How an Ottawa Dancer Found Freedom in Motion, Wheelchair and All

On a particularly hot summer day in 1986, a fan in six-year-old Julie Pettigrew's bedroom short-circuited. She was having dinner across the street at her grandparents' house when the fan caught fire, lit up her bedding, and engulfed her West Ottawa home.

Though her family didn't lose the place entirely, her dance shoes, costumes, pictures, and batons — items she'd been collecting since age three — were gone. And because it was summer holidays, she couldn't go to the studio to distract herself.

"I just wanted September to come. I wanted dance classes to start back up again," she says.

For Pettigrew, dance was what kept her going that summer and beyond, as she experienced mobility issues that would later leave her wheelchair-bound. "Being a kid, I couldn't keep up. I was very frustrated with myself, but having dance in my life — the problems went away the moment I was doing it," she says.

Pettigrew is diagnosed with Graves' disease and hypermobility. Graves' is an autoimmune disease where the body makes excess thyroid hormone, resulting in trembling and muscle weakness. Hypermobility is a common condition allowing people to stretch joints further than normal, which in severe cases causes joint pain, injuries, and fatigue.

When Pettigrew couldn't dance like she used to because of these diagnoses, she didn't give up — she created her own path. In 2019, when dance-studio director Zach Kostjuk asked her to join his new venture in Kanata, Devotion Dance Company, Pettigrew launched a low-mobility dance program. She became co-director and made it her mission to build something that didn't exist in Ottawa: a structured, curriculum-based program for dancers in wheelchairs that offers opportunities to compete.

"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 said. "There are just no solutions. Now that we have it, people are finding us."

The program is the only one in Ottawa to offer structured, rather than freestyle, classes with curriculums and syllabuses. Kostjuk and Pettigrew say the program is taking off, though more awareness about low-mobility dancers is necessary. Many people don't realize that adaptive dance — dance for people of all mobility levels — exists at all, let alone that it can be competitive and rigorous.

Pettigrew's own journey mirrors her students' experiences: resilience in the face of physical limitation, creativity in problem-solving, and the refusal to accept that disability means sitting on the sidelines. For her, and the dancers she teaches, the studio floor is where life happens — where bodies that the world might write off as limited become instruments of expression, power, and joy.