How an Ottawa dancer adapted to life in a wheelchair

On a sweltering summer day in 1986, a fan in six-year-old Julie Pettigrew's bedroom short-circuited. It sparked a fire that tore through her West Ottawa home, consuming her dance shoes, costumes, pictures, and batons—items she'd been collecting since she was three.

What saved her that summer wasn't material recovery. It was the countdown to September, when dance classes would start again.

"I just wanted September to come," Pettigrew says now. "I wanted dance classes to start backup again."

For her, dance was the thing that made everything else disappear. Being a kid with mobility issues that would later confine her to a wheelchair, she couldn't keep up with peers in regular classes. But when she was dancing, the frustration and pain dissolved. The problems went away the moment she was doing it.

Pettigrew was eventually diagnosed with Graves' disease—an autoimmune condition that produces excess thyroid hormone, causing trembling and muscle weakness—and hypermobility, a condition allowing joints to stretch beyond normal range. In severe cases, it causes joint pain, injuries, and tiredness. By her 40s, both conditions had escalated. After surgeries on both legs in 2020 and 2021, she got a wheelchair.

She initially refused to use it. "I remember talking to my mentor, and she asked me where my wheelchair was. I said it was in the living room, because I hadn't accepted it yet," Pettigrew recalls. Her mentor told her something that shifted everything: "You haven't accepted your disease if you haven't accepted your chair."

That moment came in 2019, when an orthopedic surgeon told her she needed surgery on her right leg. She got depressed. She thought her dance career was over. Then she discovered the Rollettes, a Los Angeles-based wheelchair dance team offering online support and education for low-mobility dancers. Suddenly there was hope—and a model she couldn't find anywhere in Canada.

When Zach Kostjuk, director of a new dance studio in Kanata called Devotion Dance Company, asked Pettigrew to join in 2019, she saw her opening. Together, they built a low-mobility program—the only one in Ottawa to offer structured, curriculum-based classes rather than freestyle sessions. Classes include dancers in wheelchairs, people with vision loss, seniors with mobility constraints, and anyone seeking movement and community.

"I have a lady in her 60s who's legally blind but can still walk," Pettigrew says. "I have people in wheelchairs in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, just to get that movement."

The demand has grown as word spread. "Once we started getting the word out, we found that a lot of people are looking for these services, and the demand is there," Kostjuk says. "There are just no solutions. Now that people are starting to know what we're doing, we're getting a lot more inquiries."

Brian Malcomson, co-chair of health issues at the Council on Aging of Ottawa, sees the broader context. "Social isolation is increasingly recognized as a major issue for everyone, but seniors more because they're less inclined to be hooked into social things younger people would be doing," he says. Programs that encourage movement and connection for older people are essential in an aging Canada.

But what matters most to Pettigrew is what happens onstage. At Devotion's year-end show, the finale featured everyone together—not separated by ability. "In the first 30 seconds, we have four wheelchairs and four people dancing around," she says. During rehearsal, the dancers in wheelchairs said how amazing it felt, how they finally felt like they were part of something.

"That's why I keep going," Pettigrew says. When her illness weighs on her, the first thing she does is get to the studio. The day her mom died, she was dancing. Now, teaching low-mobility classes helps her rehabilitate herself and gives her students a safe space to talk about things they can't discuss with family or friends. In this tight-knit community, they understand.

She created the program because she needed it. But in doing so, she gave it to everyone else too.