From Wheelchair to Stage: How One Woman Built a Movement for Dancers

A road accident in 2018 changed everything for Priya Sharma. But it was a single moment at her sister’s wedding—when her siblings insisted she dance from her wheelchair—that revealed something unexpected: joy still lived there, waiting to be claimed.

That evening became the spark for Dance With Wheels, the platform Priya founded in 2024 that’s now connecting women and girls with disabilities across 16 Indian states. What makes this movement so quietly powerful isn’t the choreography itself, but what it represents: a deliberate refusal to accept the social weight that disability carries. Because here’s what the story reveals—much of that weight isn’t medical. It’s the shrinking invitations, the well-meaning pity, the applause withheld. It’s the way people stop seeing you as a person and start seeing only the condition.

When nine dancers from Dance With Wheels rolled onto a stage in Jaipur in front of 350 people, the impact was immediate and profound. For some, it was their first solo journey away from home. For one participant, the moment was transformative enough to say afterward:“Today I forgot I have a disability.”That sentence holds everything. It’s not about forgetting the physical reality—it’s about stepping into a space where your identity isn’t defined by limitation, where you’re a dancer first and the disability becomes secondary, or disappears entirely.

The language shift Priya describes is equally significant.“Earlier, we would say I am someone with a disability,”she reflects.“Now we say we’re dancers.”It’s a small grammatical pivot with enormous psychological weight. Identity isn’t what happens to you; it’s what you claim for yourself. And claiming space—literally on stage, metaphorically in the world—changes how you see yourself and how others see you.

What Dance With Wheels is really building is permission. Permission to take up space, to be seen without explanation, to pursue joy without apology. In a society that often treats disability as something to be hidden or endured, Priya built the inclusive platform that was missing. And in doing so, she didn’t just create a dance program—she created a mirror that reflects what was always true: that brilliance, artistry, and the urge to move and be seen belong to everyone, regardless of how their body navigates the world.