“Disability underpins George Balanchine’s 1957 ballet, Agon. After his wife—ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq—contracted polio, Balanchine studied the exercises developed at Warm Springs Polio Rehabilitation Center, a whites-only institution founded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Traces of these exercises are discernible in the choreography. Changing race relations also influenced Agon—for instance the casting of Arthur Mitchell as New York City Ballet’s first African-American dancer in a principal role. Foregrounding this history invites different kinds of bodies and different modes of perception into the dance. Deconstructing the original choreography unsettles Balanchine’s simple binaries—male/ female, black/white, virtuosity/frailty, dancer/spectator—and opens up the aesthetic potential of a more inclusive understanding of human embodiment. ”