person and we got to get this done. But for those who don't know, you just said you got the fellowship, so tell us about that. Congratulations. That's massive.
00:02:49
Caroline: Yeah, it's huge. Somehow, out of three hundred and fifty plus applications, I became one of eight of the artists that was awarded in late twenty twenty four to receive essentially funding for the next two years for me to just explore my creativity to recuperate to recalibrate, to reimagine what I want.
00:03:18
Peta: To do next.
00:03:19
Caroline: And it's been a complete honor and privilege to have it.
00:03:25
Peta: That's amazing to just be able to play in your creativity. Did you have any sort of restraints of what you had to do?
00:03:34
Caroline: No? I write them literally, I write them a one to two page report every year about what I've done. But there's no outcomes, there's no measures of.
00:03:46
Speaker 3: What success looks like.
00:03:47
Peta: Nothing. It just is.
00:03:49
Caroline: Here is a significant chunk of money. Please go away and live a life as an artist should be able to and see what comes.
00:03:58
Peta: You've been part of just disabled culture for such a long time and a pivotal voice. I must say, but I always like to go back to the beginning, particularly for the audience who don't know your work. You know as thoroughly as maybe I do. Caroline. When you think of your little self and little Caroline, I know you wanted to be a dancer, ballerina, even an ice skater. I love the ambition. You're my sort of person. How do you see your little self now?
00:04:27
Caroline: It's really interesting.
00:04:29
Speaker 3: I was very bossy as a child.
00:04:32
Caroline: My brothers were attested to that, and I think that was about trying to gain control in a world that I felt I had very little control over for lots of reasons. One that I was living in a really unpredictable body that could break it any minute. I used to dance at the discos that we would go to actually at glen Waverley Special School, which is where I kind of started, and David Craig, he was the recreation person, would organize these amazing discos that we would have once a month, and I would desperately go and dance and loved it. But I did start dancing on my next door neighbors dining room table thinking that I was living in john So I think I've always I've always had the performer in me, and I've always had a passion for dance and really seen that as an expression that I loved.
00:05:27
Peta: I myself love a dance. I think it's one of the main joys of life, Like there's nothing better getting on a dance floor and having a bit of a boogie. I'm that person completely, and I fully appreciate where you're coming from. And I too, probably wanted to go into the arts until I realized I had no skill in that area, unlike you Caroline, What made you feel like you could go into those areas? Because even sitting here as a thirty four thirty five year old person, I have hadn't seen many people in those spaces, particularly when I was a kid. I mean, obviously you would have faced backlash or people not believing that you could. How did you have that self belief in yourself?
00:06:14
Caroline: I think it's a really interesting thing, especially being in the dance well where I am with dancers who are like, yes, I started ballet at four, and it was like I was never afforded that privilege. I was never welcomed into a dance school. I was never I never went to a Saturday morning arts class of any sort. I did my degree in promming arts, and I went into it really because of my love of music and of drama at which I'd done at school and was able to be involved. I had an incredible teachers at my mainstream high school who very much encouraged me into the being part of the musical that they were doing or whatever. Like, I just was very embraced by the teachers, particularly by the performing arts teachers at school. My high school music teacher, Valerie Tamblin Mills, that I had from the time that I was twelve to probably fifteen, just really encouraged me and believed in me and all of those sorts of things. And when we toured Frieda in Australia in twenty sixteen, we went to Newcastle where she now lives, and so forty years on, she came to see this work that I had made as a grown up and was completely overwhelmed. I mean, we were both overwhelmed to see each other. But she just said to me, I knew you always had it in you. I knew you were always going to be a performer, and I saw it in you every time we were in class together.
00:07:49
Speaker 3: I knew it.
00:07:50
Caroline: I knew you had it in you. And it's just like, oh God, I that belief in people or from someone in me was the thing. They were the things. And I when I think back about all of my success that I've had, which has come through hard work, but it's also come through incredible belief by specific people in me that I can do something that I never believed I could do myself. I think also my mom, My mom.
00:08:24
Peta: Just was so.
00:08:26
Caroline: She was such an incredible well, she is such an incredible human and she could have completely wrapped me in cotton wool and said don't do that, you might get broken, or I wouldn't try that, you might get broken. But she never did that. And my brothers were the same. They were like, it's really important that you know how to catch a ball, and balls terrified me as in sports, typed balls, and later in life the other ones as well. But yeah, just that it was really important for them that I learned those life skills, and so they would teach me stuff and take me places and play my stupid games and do all those sorts of things, and all of that made me a much more rounded person. I think.
00:09:18
Peta: I can't stop thinking about the fact, and I sort of tweaked in me as I was writing questions for you, Caroline, of how much disabled people are inherently looked at, you know, and you using that power and switching that dynamic of you wanting to be looked at in a performance setting. Was that part of your motivation? Do you think?
00:09:42
Caroline: Yeah, there is a beautiful academic article that talks about and so many of my disabled artist colleagues talk about at least when we're on stage, we're in control of the narrative. We get to control the stories that we tell and the stories that are told about us, and we have the opportunity to potentially replace the way people think about things. I used to get stared at a lot because, as you know, I'm very short and I use a motorized wheelchair most of the time. And my brother I have a two brothers. My brother that's two years older than me, we used to we'd go the shops together and we'd go down the street, and he used to get so annoyed at people staring at me. He was like, what don't you And so I change the recording in my head that said they're looking at me because I'm weird, or I'm sabled, or all these things, and actually went, they're looking at me because I've got beautiful blue eyes and they want more of it. And that was the beginning I think of me shifting my thinking about how people were perceiving me. And that wasn't easy, and that took time, but I think it was essentially it was a survival skill. Was I had to change the narrative that I was telling myself into something that worked for me, rather than imagining what it was for them. I think all disabled people have incredible stories to tell, and I think I have been generously afforded a platform, and so I want to make sure I tell stories that are relevant to me but also to the community. There's a line that I say in Falling in Love with Freeda, which is I think disabled people are always performing, whether they bought a ticket or not, because we are We are always being watched, We're always observed, we are always under the microscope in many many ways. We're always in the spotlight. So why don't I make the most of it.
00:11:56
Peta: We're always in the spotlight, and yet we're highly ignored. Like that dichotomy is just yeaheah, yeah.
00:12:05
Caroline: Absolutely.
00:12:07
Peta: Did you ever come across like a lecturer during your university degree that was like, no, don't understand. How are you ever going to think to become a performing artist or were you fully supported? How did you approach, particularly academics or people in power that were in charge of you getting your qualifications? How did you put them on side?
00:12:31
Caroline: I don't know that I did put them on side. I think my music teacher completely believed in me. In my theater teacher completely believed in me. And it's been really interesting because I've reconnected to them now as a grown up, as a graduate, as a successful artist, and that's been really lovely. But my dance teacher, like I hated dance because we were doing a dance technique called Cunningham, and my dance teachers would just say, you go over there and make up your own version. And it's like, I'm sorry, I have no dance training at all. You are teaching incredibly complex sequence of movement that from a body that looks nothing like mine, and you want me to just make up my own version, okay, And.
00:13:21
Speaker 3: Somehow that was acceptable.
00:13:24
Caroline: So dance was my biggest challenge when I was at university. It was the y I didn't love it because I couldn't I couldn't make my body do what everyone else was doing, and that was incredibly frustrating. And I did not feel supported to modify it in any way, shape or form, and didn't at that stage have the skills to do it. But that is a request that's made of disabled dancers all the time.
00:13:51
Peta: But you got through and you did it.
00:13:53
Caroline: I did, but I did it because I connected with other disabled dances much later in my life. So at twenty five, twenty six, I was invited to be part of a project being run by Art Sexis, Victoria called Movable Dance. That's where I met the incredible Janis Florence. It was Janice and Martin Hughes who all said that those sessions that completely changed my way of thinking and changed my life. Ever, that was my turning point. I was allowed to, for the first time in my life explore what this body that I'd grown up thinking was strange and awkward and wrong was actually capable of doing. I talk about this quite regularly that that was the first time in my twenty six years that I actually felt like I'd landed in this skin and that was perfect. It wasn't wrong, it wasn't out of place. It was exactly the right for me, and that I had some more explore. I had so much exploring to do in it, and they helped me do that because they provided a space and an environment that was allowed me to explore them without judgment or allowed my fear to rise, and then for me to go through it, to get to the other side of it and feel safe to do that. And it then became my ambition to allow to find those spaces or create those spaces for other people to have that experience.
00:15:37
Peta: But I want to talk about Freeda in twenty fourteen, as you've already mentioned, like it sounds like it was a really pivotal moment for you in your artistic pursuit. How did you decide to create that work to start from the very beginning, and maybe we can talk through what sort of impact that had on you, but also disabled culture.
00:16:01
Caroline: I started making it in twenty twelve. I had been offered I'd been given a residency and artistic residency at Dance for in Nottingham, and I had two weeks of just an empty studio on me, which is fairly terrifying, and I just spent the first three or four days kind of singing songs, rolling around the floor, wondering what the I was doing, Like just was like, oh my god. And then on day I think it was day four, I just kind of went, gotitch, come on, snap out of it. You gotta do something, get your shit together. So I just kind of went, Okay, what do you know better than anything else in the world? Do you know best? And I was like, I know my bones. I know my bones intimately and intricately. So I started there and thought okay, So I'd write a lot about my bones and the stories that live in my bones, and I drew lots of dr I'm not a visual artist at all, Peter, but I drew drawings of my bones being like tightly packed packets of rice noodles, you know when you buy them, and they'd wound up with paper. So I drew my bones like that, because when they're together they're really strong, but if you release them and all little bits can break off. So I thought about crustaceans and their skeleton normally outside, and I thought about our indigenous people and how they paint skeletons and on their outside of their bodies, and how they use ceremonially and how important bones are. And before I knew what, I'd landed on the Day of the Dead. So I'd got myself to Mexico and then, as if a mirage, it was like Frieda just appeared before me, and I was like, holy shit, it's you. I have to talk about you. And so I spent the next two weeks finding everything I could about Frieda, reading books, everything on the internet, watching everything I possibly could. Then really started to delve into what it was, and I was lucky enough to receive a brant from Creative Scotland that allowed me to go to Mexico to visit her museum, to go to all the places that she'd gone that I could find. Being a house here, death mask, like realized that ashes were in that tup like it was just like mind blowing all of her clock. Everything was just like. I met with the curator, the director of the museum, and I just Frida has been told in so many ways. There are so many versions of Frieda. What can I say about her that might be different? And she just said, well, she's never been told through a disability lens by someone from someone who has a disability. Lots of people have put the disability lens on her, but they have not been disabled people themselves. And she said, so you just need to tell your version of Frieda. She gave me a CD of the songs that Frida used to play in her house, which became the music that everyone came into the space to hear to the smell of watermelon and tequila as people arrived. Yeah, that was that was the beginning. So I spent the next four years making the show. During the work we took it, we performed at ninety three times in six countries. I made it at a time when I thought I would never fall in love again. You know, I'm forty, I'm very loved. I have an incredible group of friends, and I'm so loved by so many people, and I've had a lot of love in my life and if I don't again, it's okay. And from that, I ended up with two significant relationships moving forward, one of which I'm still in. So it's like I had kind of gone, do you know what, I am just lucky that I've had what I've had, and then lo and behold. I think that allowed me to just go, okay, I can drop all of that, and then it just came and yeah, it was. She changed my life in.
00:20:55
Peta: So many way.
00:20:56
Caroline: It is so many ways. I had that moment of just thinking, King, if I never make anything ever again, this is the piece that I will feel proud that I brought into the world.
00:21:09
Peta: What do you think exploring her identity in her life was allowed you to say out loud about your own disabled identity, Caroline.
00:21:20
Caroline: I think I told stories on that stage that I never imagined I would tell. I think I was brutally honest about her life and mine, and I think that the intertwining of those two things was the crux of the whole thing. Actually, there were some really deliberate choices made that allowed conversations to happen that may never have happened. She's always got a tiny little corner of my heart and always will.
00:21:52
Peta: I think, as it creative myself, I'm just generally interested in how you then get motivated onto the next work, because clearly that sort of changed your life and your prespictive of your identity and love and everything. How do you then pick yourself up and go, no, this is the new direction that I'm going to put myself in.
00:22:18
Caroline: When you make a big work like that that's seen by lots of people, it's a bit like the second album, right, It's like, what's the follow up? As you alluded to, what's the follow up to that? Well, I have to make something you actually can't compare to that, and so that is I made a show about for tiny babies, about snails and insects.
00:22:41
Peta: After many years of being a freelance performer and all the challenges that that brings, but also all the creativity and the freedom that I also gravitate. To myself. You took a formal leadership role at Art Access Victoria. As you said before, why did you want to take that and why did you think you were the right person to do it?
00:23:04
Caroline: Again, I feel like other people suggested that I was the right person to do it, and I think when I was home in twenty sixteen, I met with Roonic Capado and she said, I'm determined to make this organization be disability led because that's the right thing to do. Or would you ever throw your hat in the ring? Basically? And I said maybe at that stage, I've been overseas for fourteen years. I've told my mum I'd be overseas for five whoops, maybe it's time to get a haircut and get a real job. Like But also I was really watching the landscape and and at that stage I thought, I feel like I've learned enough that I can usefully take something back. Because what I didn't want to do was come back and be mediocre. I didn't want to come back and just.
00:24:05
Speaker 3: Toe the line.
00:24:06
Caroline: I wanted to come back and be able to push. I wanted to come back and be able to change the landscape. The conversation, all of those sorts of things, and I was like, I think I'm ready, And so I applied for the job and went through many interviews and was lucky enough to get it. But then they had to wait six months for me because I had one more project that I needed to do in the UK. I couldn't have come back any sooner. I needed to do that. I needed to get that out of a system and then come into the job at AAV.
00:24:42
Peta: Through your time at AAV, what do you think impacts changed the most in allowing disabled artists to fulfill their potential?
00:24:53
Caroline: We need people on the inside. I think lots of disabled artists for whatever reason. We're regularly freelance. We generate our own work, we create art that actually the biggest change that I've seen is when we can be on the inside of an organization. So I had a role as dance agent for change with Scottish Dance Theater and I regularly talked about myself as a trip hazard, like I just needed to be there as a regular reminder, as not just an audience member who would come in and see a show and leave again, but actually be there as a colleague and as a sounding board and as someone to feed into conversation and yeah, to physically be in a space and be a constant reminder of why access is important. There's something really important about when you're in a role like that, being able to open pathways, avenues, doors for other people to let them in, to shift the thinking. Yeah, and I think the really interesting thing for me was how willing and ready the sector is to have those conversations, but then how unsure they are of how to do it this. There is a commitment to equity, there is a commitment to disability justice. People really want it what they and they know why and what needs to happen. But I think there is a massive piece missing about the how we do this, How does change actually happen, and the recognition that it takes time, that it takes investment, not just financially but energy. When you're on the inside, you can be there as a regular reminder, just to make sure it doesn't fall off the agenda.
00:27:04
Peta: Yeah, how do you manage your I mean, obviously change really motivates you, and you clearly love change, as I do myself. How do you manage your fatigue and maintain your motivation now in trying to push for change in other areas that you're working on.
00:27:23
Caroline: I can now be selective about the conversations that I want to have, and so I take that energy to the places where I think it's wanted. I will always start conversations where I think it's needed, that I will put my energy where I am fed as well as so that it's a two way conversation rather than just feeling it doesn't feel extractive.
00:27:49
Peta: They're not sucking all the positivity out of you until you feel depleted.
00:27:54
Caroline: No, and I don't feel tokenistic in that space.
00:28:00
Peta: What motivates you now today? What areas of change are you really trying to push for?
00:28:07
Caroline: I'm big picture, so I'm starting to think about what are we doing for the opening ceremony of the Paralympics in Brisbane in thirty two, and more importantly, who are we sending to do the handover in twenty eight to LA where access is absolutely amazing? Who are we putting on that platform we're goin to shakecase? So they're the conversations that I'm trying to start at the moment. Is that thing about going we have I've got long kids, What are you gonna do about it?
00:28:37
Peta: I want to go back to a really basic question for those who haven't seen disabled dance in real life in practice, can you describe what it looks like.
00:28:51
Caroline: I'm gon't e fucking describe what it looks like, because depending on who the artist is, it will look different for everybody, and I think that's the thing that I love. But what I'm be able to describe better is how it feels. And it feels different. It feels more human, it feels hopefully more connected, and often there will just be a moment where we are able to see ourselves. It will have had a different process, and it will have potentially have different bodies that we haven't we don't experience on our stages very often, and there will be things like captioning, and there might be sign language interpreters embedded or even depth performers. There might be in.
00:29:49
Speaker 3: Built or for the whole audience auto description of what's going on on stage. So it will it will look different, and it will feel different, and it will be potentially a different experience than what people are generally used to.
00:30:07
Peta: Before I hit my last question, I just want to give you the opportunity because whenever I'm in an interview sometimes I think, oh, the person interviewing me, didn't ask me the question that I really wanted to answer, or there was something that I really wanted to say. So I'm not necessarily saying this section will end up in the podcast, but I just wanted to give you the opportunity in a disabled space to say something that you might want to.
00:30:35
Caroline: I wanted to say to you, Peter, just how important this podcast is and the work that you're doing, because actually to be in a disability held space with someone who asks incredible questions like you asked me questions that I haven't been asked four hundred times before, and I really appreciate that. In doing my research about coming on this podcast, I listened to Grace Spence surname Forget, which led me to her book, which I have now finished. I listened to it as an audiobook, just her writing in that book and the way that she talks about disability and the medical profession, because I'm also currently doing a project with Swinburne University about ableism within the medical field. And I was just like, every doctor, every health professional, every allied health professional, and every SABER person needs to.
00:31:52
Peta: Read this book. They just need to read this book.
00:31:55
Caroline: And I would never have found that without you.
00:32:00
Peta: So my last question is the same question for every episode, and that is because I started the podcast I was sick of strangers asking me silly questions in cafes. And while I'm fairly open and happy to educate the public, some days i'm not. But also I recognize that not all disabled people want to or are able to, or their disability is connected to trauma, and it's not fair for them to have to constantly explain their disability, nor should they have to, because that's their personal medical information. But if there was one question you never got asked by a stranger, again, Caroline, what would it be? And you walk.
00:32:49
Caroline: And you stand. I want people to recognize the permanency of a wheelchair, because it is temporary for lots of people. But I really want people to understand that without my chair, I am nothing. I am well not nothing, but I am completely stuck. I'm completely macarooned, as we say nowhouse without my chair. And interestingly, just as an aside, I had the service people out to routine change in my batteries change of my tires on Friday, and the technician damaged my back wheel so badly that he had to take my chair away.
00:33:41
Peta: Oh God.
00:33:43
Caroline: And I have yet to hear from the company with a solution to the problem. The suggestion was made that it could just come back sometime after Christmas. I would like people to realize that our chairs are not optional. They are not a choice piece of equipment. They are out everything.
00:34:16
Peta: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the I Can't Stand Podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, the best way you can support the show is by sharing it with a friend or posting about it on social media. And if you have a moment, leaving a rating and review helps more people find these stories. Don't forget. You can always send me an email I Can't Stand Podcast at gmail dot com, or you can follow me over on Instagram at Peterhook. I'll see you next week. I would like to respectfully acknowledge the wondery and bunner wrong people of the call and nation of which I record the podcast day, and I pay my respects to both elders past and present, along with and especially to those in the First Nations communities who are disabled themselves.
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