The Best Wheelchair For Dancing

I'm writing this as a response to an email I received.  On the face of it, the question is simple: "what is the best wheelchair for dancing?"  The answer is unbelievably difficult and yet really simple.

Let's just deal with the question first.  And with my emotional reaction.  I hate this question; it pisses me off.  I usually hear it in the following context.  A non-disabled, non-dancer person has just seen a performance, and they immediately want to know: what is the best chair for dancing.  The other context in which this question comes up is a bunch of engineering and design students get together and ask how to design the next generation of wheelchairs.  As wheelchair design really needs to be driven forward in new directions, I feel I should support such work -- particularly if it is led by a person with a disability.  Not everyone is going to be a Ralph Hotchkiss-level genius, but they might be MIT-wizards or simply people, like Christian Bagg, looking to solve a difficult problem.

I love wheelchair technology, but I never really know how to respond to this question graciously.  So, here's my mixed response.

Technically speaking, it's a good and important question.

• Though all wheelchairs move through the world, not all wheelchairs move the same way or can be moved the same way.
• There are wheelchairs for running, tennis, basketball, etc., so there are wheelchairs for dance, right?

I can see how recognizing these facts would lead someone to ask which chairs are best for dance.  But there are so many problematic assumptions behind both question and recognition.  First, the "dance" part.  To ask which chairs are best for dancing is to assume, in part, that certain movements are constitutive of dance and others are not.  Not the case.  A better formulation of the question from this point of view would be:  I want to be able to have a certain set of movements in my dance piece.  What kind of chair setup would make that possible?

This latter formulation comes to a better understanding of the relationship of chair to movement.  If you have a lot of camber, for example, you are likely to be able to turn, using your arms and shoulders, very quickly.  This is a great move; it looks fabulous.  Almost all dancers participating in wheelchair dance sport, choose manual chairs with a lot of camber (and a 5th wheel).  Check out this guy (embedding disabled on the site) and the discussion underneath.  He has fabulous turns, a lot of which are facilitated and supported by  his chair.  But although he can turn, he is pretty limited in what else he can do.  The side stability created by the wide base limits his movement expression and use of his kinetic sphere -- nothing to the side, nothing to the back, just turn, turn, turn (and a neat toestand).  

If you optimize for one thing, you create a tradeoff that negatively affects your ability to do another.  If it is possible to say your dance vocabulary is only going to be these moves, then perhaps you can design a chair specifically to do those moves.  But I don't understand why anyone would want to do that.  What are you going to do if you suddenly get creative and expand your movement possibilities?

A second issue is an implicit assumption: the idea that somehow the "dance" is in the chair.  I cannot state this firmly enough: the dance is not in the chair.  That's obvious, of course, except that it isn't.  In response to seeing West Coast, so many people say stuff like: "I couldn't see the wheelchairs at all."  "The wheelchairs were just wonderful."  And over time, the dancers become conflated with our chairs to such an extent that we are invisible.  This, to me, is the problem with the reporting on Lorna Marsh, a dancer in the United Kingdom: "Sophisticated Wheelchair Helps Dancer Realize Her Dreams" and "Lorna's powered wheelchair was vital in helping her achieve all this. Her old chair wasn't given her the freedom and support she needed, the battery kept going flat and Lorna's family could not afford to replace it, let alone buy a new chair" (from an article entitled Lorna's Story, but which might more accurately be called the story of Lorna's new wheelchair that is not as far as I can tell a special dancing chair, but a chair that is better suited to her needs as an outgoing individual who wants to live her life as it should be lived: without restriction from crappy chair design).

Our chairs are beautiful.  But the chairs don't dance.  They don't move, express, or speak until we move them.  We control them; we know how to exploit their architecture to construct beautiful lines, extraordinary snapshots; we know how to direct your attention as an audience member, to make you see the chair as chair and as part of our bodies.  These are things we think about as artists; it's part of our tradecraft.  You are looking at something we, for the most part, have built with intention.  (You might of course argue that the fact that I am writing this post says something about the failure of that intention -- but, you know, we can't control everything.  Images make sense to people inside their own contexts; if they are willing to change, that's one thing....)

Post here contains a snapshot of me taken by a friend; I'm poledancing in the DC metro, head flung back, mouth open, arms gripping the pole.  To my mind, the dance is here -- in my body -- my chair is not visible.

Moral of the story?  Wheelchair users are the dancers.  And speaking of the users, here's another problem.  Even if you take out user preference, which, by the way, you should never do, the simple fact is that what works for one dancer doesn't often work for another.  I have a very particular set up; it enables me to do a bunch of interesting things and allows me great flexibility.  It has its limits, yes, but it is a workable setup.  I know one dancer who has something similar, but not entirely the same.  We've spent some time talking about the tradeoffs we've made.  My colleague at West Coast has something entirely different.  (Full disclosure: I don't dance in my everyday chair.)

Post here contains a picture of my every day chair.  it's a mostly black and white picture of a wheelchair from the back.  You can see the hard back, the back bar, and the wheels.  There's a reflection of golden light on the left of the back rest.

And that's another part of the equation.  Recognizing that dance starts with the dancer is an important part of the idea that all bodies can dance -- in and with the assistive equipment they have.  Anyone can dance.  You don't have to come to the studio in a super light, highly sporty/technical titanium manual chair or in a specially designed souped up, ledges added powerchair (something like this one from USF, for example).  Come as you are, and we will help you explore the body you have.

So, what do you do if you want to design wheelchairs for dancing?  Find a bunch of wheelchair users who dance and a bunch who don't.  A lot of them,  mind.  Not just 2 or 3.  That's too small a sample size.  Talk to people in very different bodies, with very different chairs.  Find out what they think are the strengths and limitations of the chairs they are in.  Discover more about the environments they work, learn, and perform in.  Document, document and document.

Our experience as end users matters most.  We will tell you about the relationships between our setups and our work.  Discover and deepen your knowledge of the relationships between our bodies and our chairs -- WITHOUT -- without going all medical on us.  It's no use, for example, you saying -- "Ahh.  T2.  You ought to be able to dance in this kind of chair and do these kinds of moves."  Learn instead, how we use our setup to do our moves and how we create moves in conjunction with our partners.  Learn about the dynamics between body and chair and body, chair, and dance partner.  Study dance with us.  Watch us move.  Talk to us and create equal partnerships with us.

Don't design for us; create with us.