- Posted by Wheelchair Dancer
- 26 Aug 07, 06:11 PM
Ooof! It's Sunday. It's 2.26 AM PDT. It must be time to blog.
We've been making new work. The process of creation can be drama filled. We've had tears and shouting; we've had snide remarks that would bring up blisters on concrete. There's even been stomping out in the middle of a rehearsal. That kind of thing is usually the choreographer; the dancers don't get to have tantrums. Even without the emotional extremes, making work can be stressful. Sometimes, it can be hard to see a piece among the fragments, and we wander around thoroughly lost for weeks at a time. "Wheel across the stage 10 times. And again, please. Again. Again. Can I see that again?" Sometimes, however, being in process (that's what we call it) can be smooth and sweet. Like honey. (Apologies to Diana Krall).
The most recent process goes under the sweet category.
This has very little to do with the dancers of West Coast -- we're what/who we are -- and everything to do with the skill and facility of the choreographer. The person we are working with at the moment understands bodies, wheels, prosthetics. And I mean really understands them. She also has insight into who we are as people, dancers, and performers. I don't want to describe the piece because it's not yet finished, but allow me for a second to talk about one sequence of movement that I get to make.
I start facing the audience reacting to my partner, but slide slowly into my own world. My hands slip onto the wheels, and I pull backwards the length and width of the stage; I make 2 sides of a square. In that dreamy world, I get to create a feeling of sensuality, but I don't use my body. Deliberately, there's very little body movement until the very end. The lyrical, sensual feel I am aiming for comes almost entirely from the movement of the wheels. I don't have all that long to create this feeling; I make 7 slow pulls back to the scrim (the gauzy material at the backdrop of the stage) and 13 increasingly faster, shorter pulls across the width. 20 pulls in all. And, though I say it myself, those are 20 way seductive pulls.
In the process of figuring out how to move in this way, I started ruminating on how anyone learns to move this way. I mean, how does a disabled person learn to dance? I grew up with the idea that dance was a thing for the ethereal. All those unusually skinny women; the men with unusually muscly legs. I didn't know any dancers, though I worked in an orchestra pit for several years. I certainly didn't think I would ever dance. I admired the dancers of Fame (that dates me), rolled my eyes at Flashdance, loved Strictly Ballroom, and wept my way through Billy Elliott. But none of these films really dealt with disability. Confession.... I have since rewatched the first season of Fame, and there WAS a storyline about the tragedy of a dancer with MS who was going to dance until she couldn't...
Any road, I am fascinated by the dance/movement experiences of other disabled people. I have to say, though, the experiences of these OUCHers is more than a little discouraging: Check out Christina Papamichel's yoga knots, and Kate Ansell's salsa.
Off-putting, no? Their experiences seem to be part of a larger pattern for would-be disabled movers. Ideally, you would just show up to an integrated setting, and people would know how to make it happen for you. Practically, however, you usually have to integrate the setting yourself. No one really knows how to help. You have to figure out your own adaptations. You spend many hours trying to make your body do stuff that it simply won't. In an ideal world, the instructor would begin with the natural movement of your body.
I learned to dance using both approaches to the body. West Coast teaches classes and workshops that allow people to bring their bodies and learn to move with them. In the beginner classes, we concentrate on asking people to move with intention, to learn to initiate, to find their bodies, experiment with qualities, dynamics, shapes, etc; we're hoping that people will get a sense of their individual movement vocabularies. In the second half of the class, we think about how dancers move across the floor; dancers experiment with group work and the initial practices of partnering. In these classes, we demonstrate the principle, but we don't ask the dancers to copy the exact movement. We're not asking each dancer to master a named technique (Horton, Graham, Duncan, Cecchetti, Russian, RAD); we're beginning to explore the individual beauty and movement potential of each body.
I also study wheelchair ballet and Horton technique in New York. This approach takes classical ballet and Horton techniques apart, looks for the line, the shape, the intention, and rhythm of each step and develops an equivalent wheelchair adaptation. In this world, I get to worry about my arabesque line or the strength of my laterals. Regardless of approach, I think the key to my positive experience comes from the fact that my primary learning situations are with disabled teachers. I have had some amazing (good and bad amazing) experiences going to mainstream dance classes. In New York, I work at a particular studio where there is another wheelchair user. I just roll in; most of the teachers are game, and some have actually gained understanding of wheelchair movement. In San Francisco, when I integrated a class, they called the security guard (full story . When I asked about the accessibility of another studio, I was told they were near both major highways....
If I thought about it at all, I sort of expected the process of making a work to be rather like the process by which an orchestra makes or learns a new piece. Essentially, the composer comes in with a virtually complete score, tries it out on the orchestra, makes revisions, tweaks, and then everyone gets down to the process of learning it. I was prepared for a choreographer to come in ready to teach everyone their part. Our job, as I saw it, would be memorizing sequences of movement. Imagine my surprise when I learned that only some choreographers are like that. Most come in with an idea -- they might have a phrase of movement that they teach to us -- but the dance as a whole is created over the course of many weeks. Can you do this? Try that? Wait a second, what happens if you ...
That degree of familiarity and ease is complicated by the presence of disability. Because most choreographers are non-disabled, they don't have much of a clue about what to do with us. Two powerchair users, two manual chair users? What are the differences? With legs? Without legs? Which legs? The better ones prepare by watching some video or from coming to one of our performances. In some cases, we have to do a lot of teaching. I remember one day I was explaining that wheelchairs simply didn't roll sideways. Obvious when you think about it, but that particular choreographer had never really thought about it. Some people get it right away. They ask us to make a phrase they can see how we move. They can work with that; it gives them a sense of the possibilities. They then go away and dream up movement. Some of the choreographers listen to and respond to our ideas about the movement. Some don't. When we get to have some input, however, the process is amazing. For example, I suggested having some body movement come late in the sequence of pulls, and the choreographer defined what, where, and when. I came up with several versions of the sensual pull; she picked one, refined it, and we worked on it again.
On Friday, we got our first look at the new piece as a whole. We know the order of the sections; there will be time for one of our dancers to remove her prosthetics before she goes on without them. We also came to see how the parts work together, but there's a couple of moments for me and my partner where the floor pattern doesn't quite work. We're frantically tearing across the stage with whip turns and suddenly two other dancers are in the way. My partner pulls a basketball sidestep; I skid to a stop. We'll work on that next week -- timing is everything. It's interesting to see how small things resonate across the three sections, but I am more intrigued by the differences in relationships. The obvious is never obvious with this choreographer -- that's why she is so compelling.
It's Sunday morning; it's 4.28, and writing this has brought back that movement. I'm downstairs on the couch (shared with cats) and yet I can still feel the wheels sliding through my fingers. It's deeply affecting. But it's also really annoying. That pull is in my body, the same way that ditty gets in your mind. You start singing it over and over again; it pops up and before you know it, you're singing it. I've felt the urge to do that pull on the street, in last night's restaurant, on the ferry... It just slips out when I am not looking.
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