We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Oji Dannelley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Oji below.

Alright, Oji thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

In addition to working full-time in the theatre/dance world, I am also a long-time attendee of Atlanta’s own Dragon Con and a cosplay lover. I’ve been to every event there since 1987, so my first experiences there were as a non-disabled person. The first year I attended in my wheelchair, I was a bit skittish the first couple of days to be in an environment so crowded, but I wanted to do all the things there I always did. The last night, I was at a party where they had a hard dance floor, and I’d been apprenticing in the dance company I later joined. Anyway, with a bit of audacity, I ventured out into the floor and started to just move to the music as I have always done. A wonderful photographer, it turned out, took photos of me and published one on social media when the con was over. He wanted permission to use the photos but hadn’t caught my name. So there was a call on FaceBook asking, “Does anyone know this girl? #DancesWithWheels” We connected and have done many shoots over the last 12 years, and it really was the start of my seeing myself as just a regular person enjoying not only the movement of dance in the new mode I was now in, but ALL the things that I did before. When it came time to name my new adventure as a solo artist, it just seemed the perfect name for the endeavor.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Oji Dannelley, and I have been working in the theatre since I was six. I studied to be a stage manager at West Georgia College and later got my degree in theatre from Georgia State. I worked for many of the major and minor theatres in Atlanta as a director, producer, and stage manager as well as acting from time to time. I helped develop “Plays In Process” for Stage Door Players and later established my own theatre company Koalaty Presentations; both organizations were devoted to the development of new plays by Georgia Playwrights. I took a break in the early Aughts from the Arts, and in 2008, my mobility issues began. By 2012 I was fortunate enough to land an apprenticeship with Full Radius Dance, a physically integrated dance company in Atlanta, GA. I worked with the company for the next 9 years. Under the direction of our Artistic Director Douglas Scott,I watched how the work we produced not only touched our audiences but got to see how it was also changing how people saw disabled bodies. I came to understand that simply BEING a disabled artist was a political and social advocacy position. When I retired from that company and was searching for my next enterprise, I knew I wanted to see how the use of media, social, written, and performative could be used to provide positive and realistic portrayals of life with disability.

I started with being a paid creator with the Meta, doing reels about everyday life, the funny and the frustrating, as a wheelchair user. I was also writing essays that showed the parallels between learning to be a dancer and learning to navigate a world of people who just aren’t educated about what it really is to be mobility challenged in a world that constantly tells you, you are broken. As my platform grew, I started including dance into my feed, dancing in the rain with my granddaughter, drift dancing downhill in the snow, and dancing in the parks in the autumn leaves. Those made it onto TV. These caught others’ attention and inquiries came to me to create longer pieces. Disabled people loved the representation of themselves enjoying movement like everyone else. I made my first self-produced video just before the pandemic, a rough Guerilla filmed style piece called “Learning to Fly”. The piece was about the solo exploration of learning how a wheelchair instinctively moves and pushing the bounds of what that means. Our two new pieces, which will be premiering at the DIsablity Art Show being presented by DIYabled and This Body Is Worthy in Asheville NC on July 30th are the first collaborative works from Dances with Wheels. “Ascension” original choreography by Douglas Scott and courtesy of Full Radius Dance, is a piece that my long-time dance partner, Mason Diaz, has performed many times over the years. It is an exploration of the emotional and spacial relationship between dance partners. Our newest work “aPart” choreography by Mason Diaz, is about how 2 people exist both apart from one another and also perpetually a part of one another. Both in their impact on the person and in their memory.

It’s been very gratifying to have people connect with my work and see themselves in it. How they respond to being seen as both “like everyone else” and SEEN as a disabled person navigating an inaccessible world. Every disability is different and how we choose to move through the world is individualized. I see the future of dance in the disabled world the same way, that it must be adaptive, or as was taught to me, “transposed” to the body of the dancer as it exists in the now. This goes into everything we do, from the beginning stages of creation, rehearsal, execution, and production. It is my professional goal to use these dance videos as a more accessible way to bring physically integrated dance to audiences who may not be able to transport to a live theatre event. To bring the art to them, where they are, in the now, to experience new visuals and ideas of what moving in a disabled body looks like. In the future, I hope that more organizations will invite us to present these works to be a starting point for discussion of how disability is seen in the world at large. To understand that disabled is NOT a bad word. It is EXACTLY the correct word, and really the ONLY WORD that is needed. The euphemisms of “special needs”, “differently abled” and “handicapable” are terms used by people who are uncomfortable with the concept of being disabled. The focus needs to move away from trying to fix us and move into making the world more accessible. Art says that better than anything else I know. It’s all about body autonomy in the end, and the disabled body is enough, it is amazing just exactly as it is.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Instagram was my first and for a long while only entry into social media and that wasn’t until about 5 years ago. It wasn’t until I started to be contacted by brands to do promotions for things as varied as a soap dispenser to an amazing new Rollator that I began to see that maybe there was a way to turn this side hustle into a business. I’ve never worried much about follower counts, and everyone I have has been organically created. I loved making connections with the people who would reach out to me in comments and DM’s. I discovered a vast collective of disabled artists and movement creators, especially during the early days of the pandemic. I found the more I interacted with their content, the more they interacted with mine. You have to support each other, really take time to see what people are putting on their feeds, and let them see the reality of your life. I’ve only expanded into TikTok over the last 2 years, and though it is a vastly different audience than Meta formats, it is exciting to find new followers one at a time who connect with a dance piece or funny perspective video on being a wheelchair user. It is true what they say, just put yourself out there and be authentic and just your unique self. Don’t focus on follower counts, focus on your message. Mine is, “I don’t have a “niche” I have a life. I am a person who loves camping, cosplay, playing with my grand daughter, exploring my hometown of Atlanta, and dancing my way through a lot of that. I am a mom, a minister, a greif counselor, a business owner, and oh yeah, I’m also disabled. That is being myself, all of me. Not having a singular “niche” can make breaking into some areas of social media harder, but in the end, it’s about telling stories and along the way your audience will find you. Just keep it real. If you’d like to join my adventures and see the development of new dances we are creating, I can be found under the handle oji_dannelley on IG and TicTok and on our FaceBook Pages Dances with Wheels.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal for the art I created and the business that helps makes that possible is to create a space for physically integrated and dance for the disabled bodies, in harmony with the body exactly as it is now. Though in any art form, humans strive to perfect their vision of beauty and honesty, there is also a space to create within the parts of the body we have access to and this changes over time. The body that I had to dance with as a non-disabled person is different from the one that I started dancing with in 2012. My body is different in 2023 and will change through the progression of my disability and with time. As a young performer, there was a discipline engrained into me of hard work and dedication. That is still true, but the faculties I have available to me now need accommodations. We don’t hide that in our journey to make new choreography. As Mason Diaz structured rehearsal and the process from the beginning, he was always very aware of communicating with me on what my body could and could not do throughout the time we were working. It wasn’t a hindrance to the process, it was a part of it. We bring into that discussion all the members of the project so that we work hard by working smart. It is reflected in the dance we present. In the essays, messaging in talkbacks, and speeches on bringing disabled bodies into the Arts, I want to bring to light that accommodations for the human body as it is, is beneficial to everyone. It is looking at the real ableism that governs so much of our society by limiting access to the outside world. It is the crux of what we all should be fighting for in society today, real body autonomy. All bodies. In my own small way, my work is about putting a real honest representation of my own disabled body to counter the damaging images of disabled people only having worth if they can be inspirational.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.facebook.com/DancesWithWheels/
• Instagram: oji_dannelley
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DancesWithWheels/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OjiDannelley/featured
• Other: Tik Tok oji_dannelley email at danceswthwheels@gmail.com

Image Credits
Image 1 Photography by John Filipek (performing in Brooke Run Park Dunwoody GA) Image 2 Photography by John Filipek ( rehearsals at Dance Foundry in Decatur GA) Image 3 Photography by T’Shauna Henry ( a shot from the new video “aPart”) Image 4 Photography by Fritz Krieg (a shot from the new video “Ascension”) image 5 Photography by T’Shauna Henry ( a shot from the new video “aPart”) Image 6 Photography by John Filipek (Oji with her Granddaughter Clementine ) Image 7 Photography by John Clifton (Monet Immersive Exhibition Atlanta GA) Image 8 Photography by James Curtis Barger (the photo from the story about how I got the name dances with wheels) Personal photo was by John Filipek