Day 5/6/7

Over the weekend, I realized that I had become less than human. I was
so tired that I found myself about to do something pretty appalling.
Throughout the first week, I had to do more than I had expected to
find myself in a comfortable disability awareness place. This work
and all of the physical stress left me feeling more and more grouchy
about other people's body narratives and, in particular, their stories
of their physicality.

Here's what I mean. For the narrators, the stories of their back
ache, knee pain, etc., with their attendant fear and lived experience
of pain and limitation is real. Very real. But I get tired of it.
Very quickly. I find myself reflecting on what I have to do to do
what I do and on what my colleagues do and have gone through. In
comparison, these stories, real and painful as they are, mean so
little to me .... Particularly when they are being told to me as an
act of kinship and belonging. "See? We're all a little bit disabled,
aren't we? We all have something to deal with. And my (insert
relevant body part) is sooooo bad."

Over the weekend, I overheard a conversation about a guy and his back.
It was told in a particularly self-important tone. The guy has a bad
back. It hurts a lot. But only when he's hitting golf balls. Most
of the time, it's fine. But when he's hitting golf balls.... And, now
said in a particularly aggrieved manner, his doctor doesn't know what
is wrong with it.

I feel a deep rage well up in me. We are all crossing the road, but
I feel compelled to turn around and bawl at him -- right in the middle
of the road. I quell myself and roll on, a little taken aback. No
one give strangers disability lessons in the middle of a crosswalk, do
they?

Clearly, I would have been over the line, and it has been a while
since I've been in that place. But I was. I've slept since then and
now feel better, but the experience has me wondering about people's
experience. Not being able to dance, hit golf balls, or bend down
scares people. Having to live with some pain scares people. And
that's a primary factor in their understanding of disability. When
they look at my chair, do they remember the time they put their back
out and couldn't move? The time they tore their ACL and all the
difficulty of their recovery?

I get this. I do. But I don't understand how we get from the
individual experience of pain and fear to the systems of social
oppression and inaccessibility that dominate our daily interactions
with each other.

Setup Matters: Day 8?

The goal is to build trust among dancers in the room and between two
particular dancers. The exercise is equally as fundamental and, in
itself, extraordinarily simple. All you have to do is close your eyes
and allow your partner to lead you -- wherever and however. The group
instructor will tell you how to lead and how you will be lead.

I've been doing this exercise for years now with the people of West
Coast, with people in class, and with people we've met while touring.
I was fascinated by what I learned in the exercise this time.

When the exercise is called "blind lead," the effects on the body are radical.

All of a sudden, the person with their eyes closed is "blind." They
assume the position -- not that position -- the one that they think
most closely approximates the somatic experience of being blind.
They've had something taken away from them; they go stiff. Not being
able to see "paralyses" them. They stand up straight and unyielding.
Even as they parade around the room and move a little more in their
bodies, there's something tight or tense in their bodies: they aren't
seeing and the rest of the body knows it. The listening comes from a
place of deprivation and from a (misguided) cultural understanding of
disability. And it resonates in the body. It resonates in the body.

Huh.

Equivalencies:Days 2 and 3

The word I am struggling with today goes beyond the dance studio: It's
the word and the idea of "equivalence."

We use equivalent to suggest that two separate and often very
different things are the same, or, at least, of equal value. But the
very insistence on equivalence underscores the potential for the thing
that is being compared to be somehow less than the original. Rather
than "same but different," it's more "different but same." My mind
jumps to "separate but equal."

I think disableds live with a lot of separate but equal. You know the
accessible entrance round the back, by the trash cans. The separate
and ineffective transit systems, because the mass transit is
inaccessible. I think of our lives as having a parallel track, one
which we and only we are able to see. On the good side, this parallel
track is the place of disability history and culture. On the less
appealing side, it is the place of isolation and frustration with a
world of environmental and attitudinal barriers. And somewhere in
there, I hear my voice, artificially bright and cheery -- I'm striving
for lightness and neutrality, but what I really want to say is
unprintable -- saying, "No, don't worry. I've got it. I just have to
do it differently, in my own way." I'm trying to convince the person
in front of me that what I am doing is valid and effective for me.
"No, honestly, I don't need your help. Thank you, though."

The difficult "equivalent" of the past couple of days arose in
technique class. Not every class can be about expanding and exploring
movement ranges and possibilities and ideas and different bodies.
There are some contexts in which that absolutely should be the case,
in which it would be unforgivable for this not to be the case. And
there are others in which you simply have to assimilate and go.
Assimilate means not seeking the organic wheeled version -- the
version that would be a neutral equivalent; it means picking in a
split second something to work with that approximates what I see, in
order to reproduce in my body the same phrase everyone else is doing.
I can't succeed at this game, of course. Nothing I can do will ever
look the same. So, I can only do what I am able to do. And I exist
permanently in a space of catch-up. In this space, my equivalent is
definitely different and certainly not the same. It is so separate
that it can't be equal.

Question: if I had the courage of my convictions, I would create the
wheeled version. I wouldn't feel like I was achieving unison, but I
would have an organic and authentic (in so far as it is genuine to my
body) piece of movement. I would be able to dance instead of feeling
fake. What would it take for me to do that? Why don't I do this now?

The pleasurable equivalent came from sourcing movement in words.
These are my words: "I am close to falling. I am far from home." What
would your dances to these words look like? How do the words move
you?

I'm going to leave it there, not because I think the relationship
between words and movement is unproblematic, but because it is late.
We worked for 15 hours today, and tomorrow is going to be equally
hard.

Day 1

Today was the first day; I am so tired that you could just wipe the
floor with me, and I wouldn't notice. The thing about it is that we
routinely have 5 hour rehearsals, but this was an 8 hour day (with 90
minutes for lunch) and a commute. The other thing about it is that
the exercises we did weren't so different from the ones I am
accustomed to. But I apparently had not thought about the effects of
doing them in a different place, as a participant and not as a
workshop leader, and as the only disabled-identifying person in the
room.

I put it that way because I felt two things. First: there were people
in the room that some in the medical profession would call disabled,
but I don't know whether they identify or would even choose that word
for themselves. Second: I felt different from the other people in the
room. I have no reason to think this, of course, but I felt that
using a wheelchair seemed not to qualify as a part of the normal human
range of age, size, ability, dance experience and movement training.
Somehow, being a dancer who uses a wheelchair instead of being a
dancer who has a chronic back injury or a joint injury, repaid with
surgery or not, just feels different -- beyond the norm.

I feel this way because it is the way that insecurity and
uncertainness happen for me. I imagine other dancers might worry
about size, weight, and technique; me? I worry about disability.

Tomorrow is another day.

Pedestrian Dance: Making The Ordinary Move

If you’ve ever seen a dance performance, you’ve probably seen some pretty virtuosic movement -- things that you think you couldn’t do.  This probably true whether you’ve watched a ballet, modern dance or even physically integrated dance with its wild wheelies, beautiful balances, daring dives.  If you are like many of the people I talk to, you’ve probably said, with these images in mind, “Oh, I can’t dance.”  To these and other similar remarks, I say, “but you can move.”  Any movement can be dance.

I’ve seen a lot of bad dance.  Some of it by disabled dancers; some of it by non-disabled dancers.  To me, bad dance is not about the movement itself.  It’s not that the dancer can’t do a certain movement or that a movement itself is bad.  It’s not that a hand is folded over or a foot is bent instead of pointed.  Bad dance happens when the movement fails to communicate.  Bad dance happens when the mover doesn’t move the audience, to shift their perspective.  Bad dance happens when the mover fails to make art.

There’s an art to be found in the sound of a powerchair clicking on before the dancer moves; there’s art in the strike of a hand on a wheelchair tyre. There’s art in spasm and other involuntary movements.  There’s art in moving your face, your tongue, your eyes.  Art and artistry are not narrow, exclusive, finite things; rather, the definition of art expands every time someone pushes on its so-called limits.

I have had reason to think through these questions a lot recently.  One was movement based: how could I feel that I was dancing if "all" I was doing was pushing my chair in walking mode across a space?  The answer here, for me -- and I stress that it is a personal answer -- was about intention and awareness.  I could strike my wheels in any number of ways, but that wasn't the point.  What made my walk across the stage dance was the way in which that simple of movements was legible to the audience.  How it was read, I don't know.  But I believe (and hope) that my skill in performing that movement was that it was open for interpretation -- as simply someone walking or perhaps walking in a certain way.  I don't know.  My job was to do it in such a way that someone watching me would be able to read the dance in my movement.

Making walking dance is more difficult than you might at first think.  It's much easier to see dance in movement that is big, that involves some arm or head movements.  It's much easier to look at a wheelie or some dramatic lift.  But there's skill in making such a simple pedestrian movement as walking, pushing, rolling, and dance.  It's in presence.  In neutrality, openness, intention and awareness.  And honestly, I still have a lot to learn here.

Key to my understanding of dance in pedestrian movement is the question of legibility: what you do has to read as dance -- not as you being you, just rolling around the performance space.  Or, worse, you visibly trying to be a dancer as you roll around the performance space.  Presence, intention and focus, but no airs, no graces, no drama.  The movement leads not you -- and that's one pretty powerful way to make almost any movement legible as dance.  It's almost a question of doing and not being -- by the time you get to being, you've missed the boat.  All your being has to be in the doing.  (errm...  hope that's not too confusing.)

I find this approach to understanding movement really freeing; it not only permits disability and ability at any level, it reshapes the question of virtuosity.  The most communicative performance now comes in the connection between dancer and audience or dancer, dancer and audience and not so much in the execution of a particular movement in a standardized way.  But I also realize that my emphasis on legibility is problematic.  What if, for example, your stuff doesn't read?  What if you are doing it as best as you can and it doesn't read beyond you in your usual self.

What if, for example, something disability related is what makes it difficult for your movement to read -- even if you have the intention, focus, etc.?  Is it possible for your unedited, unfiltered -- I'd use refined, except that that has too judgmental an edge to it -- movement to register as dance?  There's an easy answer to this -- yes.  But there's also a hard answer to this -- unless this is the point, just being yourself without variation may be difficult to watch.  Here's an example: I can walk across the stage or get from the floor to my chair in the most routine manner and still find the dance in both these things.  But it is also possible that while the walk is read as dance, the getting back into my chair may look like a moment when the dance stops.

I don't really have answers to these latter questions.  I do know, though, that dance can be found in all movement.  I'm hanging on to that piece of it.