“Making the case for a serious art form for dancers who use wheelchairs meant a lot of advocacy. … ‘The first 10 years we spent just trying to convince people in the bigger dance world, the funding world, that what we were doing wasn’t ‘just therapy,” [said AXIS co-founder Judith Smith]. ‘We really wanted to be taken seriously as a dance company.’ … Today, AXIS’s work is fairly well known within the field of contemporary dance. It is less visible, however, to the general public for many reasons.”