After You've Been To The Show: Writing The Dance

After you've been to the show, you may feel a whole host of emotion -- some of which may be off balancing, some of which may be sheer utter joy.  You may feel surprise, shock, anger; you may have cried and/or laughed.  I've certainly had all of these feelings at dance performances.  The question is what happens next.  You may want to write about what you've seen; you may have to write about what you've seen -- compulsion or, perhaps, employment.  Allow me to offer some biased tips.

•  I like to think about dance writing as a second performance -- a verbal interpretation of movement you have just seen.  You, the writer, become a performer.  How would you like your work to be received?
  
• Decide what kind of piece it is going to be in advance.  That way, you will ramble less, and your audience won't feel tossed around by you blathering on.  You might want to write a reaction piece -- something that describes how you felt, what you were thinking, how you responded to what you saw.  You might be tasked with writing a more formal review piece -- something that future audiences, other professionals in the community and/or funders will read.  There are an infinite number of ways to write about what you've seen.  Don't just blurt.  Make some conscious decisions about what kind of piece this will be and write for your intended audience.
  
• The previous paragraph is good advice for any piece of writing, but it is particularly important when writing about physical integrated dance.  So much writing in the contemporary media relies on three things: cliches about disabled people, cliched word play about disabled people, and cliches about the non-disabled world.  Make your writing stand out!  Just don't go there.  Write honestly and open-mindedly about what you saw.  Tell your reader what you liked and didn't like and why.
  
  s.e. smith provides you with a guide for language about disability here.  The world doesn't need another piece of writing about overcoming disability, inspiration, disability not letting someone hold them back, wheels rolling.  Read this piece and learn how to make your writing different.
  
• Remember, too, that you have just seen a piece of physically integrated dance.  It's an unusual form of contemporary dance that depends on the equal collaboration of disabled and non-disabled dancers.  I've written about physically integrated dance as a genre in a variety of places on this blog.  Some of my favourite posts are here, here, and here.  Here's a quote from that last post: "As an art form, physically integrated dance takes trained dancers -- disabled and non -- and launches them on a collaboration of bodies. ....   It's the mutuality between disabled and non and the potential for an accepting, kinesthetic effect on the audience that together define physically integrated dance."
  
• It is fine for you to talk about the bodies and equipment of the dancers; you can talk about strength, grace, power, communicative potential, kind of wheelchair -- manual or power, crutch, cane, prosthetic and give a neutral description: carbon fiber, curved prosthetic; amputee; crutch  or wheelchair user; light-weight manual chair; strong arms; flexible spine, etc.  It is not fine for you to be talking judgmentally about dancers' bodies.  You can also talk about certain moves and the qualities of those moves: speed, height or distance of a jump, lyricism, grace, precision, etc.
  
  You do not have the right to judge anyone as too large, too small, too fat, too thin, too disabled, not disabled enough. ...  Dancers put themselves and their bodies out there to do a particular kind of work.  You are there to see and respond to that work -- not their embodiment and not their personhood.
  

Dance writing and dance criticism are complex and changing fields.  Here are some very recent links to get you started on some threads of the current conversation.

The Dance JOT: journal of outlying thoughts on dance   -- a free online quarterly journal of writing on dance.

http://www.theballetbag.com/2011/11/01/the-future-of-dance-criticism/ --  on the future of dance criticism and its relevance.

http://danceintuit.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/dance-critics-speak-up-in-dance-magazine/ -- dance critics dig in.

http://www.dance-enthusiast.com/barefootnotes/view/35/ -- why words matter.

Becoming A Subject

One of the things about the Internet is its ability to turn your life perspective on its head.  If you read my blog (and, well, you are probably doing that right now), you will know me as, I hope, a powerful independent woman -- hopefully, I come across as mouthy, not afraid to speak the truth, smart, sassy ... you get the picture.

Like many site owners, I make available an email address for you to contact me and, like many site owners, I often trace back referring sites for traffic.  But finding out who is reading your site is something of a mixed blessing.  Particularly when the contact is coming from academia.

Sometimes, I get emails from people who ask if it is OK to use my work.  It is.  As long as you give credit.  Sometimes, it's a note from someone saying that a particular post was helpful to them in a given assignment.  These kinds of notes lift my spirit.  Two things sink my heart: requests for interviews and traffic from course sites.

I no longer agree to do interviews for students who wish to make me and my life part of their term papers.   I don't answer questions any more, either.  You can use my material -- I can't even track whether or not you cite me appropriately, but I will follow up if I find that you haven't -- but you are not getting more than anything that is here.  No, not even if you are a PhD student and my life and work are somehow "critical" to your thesis.   I'm done.  And, yes, I'm slightly angry and resentful about how few of you do your homework, your preparation: reading about disability, disability arts and culture, the disability rights movement, dance, and disabled performers.  I know these academic fields; I know what's out there; I know many of the people who've written it.  Your lack of preparation does not make me feel inclined to trust myself to you -- no matter how ardent your appeal.  NB: that's true for those of you who want to make documentaries, too.

Then, there's course sites.  Every time I see a referral from Blackboard or some other educational course site, I go back and reread the post that has become part of someone else's lesson plan.  I wonder what they are doing with it.  What are people saying?  How does the discussion go?  Would I be horrified?  Yes, probably.  I think about how I would teach the post -- what I would combine it with, what points I would see as critical, how I would facilitate discussion.  Risks I would take.  Language and ideas that I would consider acceptable/offensive.  What I would do about stuff that came up.  I mull it over; hope for the best; close my eyes and try to forget.

Showing up in academia is different from finding that someone has linked to a post or two because the internet links only to your material.  You can find out what someone thinks of your site; you can read the comments.  Sometimes, too, you find personalized stuff about you (or your internet persona).  But that is different.  The internet is a sprawling mess of actions and reactions.  Even when the post is locked, I am happy to find that my work has left my site and become part of a conversation somewhere.

By contrast, academia turns you (or your persona) into a project for study.  It's a difference of purpose.  A difference of focus.  It's not quite a medicalization of a disabled body -- not all academic gazes are medical.  But it does include that same kind of power dynamic.  There's no way to know who is staring.  And how.  There's no way to know what meaning or what kind of value is being read into your life.  You become something someone teaches and other people learn.  You are nothing more than a topic, a passing reference in someone else's education.

And because the world of disability rights is still so new to academia, I fear that I and my blog often land in a hostile environment.  Strange: what the Internet giveth, it also taketh away.

Who Needs It? Label: People Suck

So, I'm sitting alone in the airport -- a small town airport.  I've gone through security a little ahead of my friends, and I am waiting by the window.  A woman approaches me.  "There's a dollar over there.  Is it yours?"  I look.  Sure enough, there's a dollar on a seat two rows over.  I shake my head.  Then, it begins.

The woman asks if I would like the dollar.  I say no.  "No," she tells me.  "Take the dollar.  You can have it."  I respond: "It's yours; you saw it."  "I'm giving it to you...."  At this point, I get a little, well, pissy.  I make it perfectly clear that I don't want to take the dollar.  It is a strange situation after all.  I didn't see the dollar.  It's not my dollar.  But the scene is sadly familiar.  It's like this one from 2008:

Starbucks. Me drinking bad coffee and reading my email. A bright and beautiful teen picks up her coffee. School ended early today; she's with her friends, enjoying the freedom. She fumbles her purse, the change, and the drink. 10c falls on the floor at my feet. I turn to see what the noise is. And just catch her... "Please, keep it. I don't need it." I look at her. She has her whole future in front of her; she thinks she's doing me a favour. I realize how I must seem. There's absolutely nothing to say. Where would I even start? I leave the money on the floor, pack up my computer, and leave.

Just as that frisson of recognition happens, the woman turns to me with that sainted pious look on her face.  "I'll take it," she says, "and I promise to give it to the next person who needs it."

That's the story.  I'm in my wheelchair; I must need the dollar.  This despite the fact that I am in an airport and am travelling (probably don't need the dollar any more than anyone else who just paid for a plane ticket).  Despite the fact that I am carrying a cup of coffee that I just bought (for a dollar).  Despite the fact that, in my mind's eye at least, I look as in need as she does (i.e, like any other passenger).  Yes, it's the disability thing.  I'm needy, because I am disabled.

When my friends come over, the situation shifts -- sharply.  I go from being an object of forced charity to being a human being.  She chats with my friends about the weather and gestures towards me, inclusively, as she talks.  I glower.  The atmosphere dissolves.

Except.  But.

I am furious still with the predatory nature of charity.  So overwhelming, it seems, is the urge to do good that the people who do it cannot see the humanity of those they are trying to help.

Watching Disabled People Dance

So, you are on your way to your first physically integrated performance, but you don't know what to expect or how to think about what you might see.  Allow me, if you will, to offer a somewhat biased guide.

• Relax.  You've done most of your part part by showing up.  Sit back and let the performers do theirs.  There's an unwritten contract in performance.  Both parties have to do their part to make the performance successful.
  
  In buying the ticket, you promise to show up, turn off your cellphone, put away your camera, open your mind and watch.  The performers, in offering a concert, promise to show their best work -- work that transcends the ordinary, to honour your intelligence and spirit, to perform and not just execute.
• Don't worry about meaning.  Even if the dance follows a story line, you can create your own meaning.  In fact, you are pretty much expected to create your own meaning.  It's like reading a poem or a book.  Or even seeing a film.  It's personal.  To you.
  
  And related to that, don't worry about missing anything.  There's a lot happening on stage.  You can't see it all.  Your eye will be drawn to some things and not others.  That's OK.  That's part of how you create your meaning.  That's part of performance.
• On stage.  You don't have to have a long background in dance to appreciate what's happening on stage.  You can enjoy the shapes, lines, turns, jumps, lifts, emotion, light, colour ... whatever ... without having to name it or know, technically, how it was composed.

• The performers with and without disabilities are expecting you to look at them.  It's not staring, if you watch carefully.  But don't try and figure out who is or isn't disabled and what their disabilities are.  This is not a medical show; it's an art performance.

• All the performers, disabled and non, retain their personhood, no matter what equipment they use or don't use.  Wheelchair users don't become chairs; non-disabled dancers aren't just bodies.  But don't assume that the work is about the dancers and their lives and bodies, unless it is explicitly framed as such.  The work is just that work.  A certain amount of effort has gone into creating a thing for you to see -- it's not a reflection of reality.  Nor is it a projection of your fears and expectations.
  
• Speaking of your fears and expectations.  Leave them at the door as best you can.  That's a good way to see *any* work of art, but it is especially important when seeing work that includes disabled artists.  There is so much societal prejudice around disability that leaving that behind will open you up to a new understanding of the world.
  
• It is absolutely your right to like or not to like what you see.  I hope you will like it for reasons more powerful than your belief that those poor disabled people are inspiring and that it is so nice that those other dancers help them.  I hope you will dislike it because the choreography, staging, presentation or whatever did not appeal to you.  And I hope you will have the opportunity to express both your likes and dislikes to the performers.  We welcome feedback that engages with our work.  We don't need to hear your commentary on our bodies, etc.  Questions about our personal lives ...  assumptions, etc.
  
• Physically integrated dance is a powerful form of contemporary dance.  Let us do our job: we will take you on a journey to new and unexpected places.

Staying Engaged

Not only do I not understand her, I no longer have any idea about how to see where she starts her world.

Part of the gap comes from differences of perspective. We disagree about money, duty, race, gender, sexuality, class, expectations and obligations, disability, religion, politics, education, wellness, family and just about anything else you could name. I do not see how she can hold any of the positions she holds either per se or in tandem with each other. We appear not to value any of the same things in the same way, and while there are several people in my life about whom I could say the same thing, our differences here are divisive; there's no crossing these gaps.

So instead of looking at everything she's doing wrong and everything that I dislike about her, I'm going to look at me and what I've contributed to the mess.  I have chosen, inconsistently, to do a mix of things that both in and of themselves simultaneously exacerbate and improve the situation. And then there's when and how I choose to deploy them.

Let's take the question of education -- because we fight about that one a lot.  We get tied up if we start arguing who has more of it and at what cost -- financially and personally.  Trying to be right is a pointless endeavour.  We might be better off trying address the things that lurk behind the question of college degrees: obligation and responsibility. 

Factually speaking, nothing I learned at college is of practicable use to anyone. Sharing what I learned or even what I was doing was always more alienating and distancing, so I learned that the facts of my subject knowledge never were the coin-in-trade. But being in a college environment exposed me to stuff I didn't know people knew. About how to be in the world. About how the world works. About voting, politics, credit, money, life-planning, self-presentation ... Decision-making.

I was shocked to find these were things people made choices about -- job offer? take it or leave it.  The complexities of the dress codes -- I knew there were codes; I just didn't understand them so fully.  Career, as opposed to work? Buy a house? Save? How? Budget?  I had no idea.  And where I came from, people didn't ever talk about it.  You either knew (mysteriously), and life worked out all right.  Or you tried hard, and life went wrong anyway.  Or some things worked without trying; some things failed despite trying.

It was that uncertainty that got to me.  The not knowing why and not knowing how or if.

College didn't teach me those facts, but it did -- or at least the people I encountered -- did show me that I might need to know stuff like this.  I learned how to access this knowledge and how to interpret it.  And that is the biggest difference between our notions of education.  It's not the weight of the facts that I learned.  It's the stuff I learned from realizing that other people had choices and options that I wasn't even aware of.  It's the stuff I learned from copying people.  From imitating those who looked successful.

So, I don't talk about my education; I share what I know of life-skills.  Having them has changed my life; I am less scared about the world.  I no longer believe that the rug will be pulled from underneath me at any moment.  And when the forces of evil yank on my rug, I have the skills and the support to fight back successfully.  How to share is the challenge. The best way would be to do it, little by little. By being with. By talking a little as things came up. By modeling and talking about what I do. By being human with each other.  But that would require contact.  And trust.

And that we don't have.

Architecting Your Space As An Act Of Love

Love your body!   This post is, I hope, part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival

Love your body.  For a moment, though, I want to disagree with the terms of the request/engagement.  To me, the question is not so much how can I love my particular body -- though, of course, I have work to do here -- but what can I do in the world such that I am not under the kinds of pressure that make calls to love my body so necessary.

In other words, I want to push back on the weighty work of always having to do self-care.  Self-love.  I do need to look down and love my physicality.  I do need to figure out a way to love my body.

I am angry though.  The call to love my body has awakened in me a deep slow anger.  I am so tired of the work that we have to do to love our bodies and ourselves.  It is necessary work; it is unending work.  But today, I question why we have to do it.  Why is it that I/we have to do the work?  And do we have to do it alone?

I don't want to write another post about loving the difference that is my body.  I don't want to write another post about disability as physical variation and as such a neutral part of humanity.  I don't want to write another post about the joys of impairment and the pleasures of disabled physicality, sexuality and life.  Granted, there aren't yet enough of these posts.  Please.  Write and read them wherever you can.  Today, however, I cannot put these words on my screen.  I am exhausted by this kind of project of self work.

We.  Are.  Here.  Still.  Again.  Trying to figure out how to love our bodies.  How to resist what the world does to us.  How can we love ourselves?  So this time, I want to think differently about how we love.

Public culture and public space are often so difficult for people with disabilities.  On some days, just leaving the house can expose us to hostile stares, stupid comments, inaccessible architecture, inaccessible public transport.... I don't have to go on.  On days like these, it can seem that self love is in tension with the world.  You can do the work at home, with your friends, by yourself.  You can look deep into yourself and gently draw out the threads of your personhood.  You can softly tie them, weave them, knit them.  You can tangle up your of strands humanity into a compassionate, open loving human being.  You can do the work.  You have to.  I have to.  We have to.

And that might be the most important part of loving your body.  We have to.  We.  I/We/You have to find, create engage community.  Perhaps that's just one person, perhaps it's even ten.  No matter what the number, I'm beginning to think that love is not a lonely act.  It is to be shared.  In public and private.  Perhaps your community are your friends.  Perhaps not.  But loving your body is learned, nurtured, and developed in the trust and love of community.

If you go out on the street, go in community.  And that doesn't mean you have to go with someone in person.  You can go with the sense of your community radiating from your mind.  Lean into the wind with your community behind, beside and ahead of you.  From there, shape the space.  Your space.   You probably can't change the accessibility of the world; you alone might be able to change an individual's mind, but there are a hell of a lot of individuals out there.  It's a daunting job.  Trying to do that leads to burnout.

You in community can create a little bubble of open, loving and loved safety.  You won't have to figure out how to love your body alone.  You will.  You are loved.

Transition Time

There's a moment in every creative process where the thing is "done enough."  The choreographer steps away and hands the piece over to the dancers.  It will be our job, from that moment on, to take care of the work -- to develop, nurture and explore its revelations.

This is a huge responsibility.

The piece is not finished; it's just that the formal creative process has come to an end.  The choreographer may make tweaks later -- months, sometimes a year later.  The rehearsal director will help us stay tight and focused with all of the detail.  We will perform and rehearse the piece many, many times.  It's ours now.

As a work transitions from creation and rehearsal to performance, it undergoes a significant transformation.  In our case, we roll down the elevator from the studio into the theater.  We feel the difference immediately.  Somehow, the air is different; the atmosphere more formal, more serious, more ... hushed.  We fill the space up with our laughter and shouts; we dump our stuff on the front row, wheel over the little mats with the wheelchair accessible symbol on them and leap onto the stage marley.  As we warm up, lights go on and off; people run around with mics and clipboards.  There's a good deal of organizing and then everyone is ready.  We are for the first time about to experience the lighting design.

During tech week, we will go over the piece again and again.  The scrim will be installed; the lights set and focused.  The stage crew will figure out what needs to go where, when, and who will move it.  The sound volumes will be set and the light and sound cues written.  Everyone will practise running it.  Sometimes, we will go full out; sometimes, we will do a cue-to-cue.

We will set our stuff up backstage -- figure out who changes where, where the lights will be, the heater (it's really cold in this particular theater).  We will reacquaint ourselves with the floor -- this one has some unusual rolling spots -- and we will practice taking account of the floor.  We will space -- again and again -- until we know by muscle memory how much force it takes, how many pushes, where people will be in order to not crash into each other, keep the sightlines and maximize the movement.

And despite all this rehearsing, we won't know how things actually will be until we've done the piece.  Until an audience has seen it.  Until *we've* seen, heard, and felt an audience as we perform it.  (Yes, we can tell when you are utterly focused and when you are bored/distracted/not with us.)  I won't know how I feel about this piece until the first run is over, and I've had a couple of days to live with what happened.

It's a huge responsibility to take this thing and to offer it to you.

Mobility, Movement, And The Bind Of A Chair

In a recent talkback, someone familiar with the company commented that they had never seen the disabled dancers move so much.

That compliment caught my attention.

The piece in question is very different from anything else in our rep. We break a sweat, yes.  But I am not racing around, pulling extreme wheelchair moves.  I'm not exactly grounded, but I am dancing in the much more spatially limited context of my new props.  So, the first thing that caught my ear was my default assumption that movement -- the moving of any part of my body -- was sort of bound up with mobility -- my ability to traverse space both while moving parts of my body other than those parts necessary to push my chair and/or simply moving my chair.  Movement and mobility are not necessarily the same.  You'd think that I might have figured that out a while ago.  But apparently not.

As dancers, we are always seeking new movement.  We train in different sets of movements and create new vocabularies of movement as we work in different settings, with different people, on different pieces.  So, of course, working with props enables us to create new movement vocabularies.  That's exactly the point.  Thinking as a dancer, though, confused me.  For a moment, I had forgotten that I was a disabled dancer and that for us things often have second and third layers of meaning that come along with people's understandings of disability.

But even landing on this nuance didn't really help me understand what the commenter was seeing.  What drew their attention so much, what compelled them so much that they spoke out?

Talking with another dancer, a best guess was that the piece has us working out of our wheelchairs for most of the time.  Just being out of a chair renders more of our flesh bodies visible to the audience.  And, of course, as dancers, we are using those bodies fully.  The commenter was simply responding to seeing new lines, new shapes, new movement vocabulary as we worked outside our chairs.

That's a neutral guess.  But I wonder about the disability value of this.  What do people see when they see us dancing in chairs?  Do they think that the chairs compensate for our legs and therewith unintentionally erase our legs?  Do they have images of us as flexible flesh upper bodies and rigid rubber and metal lower bodies?  (Laurel's been really helpful in thinking about this one: here, for example.)  Thus, when the commenter saw us moving around outside our wheelchairs, they saw, perhaps for the first time in their conscious mind, the full potential of our flesh bodies.

I'm really sensitive on this point.  Is it possible that in other pieces, our hybrid metal and flesh bodies have become props?  When the choreography is weak, the dance tends to feature a lot of moments when the non-disabled dancers jump on us, use our bodies and chairs as furniture, points of leverage that they can use to do something fantastic and eye catching.  Meanwhile, we sit there.  When the choreography is strong, we get to dance into moments of shared fantasticness -- moves where we are as active as they are.  When I heard the commenter speak, I began to review other works that they might have seen.  Have I felt like a prop?  Do I look like one?

As I finish my review of five years of rep, I find myself overcome with a little cynicism.  I'm betting that there's some wheelchair-boundedness going on here.  If you start with the idea that because we are strapped in to our chairs (necessary to do the cartwheels and rolls and things that we do), we are bound to our chairs in a societally conventional wheelchair bound kind of way, it makes sense to think of us moving more now that we are moving with props (link to some of my posts on wheelchair-bound).  No, we are not flying around stage, but we are liberated from those nasty binding little wheelchair things.  And now, suddenly, we are free.  You can see our full fleshly bodies at work.

The post-show talkbacks are really difficult for me to be in.  But you can be sure that I am listening.  Attentively.  I learn a lot from you about what I do.

Staging Beauty

You can tell a new show with a new piece is close: I'm thinking about what people will think.  How will it go over?  What will people think!!

Enjoying the beauty of the movement is one of the most accessible ways to appreciate a performance.  As different as we all may be, we all have some sense of beauty, and a dance performance is likely to feed and challenge that sense.  Even if you don't know much about dance, can't figure out what it means, and/or don't know why you like it, the bodies you see can touch you deep down.  I remember going to my first dance performance and just crying (silently) throughout the whole thing.  I had no idea why.  Most recently, I had the same response to a performance of the Nederlands Dans Theater.  This time, I knew why, but I kept crying nonetheless.

Dancers are regularly in contact with ideas and realizations of beauty.  It's not the repeated applications of makeup that make us beautiful, though; it's the sweat and the work in the studio.  Barely a day goes by without one of us calling the other beautiful as we rehearse.  If we are not noting the beauty in ourselves, we are talking about a beautiful performance we've seen.  Somehow, even though it is a much-used way to respond, calling something beautiful is still a meaningful response.

But beauty also has its underside when it is seen as a necessary precursor for professional success.  I want to thank Eva Yaa Asantewaa at Infinite Body for unknowingly helping me frame my ideas and for connecting me to some important parts of the conversation.

A while ago, there was a large debate in dance and feminist circles about whether it was fair game to comment on a dancer's body.  I didn't write a full post on it, but my observations about how, in dance critic Alistair Macaulay's eyes, arm fat suddenly became connected to disability can be found here.  Dance Magazine has a 2008 piece on the role of the critic (the piece under discussion at Infinite Body), but buried even in that conversation is the question of beauty in a dancer -- and whether a critic can/should comment upon it.  There's a reference to the John Rockwell piece in which he discusses the virtues of technique and beauty -- dancers should be physically beautiful as well as have astounding technique (NYT: subscription only).  There's also another example of Macaulay's obsession with physical perfection with this reference to Lynn Seymour, a ballerina who is euphemistically said to have had weight issues.

In the Dance Magazine essay, the more accepting voice is that of Deborah Jowitt, dance critic for the Village Voice: "Jowitt cites the example of dancers Larry Goldhuber and Alexandra Beller, who use their ample size to their advantage. “It is less useful,” she says, “to talk about a person’s body than about the way he or she uses that body.""  (That said, the DM author, Joseph Carman, seems snide: "ample size" is wholly unnecessary and highly prejudiced.)

The way in which a dancer uses a body is I think a useful way of undermining the discourse of beauty because it challenges how we understand dance and opens our understandings of who can dance.  From this perspective, you can find beauty where someone focused on tradition and so-called perfection will see only flaw.

There's a caveat, though -- one that stems from disability.  Dancing disabled bodies are beautiful.  There's no doubt about that.  Some of that beauty is unexpected; you see something, something that can only happen because of disability.  Some of that might be you -- you never anticipated that you could find beauty in something that tends to occupy such a socially stigmatized place.  Some of that beauty comes from the dancers' themselves.  You can be conventionally attractive and disabled.  Some of that beauty comes from the non-conventional bodies themselves.  If you haven't been to a physically integrated performance -- go.  GO and discover new beauty for yourself.

But beware: don't fall into the trap of thinking that the dancers are overcoming their disabilities.  I'm going to generalize here for a second and tag this as a non-disabled viewer's response.  There is a related response from disabled viewers, but it tends to be a little different.  This overcoming idea (and, for that matter, other stereotypical ideas about disabled bodies) is at the heart of the riskiness of relying on how a dancer uses her body as a guide to beauty.  Too often, I find the response to an integrated performance comes from the viewers' understanding of disability as a limitation.  Then, when they come and see amazing, unexpected, and beautiful stuff, they unload that prejudicial understanding back onto the dancers.  We are overcoming (or inspiring).  It's a well-meant response -- one intended to communicate to the dancers that the viewer has appreciated the performance -- but, as I've talked about all over the place, I end up frustrated every time I hear it.

There's another side.  I don't encounter this often, but when I do it is more shocking to me than the overcoming stuff.  The beauty of integrated dance and disabled bodies can negatively jolt even those with disabilities.  I suppose I think of it as a problem of familiarity and overgeneralization.  You happen to be in a wheelchair with a certain body.  You know what it can do, and you know how your wheelchair works.  But that doesn't mean that it is the same for everyone who uses a chair or who shares your diagnosis.  For these people, I think a moment of beauty that is also shocking registers as hostility towards the dancer -- I know that I have certainly encountered it that way: you can't be ....

So, perhaps, if you are using beauty as a way to interpret art -- any kind of art -- I would recommend transforming that lens into a mirror and asking what does it say about me that I respond to beauty in this way.

Music Dance Music Dance Music Dance Music....

Often at post show talk-backs, we are asked about the relationship between movement and music. Most frequently, people want to know which came first. Then, they want to know if all of the movement is choreographed "to" the music, i.e., is everything we do connected to a particular beat or whether it's felt timing that just "happens" to end when the music does.

I'm really bad at talkbacks... but the Wizard reminds me that understanding this question is important: the answers provide a way of understanding or at least accessing much of what happens on stage.  Opera: libretto vs music?  Musical: words vs music?  Films: audio, visual, script, acting?  All of these ask how the different creative processes that go into complex artistic production relate to each other.

The answers range from "yes, all of the above" to "no, not quite any of the above" and sometimes include "yeah/no .... little bits of some of the above."  Different people work in different ways. Sometimes, a choreographer comes in with music; then, the company has to get permission for the rights.  How the music becomes a part of the work is then entirely dependent on the choreographer.  Sometimes, everything happens to or on an explicit beat, and there is a clear correlation between music and dance -- one might express the other.  Sometimes, not so much -- for either the beat or the interpretation.  I've done pieces where the music is slow and sad and the dancing fast and furious.  I've done stuff with an action for every beat.  And stuff where we have "markers" by which we know whether or not we are late or not.  If we end early, the music fades.  In one piece, I like it when the music fades and there are a couple of seconds of dance in silence.  In yet another, the fading of the music is a cue for the improvised movement to end.  Variations are limitless.

Sometimes, a choreographer gets to collaborate with a composer.  I like this process most of all.  It's absolutely fabulous to watch how choreography and music grow together.  Again, though, how this works depends on everyone involved.  I've been in a process where the music arrived a week before; it was made at a distance from rehearsal video.  It was FABULOUS (but unnerving).  My favourite way is when the composer and choreographer spend time together during rehearsal.  That way, we dancers get to hear and observe a little bit of the collaborative process and learn more of what the choreographer is thinking.  From hearing about what the composer sees, we learn something of what the piece conveys.

I continue to think of the thing as a whole, though -- even though dance can happen in silence.  I need to. It makes no sense for me to be thinking of dancing "to" the music.  I know this isn't a musical performance -- no one has come for the music specifically -- but keeping my ear (and eye) on the piece as a multi-stranded work of art in which music and dance are intertwined.  It's a rich and complex feast.