Starting this morning and continuing until Saturday evening, the Start with the Arts Family Festival is holding performances and kids workshops in Columbus Circle, in front of Union Station. VSA Arts, which is throwing the celebration, is an organization dedicated to making a place where people with disabilities can participate in and enjoy the visual and performing arts.

As part of the festival, Lisa Bufano and Sonsheree Giles of AXIS Dance Company will perform a work in progress called One Breath is an Ocean for a Wooden Heart today at 4 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. What makes this work so special is something that originally began as a tragedy in Bufano’s life.

A competitive gymnast as a child and a dancer in college, Bufano had both of her feet and her fingers amputated when she was 21 years old because of a bacteria infection. Since then, much of her work in modern dance has focused on the relationships between disabled and non-disabled people.

Bufano usually dances with the help of prosthetics, but One Breath is more of an unusual modern dance duet. The disabled dancer (Bufano) and the able-bodied dancer (Giles) will wear 28’’ wooden stilts secured to their arms and legs. And these are not just any stilts — they are queen-Anne style table legs which allow the dancers to transform themselves into a wide range of imagery, including furniture, magical toys, insects, gazelles, and birds.

Photo courtesy: VSA Arts

It is compelling that Bufano seeks to put the dancers on a level playing field with the use of stilts. Though one is disabled and one is not, the use of stilts equalizes their abilities.

When asked about the work this week, Bufano reflected on the original concept for the work and the images that come up in the choreography. The nature of the dancing is difficult to envision, but at the very least, the imagery the dancers create with the stilts should be interesting.

“We spent a lot of time writing and thinking about concept when we created One Breath is an Ocean for a Wooden Heart,” Bufano said. “The beach and the ocean were reoccurring images. We also spent some time thinking about the characters that we are on the wooden stilts. It feels like we are mythological creatures, that we are connecting an imagined world and a real world -- similar to the way beach is a connection between land and water.”

The Start with the Arts Festival continues tomorrow, concluding with the 2 p.m. performance of One Breath. See the full schedule of events, all of which are free and open to the public, but note some workshops have limited space.