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