Thinking About Dance Class

We're having a swift lunch break; then we will return to talk about teaching and teaching practice. I'm exhausted (that's not new), but I did work harder than I had intended this morning. I was all about taking it easy. Recover a little from PT and dance yesterday. You know. Ease my way into digesting last night's fantastic Indian.

But then class took over. I am enjoying the rush of wheelchairs and of bodies. Even though there are many kinds of bodies on the floor, I find my eyes drawn irresistibly to the wheels. What other people do with their chairs fascinates me. And some people do some dang crazy things. Now, I have been known to do a crazy thing or two, but I work safely within the parameters of my chair and my body. And even though I take risks every day, I prefer not to hit the floor with my unprotected body. Seriously. I am not going to either fall out backwards (unless it's planned -- with a flip return, for example) or dive forwards onto my knees. Pain rules my sense of adventure: I am too old for unnecessary hurt --and as a working dancer, I don't have the luxury of recovery time. We return to rehearsing in earnest on Tuesday. That said, the spirit of this intensive seems so open and willing. People ARE trying risky things because, I think, we have made safe and interesting space. Swings and roundabouts.

One area of difficulty: TAB's using wheelchairs. I am not sure how I feel about this or how to respond to this important part of the dance experience.

I think you dancer TABs need to know how wheelchairs work, but you also need to know that just cuz you can ride around in a wheelchair doesn't mean you REALLY know wheelchair movement. And, moreover, your abilities might endanger you.

Here's what I mean. You can get a sense of how long it takes to turn in a chair, what it feels like to PUSH a chair, how to stroke, wheelie, etc. But you don't know what it means to actually live in a chair and feel it melded to you as an extension of your body or, especially, what it means to actively use the chair instead of feeling it as a prop. And this means you won't be able to move in it as we do. You won't feel comfortable in it in the same way that we do; you don't even see the texture and surfacing of the floor the same way. Our relationships to the space are different. We think about and experience marley as responsive, fast, fat, slow. And, because we can be screwed by something as invisible as a slightly sloping stage, we actually know which studios or dance spaces have which kind of floor.

We live this kind of movement as part of our everyday locomotion. Oh yes, you will get tired, because you don't use those muscles a lot. You don't know HOW to push and how to stabilise etc, but it isn't the same kind of tiredness, by any means. You don't know what it means to work within the limits of a disabled body. It is not the same thing to say, well, every body has limits, and that every dancer works with pain. Yes. This is true, but it is also different.

You may be an expert dancer, but in a chair.... you are a beginner. That's important to remember. Not only do you not know your own strength or how to moderate your actions with regard to the chair, you also do not know where the tipping points are. You might put weight in the wrong place for a given chair.Your center of balance, the point at which you are grounded, is different. You will initiate movement from a different place, feel your core respond differently. You, because you will inevitably use your legs to stabilise when the chair is probably designed around someone who is using other muscles, risk tipping the chair -- forwards. And then there's backwards. Yes, you can tip powerchairs. You can certainly tip manuals. We make it look easy, as easy as you make your work look. But remember how hard the things you do actually are? It's the same on our side of the divide.