Inspiration

In my line of work, I hear the "inspiration" word a lot. And I've been pretty harsh about the way it is used around disabled people (here, here, here and here, for example). So, I was pretty surprised to find myself pondering a new (to me, at least) aspect of this nasty little word.

Usually, the inspirational assault occurs after a performance (when I feel most vulnerable and most exposed); it's from an audience member. To be sure, some of them are doing the tears running down their faces, "it's so inspiring; YOU're so inspiring" stuff (yawwwnnnnn). But I have also learned to hear in this insistent inspirational language a different need being articulated.

For some people, inspiration language seems to be a way of asking for an accounting. That I hear it being asked of all kinds of artists in so many different places -- radio interviews, newspaper interviews, painters, poets, writers -- means that I, albeit consciously, have learned to separate my bitter little reflexes out from the larger picture. Of course, it is different. Of course, there's always that disability thing underneath (when they direct it to us, the disabled dancers -- more on that later), but there's also a desire for a kind of accounting, some kind of explanation. For some interpretation that brings the art back within the speaker's purview.

Here's what I mean. When West Coast performs, it is out of this world. Dance -- all good dance -- can be like that. Art can move you from your seat into an inexplicit nowhere, a place where all things seem possible, a place where, for the minutes of a performance, your perspective shifts to somewhere where the ground you knew is no longer as firm or enduring. When the lights go out for the last time and the stamping and cheering is over, the dancers and any choreographers present are brought on stage. It's Q and A time: this is the audience's chance to get up close and personal with what they've seen. And believe me, people do want to get up close and personal. This is their chance to touch the ephemeral, to have it explained, to stabilize the intangible, and to make it theirs.

In my mind, questions about meaning are replaced (at least by the quasi-sophisticated audience members) with questions about inspiration. It is as if knowing the origins, the motivations, the thinkings will help the speakers orient themselves towards meaning. It will help the speakers understand something that bowled them over. Seeking to understand inspiration is a way of taming art.

So, when choreographers are asked what inspired them, they have a choice. They can go for talking about the work and about how they do it -- many choreographers are not terribly good at this btw and, vice versa, those that are aren't always the best choreographers. But they can also choose whether to answer what to me is an ever present subtext: how did you come to make that beautiful thing out of those bodies?

Most of our choreographers have understood the pointedness of these and other such questions, and they have answered in a variety of ways. Mostly, though, they stress how much opportunity and potential we have; they talk about the learning curve they have experienced -- the challenges, difficulties, and rewards. Our choreographers make good work. Some of that "goodness" comes from our unique physicalities as both disabled and non-disabled dancers; some of it is from their original approaches to movement.

Sadly, but perhaps accurately, I am not often in a place where I can hear anything other than ignorance and triteness (if that is a word) when inspirational language is thrown at our disabled dancers. Literally, of course, how we do much of what we do is a technical question. But somehow, when I am asked and when I give a technical answer, I get the feeling that I sidestepped the question (sidestep? sidepush? can't be side rolled...). The asker seems to need a deeper kind of accounting, one that concerns not so much the work but his/her reckoning with disability and disability assumptions. They need to know how it is possible for disabled people (who don't actually register as "people -people") to do what we do. Mechanics aside, that seems to be the question. Tell me how it is that you people do what you do when I have always believed/known/experienced ....

In the outside world, inspiration is harmless; it seems to be about motivation, about reasoning, and about propelling a person forwards to new actions, ideas, and achievements. Here, however, inspiration is code for stereotypes and prejudice. It is less about moving from one place than the place in which/at which the so-called inspired person is stuck; it is about the things that hold us in place.