I keep editing it because I can't find the right version for it yet. It speaks to me so deeply, and not even this version of it is right.Post includes a small black and white and sepia image of me sitting in my chair. I am leaning forward with my head down with my arms extended so that they make the shape of a birdwing.
The picture was taken a while ago -- shortly after I started dancing and shortly after I saw the Urban Bush Women and the Alvin Ailey Company perform in New York -- Wizard was photographing me across the street in the parking lot of a large apartment complex. As you can see, the line is pretty much right, except for the fingers: I could not get them to relax into a neutral line. But there you are. Or there I am. Dropped into the birdshape.
I've been wanting to write about the joy of dancing, the beauty of partnering wild, the thrill of partnering when you know that both you and your partner can do anything. But, for a while now, I have been contemplating, worrying, chewing on the question of who I am as a dancer. Having been off for so long, I am a little worried about who I am and who I might be as a dancer.
There are a number of ways that I think able-bodied dancers know who they are as dancers. If they've been at it a while -- and for the professionals I see and work with, a "while" can be anything from childhood to college -- they have training, technique, and a vocabulary that comes with them. They've been trained as modern dancers, ballet, tap, jazz dancers (or whatever). One of the ways they know who they are is tradition; they know who they are in the context of the traditions they've been trained in.
Dancers aren't just bodies; we are people whose brains and tastes add as much to our movement vocabulary as our abilities. Over time, this experience builds and builds; my non-disabled colleagues are present in their bodies and their dance. They come to know themselves, their possibilities, and their habits. They have a reservoir to draw on -- their history, their previous work, their training, the culture of their dance city (this adds more than you would think... two years ago was the SF year of the finger flap. Almost every performance piece I saw had one ... NYC didn't care so much for it. Now, SF, too has moved on).
I don't really have a tradition in the conventional sense. I have taken ballet lessons, but I am not a ballet dancer. I have taken modern dance classes, but I am not a conventional modern dancer. Most of my work has been done in physically integrated dance -- and if PID offers one a convention, it is training in the conditions and potential of one's own body (including assistive equipment) and the bodies of the other dancers. Given this context, you can imagine that it was a shock and pleasant surprise to find my body responding to a dance line associated with a racially identified form of dance.
I drop into that bird position, and I feel at home. I drop into that bird position, and my body feels as if it has been there for centuries; it takes on the history -- movement and political -- of all that I am and all that I can be seen to be. When I drop into that bird position, I feel safe, secure, and strong. I love the way it blends an African dance shape with a wheelchair. I love the contradictions it seems to imply. That's why I haven't updated my site. That picture reminds me of who I am as a dancer. It invites me to become who I might be as a dancer.
And when I look at it, I want to begin to dance. I will be going back to work soon -- I'm making more progress every week. But more on that one later.
While I used to read ballet books and learn everything while I could, I was limited in what I could do past age 10 until college. But I loved picking up again with adult dancers, some of whom were brand new to dance. I loved the idea and the experience that one could begin anytime and without previous experience--we had people in their 50s starting, and even one grandmother who was 70. It's not the tradition that makes me love it, it's the doing it and watching it that makes me avid about it.
ReplyDeleteI've only been reading your site for a short time, and I mostly read it in my RSS feeder, but I so love that photo of you that I visit sometimes just to see it. I love the tension in it, the seeming pause between flight and not-flight. It's just so very alive.
ReplyDeletemmm, mostly read by RSS feed but love the photo. Strength, grace and soaring.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this beautiful, beautiful post.
ReplyDeleteI was trained in ballet and I am now a folk dancer. I am now trying to figure out how to integrate my crutches into my folk dancing so I can do more of it as my disease progresses instead of less of it. Fortunately for me, crutchwise, the dances of my ethnic heritage involve mainly let and feet moves with stiff arms or arms simply holding hands.
Unfortunately for me, too, as I progress. I will have to find something else I can identify with. I hope I can find something like you have -- at least a compelling image such as this one.