Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance
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The dance's opening image haunted me long before I ever choreographed the piece. Indeed, it was the power of this image—its visual and physical effect on me—that gave me the courage both to create a performance about the undoing of my life as I knew it and to stage it in the middle of a dance concert. Through this process of performing the unperformable, of telling the untold story, of staging the antithesis of my identity as a dance professional, I began to reclaim the expressive power of my body.
What do you see? A back? A backless wheelchair? A woman? A nude? Do you see pain or pleasure? Are you in pain or pleasure? How do you see me?
Most likely you don't see a dancer, for the combined discourses of idealized femininity and aesthetic virtuosity which serve to regulate theatrical dancing throughout much of the Western world refuse the very possibility of this opening moment. As a dancer, I am a body on display. As a body on display, I am expected to reside within a certain continuum of fitness and bodily control, not to mention sexuality and beauty. But as a woman in a wheelchair, I am neither expected to be a dancer nor to position myself in front of an audience's gaze. In doing this performance, I confronted a whole host of contradictions both within myself and within the audience. The work was a conscious attempt to both deconstruct the representational codes of dance production and communicate an "other" bodily reality. It was also one of the hardest pieces I've ever performed.
What followed when the lights came up again was a performance about disability—both the cultural constructions of disability and the textures of my own experiences with disability. The spoken text was structured around stories, stories about my son's frantic first days of life in intensive care, about my grandfather's life with multiple sclerosis and the recent diagnosis of MS in one of my students, as well as the story of my own spinal degeneration and episodes of partial paralysis. These bodily histories interlaced with my dancing to provide a genealogy of gestures, emotional states, and physical experiences surrounding many of our personal and social reactions to disability.
Because my performance was staged on a body at once marked by the physical and psychic scars of disability and yet unmarked by any specifically visible physical limitation, I was consciously challenging the usual representational codes of theatrical dance. Indeed, I wanted the audience to be put off balance, not knowing whether this was an enactment of disability or the real thing. Was this artistic expression or autobiographical confession? Did I choose not to do more technical dancing (artistic interpretation), or was this all that I could accomplish (aesthetic limitation)? And why would I, a dance professor, want to expose myself (including my ample buttocks and disfigured spine) like that anyway? Given that Western theatrical dance has traditionally been structured by an exclusionary mindset that projects a very narrow vision of a dancer as white, female, thin, long-limbed, flexible, heterosexual, and able-bodied, my desire to stage the cultural antithesis of the fit, healthy body disrupted the conventional voyeuristic pleasures inherent in watching most dancers. Traditionally, when dancers take their place in front of the spotlight, they are displayed in ways that accentuate the double role of technical prowess and sexual desirability (the latter being implicit in the very fact of a body's visual availability). In contrast, the disabled body is supposed to be covered up or hidden from view, to be compensated for or overcome (either literally or metaphorically) in an attempt to live as "normal" a life as possible. When a disabled dancer takes the stage, he or she stakes claim to a radical space, an unruly location where disparate assumptions about representation, subjectivity, and visual pleasure collide with one another.
This is an essay about dance and disability. It is an essay which, on the one hand, will detail how American culture constructs these realms of experience oppositionally in terms of either fit or frail, beautiful or ugly, and, on the other hand, will discuss the growing desire among various dance communities and professional companies to challenge this binary paradigm by reenvisioning just what kind of movements can constitute a dance and, by extension, what kind of body can constitute a dancer. It is an essay about a cultural movement (in both the political and physical senses of the word) that radically revises the aesthetic structures of dance performances and just as radically extends the theoretical space of disability studies into the realm of live performing bodies. This intersection of dance and disability is an extraordinarily rich site at which to explore the overlapping constructions of the body's physical ability, subjectivity, and cultural visibility that are implicated within many of our dominant cultural paradigms of health and self-determination. Excavating the social meanings of these constructions is like an archaeological dig into the deep psychic fears that disability creates within the field of professional dance. In order to examine ablist preconceptions in the dance world, one must confront both the ideological and symbolic meanings that the disabled body holds in our culture, as well as the practical conditions of disability. Watching disabled bodies dancing forces us to see with a double vision, and helps us to recognize that while a dance performance is grounded in the physical capacities of a dancer, it is not limited by them.
Over the last seven years, I have followed the evolution of various dance groups which are working to integrate visibly disabled and visibly nondisabled dancers. (I use the term "visibly" to shift the currency of the term disability from an either/or paradigm to a continuum which might include not only the most easily identifiable disabilities, such as some mobility impairments, but also less visible disabilities, including ones such as eating disorders and histories of severe abuse. It seems to me that all of these disabilities profoundly affect one's physical position in the world, although they certainly don't all affect the accessibility of the world in the same way.) Each year, the list grows longer as groups such as Mobility Junction (NYC), Danceability (Eugene), Diverse Dance (Vachon Island), Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels (Cleveland), Light Motion (Seattle), and Candoco (England) inspire other dance communities to engage with this work. In addition, there are several dance companies such as Liz Lerman's Dancers of the Third Age, which work with older performers, as well as various contemporary choregraphers who consistently work with nontraditional performers from diverse backgrounds and experiences. These include dance artists such as Johanna Boyce, Ann Carlson, David Dorfman, and Jennifer Monson, to mention only a few. Unfortunately, the radical work of these groups is often tokenized in the dance press in terms of "special" human interest profiles rather than choreographic rigor. Of course this critical marginalization implicitly suggests that this new work, while important, won't really disrupt the existing aesthetic structures of cultural institutions. For instance, when Dancing Wheels, a group dedicated to promoting "the diversity of dance and the abilities of artists with physical challenges," joined up with the Cleveland Ballet in 1990 (to become Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels), it was as an educational and outreach extension of the mainstream arts organization. The Dancing Wheels dancers rarely perform in the company's regular repertoire, and certainly never in classical works such as Balanchine's Serenade. Even in the less mainstream examples of integrated dancing, the financial reality of grassroots arts organizations often means that nondisabled dancers receive much more touring and teaching work than even the most highly renowned disabled dancers. It is still prohibitively expensive to travel as a disabled person, especially if one needs to bring an aide along.
Even though many of us are familiar with the work of disabled writers, artists, and musicians, physically disabled dancers are still seen as a contradiction in terms. This is because dance, unlike other forms of cultural production such as books or painting, makes the body visible within the representation itself. Thus when we look at dance with disabled dancers, we are looking at both the choreography and the disability. Cracking the porcelain image of the dancer as graceful sylph, disabled dancers force the viewer to confront the cultural opposite of the classical body—the grotesque body. I am using the term "grotesque" as Bakhtin invokes it in his analysis of representation within Rabelais. In her discussion of carnival, spectacle, and Bakhtinian theory, Mary Russo identifies these two bodily tropes in the following manner:
It is not my intention to invoke old stereotypes of disabled bodies as grotesque bodies. I employ these terms not to describe specific bodies, but rather to call upon cultural constructs that deeply influence our attitudes toward bodies, particularly dancing bodies. Over the past few years, I have felt this opposition of classical and grotesque bodies profoundly as I have fought my way back to the stage. Look again at the opening image of my performance and then at any other image of a dancer in Dancemagazine, or another popular dance journal. The difference is striking, and I believe that it has much to do with the cultural separation between these bodies.[2]
In the rest of this essay, I would like to explore the transgressive nature of the "grotesque" body in order to see if and how the disabled body could deconstruct and radically reform the representational structures of dance performances. But just as all disabilities are not created equal, dances made with disabled dancers are not completely alike. Many of these dances recreate the representational frames of traditional proscenium performances, emphasizing the elements of virtuosity and technical expertise to reaffirm a classical body in spite of its limitations. In contrast, some dances, particularly those influenced by the dance practice of Contact Improvisation, work to break down the distinctions between the classical and the grotesque body, radically restructuring traditional ways of seeing dancers. While all dance created on disabled bodies must negotiate the palpable contradictions between the discourses of ideal and deviant bodies, each piece meets this challenge in a different way.
Gus Solomons' account of a romantic duet describes one of the first choreographic ventures of Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, a professional dance company comprised of dancers on legs and dancers in wheelchairs. Essentially a pas de deux for legs and wheels, "Gypsy" extends the aesthetic heritage of nineteenth century Romantic ballet into several intriguing new directions. Like a traditional balletic duet, "Gypsy" is built on an illusion of grace provided by the fluid movements and physics of partnering. The use of the fabric in conjunction with the wheels gives the movement a continuous quality that is difficult to achieve on legs. When Solomons describes Verdi-Fletcher's dancing as "gliding," he is describing more than a metaphor; rather, he is transcribing the physical reality of her movement. Whether they are physically touching or connected only by their silken umbilical cord, the dancers in this pas de deux partner one another with a combination of the delicacy of ballet and the mystery of tango.
Solomons is an African-American dance critic and independent choreographer who has been involved in the contemporary dance scene since his days dancing for Merce Cunningham in the 1970s. An active member of the Dance Critics Association, he has spoken eloquently about the need to include diverse communities within our definitions of mainstream dance. And yet Solomons, like many other liberal cultural critics and arts reviewers, sets up in the above passage a peculiar rhetoric which tries to deny difference. His remark, "Did I mention that Verdi-Fletcher dances in her wheelchair?" suggests that the presence of a dancer in a wheelchair is merely an incidental detail that hardly interrupts the seamless flow of the romantic pas de deux. In assuming that disability does not make a (big) difference, this writer is, in fact, limiting the (real) difference that disability can make in radically refiguring how we look at, conceive of, and organize bodies in the twenty-first century. Why, for instance, does Solomons begin with a description of Goodman's able body as "tall and elegant," and then fail to describe Verdi-Fletcher's body at all? Why do most articles on Verdi-Fletcher's seminal dance company spend so much time celebrating how she has "overcome" her disability to "become"a dancer rather than inquiring how her bodily presence might radically refigure the very category of dancer itself? The answers to these questions lie not only in an examination of the critical reception of "Gypsy" and other choreographic ventures by Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, but also in an analysis of the ways in which this company paradoxically acknowledges and then covers over the difference that disability makes. There are contradictions embedded within this company's differing aesthetic and social priorities; while their outreach work has laid an important groundwork for the structural inclusion of people with disabilities in dance training programs and performance venues, the conservative aesthetic which guides much of Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels' performance work paradoxically reinforces, rather than disrupts, the negative connotations of disability.
Sabatino Verlezza, the new artistic co-director of Dancing Wheels and resident choreographer, has a background in modern dance which brings a welcome shift of physical vocabulary to Dancing Wheels. Unlike ballet, modern dance was created by working-class, female bodies, and its early democratic spirit was based on a belief that one should create movements specific to one's own body. Ideally, then, this form would seem to lend itself to working with and without wheels. While he still often choreographs within his group pieces a central theme for dancers with legs, leaving the dancers on wheels to provide an architectural backdrop (a process which works against the democratic principles of the company's stated claims), Verlezza has begun to experiment with creating movements specifically for the wheelchair dancers. The premiere of "1420 MHZ" on August 19, 1995, presented one of the most physically challenging works and provided a very good opportunity to see what extraordinary moves were possible on wheels. The fact that the piece was made for three women on wheels allowed the audience to experience a truly enabling representation of difference without the physical comparisons inevitable when women on wheels dance with men on legs.
Another piece by Verlezza entitled "May Ring" completed that evening's program. I was absolutely stunned by the final image of this dance, and I find it hard to believe that neither Verdi-Fletcher nor Verlezza were aware of how this image might appear to some of their audience members. "May Ring" ends with a long fade as Verlezza lifts Verdi-Fletcher, arms spread wide and face beaming, out of her wheelchair and high above his head. This is clearly meant to be a climactically transcendent moment. Yet its unavoidably sexist and ablist implications deeply disappointed me. Like Disney narratives and pop songs of my youth which promised salvation through love, this image portrays Verlezza as a prince charming, squiring Verdi-Fletcher out of her wheelchair in order to make her into a "real" woman. Now, it is possible to argue that this image is, in fact, a deconstruction of the ballerina's role, a way of winking to the audience to say that yes, a disabled woman can also fulfill that popular image. But the rest of the work doesn't support this interpretation. Verdi-Fletcher's smiling, child-like presence suggests little personal agency, much less the sense of defiance or chutzpah it would take to pull off this deconstruction.
In a short but potent essay reflecting on the interconnected issues of difference, disability, and identity politics entitled "The Other Body," Ynestra King describes a disabled woman in a wheelchair whom she sees on her way to work each day. "She can barely move. She has a pretty face, and tiny legs she could not possibly walk on. Yet she wears black lace stockings and spike high heels. [. . .] That she could flaunt her sexual being violates the code of acceptable appearance for a disabled woman."[5] What appeals to King about this woman's sartorial display is the way that she at once refuses her cultural position as an asexual being and deconstructs the icons of feminine sexuality (who can really walk in those spike heels anyway?). Watching Verdi-Fletcher in the final moments of "May Ring" brings us face to face with the contradictions involved in being positioned as both a classical dancer (at once sexualized and objectified), and a disabled woman (an asexual child who needs help). Yet instead of one position bringing tension to or fracturing the other (as in King's example of the disabled woman with high heels and black lace stockings), Verdi-Fletcher seems here to be embracing a position which is doubly disempowering.
Since this performance, I have been searching for the reasons why, in the midst of an enormous publicity campaign which seeks to present Mary Verdi-Fletcher as an extraordinary woman who has overcome the challenges of spina bifida to realize her dream of becoming a professional dancer, she would accept being presented in such a fashion. In retrospect, I think that this desire has everything to do with the powerfully seductive image of the Romantic ballerina. It seems to me that when Verdi-Fletcher closes her eyes and dreams about becoming a dancer, she still envisions a sugarplum fairy. Although she has successfully opened up the field of professional dance to dancers on wheels by creating Dancing Wheels, Verdi-Fletcher hasn't fully challenged this image of the sylph yet. Despite its recent forays into modern dance, her company still seems very much attached to an ideology of the classical body.
Mary Verdi-Fletcher is a dancer, and like many other dancers, both disabled and nondisabled, she has internalized an aesthetic of beauty, grace, and line which, if not centered on a completely mobile body, is nonetheless beholden to an idealized body image. There are very few professions where the struggle to maintain a "perfect" (or at least near-perfect) body has taken up as much psychic and physical energy as in the dance field. With few exceptions, this is true whether one's preferred technique is classical ballet, American modern dance, Bharata Natyam, or a form of African-American dance. Although the styles and looks of bodies favored by different dance cultures may allow for some degree of variation (for instance, the director of Urban Bush Women, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, talks about the freedom to have and move one's butt in African dance as wonderfully liberating after years of being told to tuck it in in modern dance classes), most professional dance is still inundated by body image and weight issues, particularly for women. Even companies, such as the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company, who pride themselves on the physical diversity of their dancers, rarely have much variation among the women dancers (all of whom are quite slim). Anytime a dancer's body is not completely svelte, the press usually mentions it. In fact, the discourse of weight and dieting in dance is so pervasive (especially, but certainly not exclusively for women) that we often don't even register it anymore. I am constantly amazed at dancers who have consciously deconstructed traditional images of female dancers in their choreographic work, and yet still complain of their extra weight, wrinkles, gray hair, or sagging whatevers. As a body on display, the female dancer is subject to the regulating gaze of the choreographer and the public, but neither of these gazes is usually quite as debilitating or oppressive as the gaze which meets its own image in the mirror.
I find it ironic that just as disability is finally beginning to enter the public consciousness and the independent living movement is beginning to gain momentum, American culture is emphasizing with a passion heretofore unfathomed the need for physical and bodily control.[6] As King makes clear in her essay, this fetishization of control marks the disabled body as the antithesis of the ideal body:
This issue of control is, I am convinced, key to understanding not only the specific issues of prejudice against the disabled, but also the larger symbolic place that disability holds in our culture's psychic imagination. In dance, the contrast between the classical and grotesque bodies is often framed in terms of physical control and technical virtuosity. Although the dancing body is moving and, in this sense, is always changing and in flux, the choreography or movement style can emphasize images resonant of the classical body. For instance, the statuesque poses of ballet are clear icons of the classical body. So too, however, are the dancers in some modern and contemporary companies which privilege an abstract body, for example those coolly elegant bodies performing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company these days. Based as it is in the live body, dance contains the cultural anxiety that the grotesque body will erupt (unexpectedly) through the image of the classical body, shattering the illusion of ease and grace by the disruptive presence of fleshy experience—heavy breathing, sweat, technical mistakes, physical injury, even evidence of a dancer's age or mortality. How the disabled body gets positioned in terms of a classical discourse of technique and virtuosity is not unaffected by gender. Gender is inscribed very differently on a disabled body, and there has been a great deal written on the way that disability can emasculate men (whose gendered identities are often contingent on displays of autonomy, independence, and strength), as well as desexualize women. Yet the social power which we accord representations of male bodies seems to give disabled men dancers (with a few exceptions) more freedom to display their bodies in dance. My own observations and research suggest that disabled men dancers can evoke the virtuosic, technically amazing body (even, as we shall see, without legs), while nevertheless deconstructing that classical body, allowing the audience to see their bodies in a different light. In the section that follows, I will look at various dance groups (including Candoco and groups working with Contact Improvisation) whose work has, in different ways, revolutionized notions of ability in contemporary dance. While Candoco has established new images of physical virtuosity and technical excellence—exploding assumptions that virtuosic dancing requires four working limbs—it is within the integrated work based in Contact Improvisation that we see dancing which actually redefines the dancers' bodies, refusing the classical/grotesque binary and opening up the possibility of looking at the dancing body as a body in process, a body becoming. This attention to the ever changing flux of bodies and the open-endedness of the improvisation refocuses the audience's gaze, helping us to see the disabled body on its own terms.
Although Benjamin's philosophy is quite radical in many ways and although Candoco has commissioned some very intriguing choreography which doesn't just "accommodate" the disabled dancers but recasts cultural perceptions about an "able" physicality, Benjamin is still committed to classical elements of technical virtuosity. For Benjamin, true integration means insisting on high standards of professional excellence in order to create interesting choreographic works for all the dancers in the company. He criticizes companies,
Recognizing the need to create their own style of dancing that will accommodate different physical possibilities, the dancers in Candoco are constantly trying out new ways of using momentum, working in a variety of levels including the floor, and coordinating legs and wheels. In a review of the fall 1992 London season, Chris de Marigny registers his own astonishment at Candoco's work:
The press discussions of Candoco's first few seasons repeatedly emphasize to what extent this company has stretched people's notions of what is possible in mixed ability dance companies. Yet because they rely on one very exceptional disabled dancer to break down the public's preconceptions about disability, Candoco sometimes recreates (unwittingly) new distinctions between the classical (virtuosic) and grotesque (passive) bodies within the company.
Victoria Marks was one of the first choreographers to work with Candoco (she was a member of their first class at the Heaffey Center, creating "The Edge of the Forest" for them in 1991), and it is her choreography that is showcased in Margaret Williams' dance film for the BBC, "Outside In." A lyrical film which interweaves surreal pastoral landscapes with the urbane suspended rhythms of tango and the beat of world music, "Outside In" begins with an extended kiss which is passed from one company member to another. The camera lingers on each face, registering everyone's delight in receiving the kiss and allowing the viewer to see how each kiss is transformed en route to the next person. A jump-cut transports the action to a cavernous space in which a single empty wheelchair rolls into the camera's focus. The company then quickly assembles and reassembles, each time leaving a maze of white patterns on the floor, as if they had just stepped in chalk. This is the first time that the viewer sees the dancers' full bodies and individual styles of locomotion. One of the most striking is David Toole's ability to careen across the space with his arms. Toole is one of three disabled dancers, but he is the only one who moves easily in and out of his wheelchair. Toole has no legs. Instead, he relies on his strong arms to walk. Ironically, the fact that Toole has no lower body gives him an incredible freedom of movement. His presence is wonderfully quixotic, and he can practically bounce from his chair to the floor and back up again within the blink of an eye.
Toole's abilities as a dancer are remarkable and are often the subject of extended discussions within reviews and preview articles about Candoco. Adjectives such as "amazing," "incredible," "stupefying," are liberally sprinkled throughout descriptions of his dancing. For instance, in an article in Ballet International which reviews the performances of several British dance companies during the spring 1993 season, Toole's dancing is the central focus of the short section on Candoco: "David Toole is a man with no legs who possesses more grace and presence than most dancers can even dream of. . . . Toole commands the stage with an athleticism that borders on the miraculous."[10] This language of astonishment reflects both an evangelistic awakening (yes, a disabled man can swagger!) and traces of freak show voyeurism (see the amazing feats of the man with no legs!). David Toole's virtuosic dancing comes at a price—a physical price. Recently, on the advice of his doctors, Toole had to quit dancing. His extraordinary mobility is predicated on his ability to support and carry his entire body weight on his arms, allowing him to walk, run, or even skip across the stage. These astonishing feats, however, are actually destroying his arms and shoulders. Still, because of his status as a virtuosic dancer, Toole cannot seem to envision the possibility of continuing to perform in a way that would not hurt his body (such as in a wheelchair, or with fewer athletic feats).[11]
Although the medium of film is notorious for its voyeuristic gaze and spectacle-making tendencies, and although Toole is one of the most visible dancers in "Outside In," the combination of skillful cinematography and inventive choreography in this film actually directs our gaze away from the extraordinary sight of Toole's body to the interactive contexts of his dancing. Even when he is moving by himself, Toole is always in dialogue with another person's movements. For instance, in the second scene, after the group has left the space, one woman remains, stepping among the circular patterns created by the wheelchairs. We see her choosing an interesting pattern and improvising with it—a skip step here, a shimmy-shimmy there. That she is translating the pattern of the wheels onto her body only becomes fully clear when the camera jumps to Toole, who is approaching a similar task—that of translating cheeky Arthur Murray footprints onto his own body. At first he seems to hesitate, running his fingers across the black outlines of a shoeprint. But then he looks directly at the camera and, squaring his shoulders with a determined look, he launches into a dashing rendition of the tango. This solo leads, after a brief tango sequence with the full company, into an extended duet with Sue Smith. The usual negotiation of desire in a tango is replaced here by the respectful negotiation of level changes. From the moment that Smith climbs aboard Toole's chair, to the last shot of them rolling away, the choreography refuses the implicit ideology of standing upright by placing most of the movement on the ground. The cinematography follows suit, filming them both at eye (that is to say ground) level. The camera's ability to shift viewpoints so seamlessly provides one of the most ingenious ways of breaking up (by literally breaking down) an ablist gaze—the one that is forever overlooking people who aren't standing (up) in front of its nose.
While the mobility of the camera allows for wonderful new ways of viewing dancers, the medium of film itself tends to reinforce images of the classical body by making the dancers always look pristine and unmussed. In "Outside In" we lose the experiential impact of breathing, the sound of thuds and falls, the sweat and physical evidence (hair out of place, costumes messed up, etc.) of this very kinesthetic dancing. This is particularly true for the women dancers, who all look exceedingly put together (perfect make-up and hair, etc.) throughout the video. Then too, given the innovative choreography of this earlier section, I was surprised by the almost generic wheelchair choreography in the next part, in which we see the able-bodied dancers assist, roll, and tilt the chairs while Jonathan French and Celeste Dandeker perform a series of decorative arm movements in them. The marked difference between Toole's dancing and that of Dandeker and French struck me as reinforcing a notion that being in a wheelchair is physically less interesting than being outside one. Ironically enough, even though one is a man and the other is a woman, both of these dancers are defined within the course of the film as much more passive and feminized than Toole. While "Outside In" liberates our notions of physical difference by giving us the opportunity to see different bodies in action, it has not sufficiently fractured the iconographic codes in which the wheelchair signifies disability.
Although companies such as Candoco are producing work that stretches the categories of dance and dancing bodies, I feel that much of their work is still informed by an ethos that reinstates classical conceptions of grace, speed, agility, and control within the disabled body. Groups like Candoco and Dancing Wheels have surely broadened the cultural imagination about who can become a dancer. However, they have not, to my mind, fully deconstructed the privileging of a certain kind of ability within dance. That more radical cultural work is currently taking place within the Contact Improvisation community.
Giving a coherent description of Contact Improvisation is a tricky business, for the form has grown exponentially over time and has traveled through many countries and dance communities. Although it was developed in the seventies, Contact Improvisation has recognizable roots in the social and aesthetic revolutions of the sixties. Contact at once embraces the casual, individualistic, improvisatory ethos of social dancing in addition to the experimentation with pedestrian and task-like movement favored by early postmodern dance groups such as the Judson Church Dance Theater. Resisting both the idealized body of ballet as well as the dramatically expressive body of modern dance, Contact seeks to create what Cynthia Novack calls a "responsive" body, one based in the physical exchange of weight.[12] Unlike many genres of dance which stress the need to control one's movement (with admonitions to pull up, tighten, and place the body), the physical training of Contact emphasizes the release of the body's weight into the floor or into a partner's body. In Contact, the experience of internal sensations and flow of the movement between two bodies is more important than specific shapes or formal positions. Dancers learn to move with a consciousness of the physical communication implicit within the dancing. Curt Siddall, an early exponent of Contact Improvisation, describes the form as a combination of kinesthetic forces: "Contact Improvisation is a movement form, improvisational in nature, involving the two bodies in contact. Impulses, weight, and momentum are communicated through a point of physical contact that continually rolls across and around the bodies of the dancers."[13]
But human bodies, especially bodies in physical contact with one another, are difficult to see only in terms of physical counter-balance, weight and momentum. By interpreting the body as both literal (the physics of weight) and metaphoric (evoking the community body, for example), Contact exposes the interconnectedness of social, physical and aesthetic concerns. Indeed, an important part of Contact Improvisation today is a willingness to allow the physical metaphors and narratives of love, power, and competition to evolve from an original emphasis on the workings of a physical interaction. On first seeing Contact, people often wonder whether this is, in fact, professional dancing or rather a recreational or therapeutic form. Gone are the formal lines of much classical dance. Gone are the traditional approaches to choreography and the conventions of the proscenium stage. In their place is an improvisational movement form based on the expressive communication involved when two people begin to share their weight and physical support. Instead of privileging an ideal type of body or movement style, Contact Improvisation privileges a willingness to take physical and emotional risks, producing a certain psychic disorientation in which the seemingly stable categories of able and disable become dislodged.
Disability in professional dance has often been a code for one type of disability—namely the paralysis of the lower body. Yet in Contact-based gatherings such as the annual DanceAbility workshop and the Brietenbush Jam, the dancers have a much wider range of disabilities, including vision impairments, deafness, and neurological conditions such as cerebral palsy. Steve Paxton, one of the originators of the form, creates an apt metaphor for this mélange of talents when he writes:
My first physical experience with this work occured in the spring of 1992 when I went to the annual Breitenbush dance jam. Held in a hot springs retreat in Oregon, the Breitenbush Jam is not designed specifically for people with physical disabilities as are the DanceAbility workshops, so I take it to be a measure of the success of true integration within the Contact community that people with various movement styles and physical abilities come to participate as dancers. At the beginning of the jam, while we were introducing ourselves to the group, Bruce Curtis, who was facilitating this particular exercise, suggested that we go around in the circle to give each dancer an opportunity to talk about his or her own physical needs and desires for the week of non-stop dancing. Curtis was speaking from the point of view that lots of people have special needs—not just the most obviously "disabled" ones. This awareness of ability as a continuum and not as an either/or situation allowed everyone present to speak without the stigma of necessarily categorizing oneself as abled or disabled solely on the basis of physical capacity.
Since that jam, I have had many more experiences dancing with people (including children) who are physically disabled. Yet it would be disingenuous to suggest that my first dancing with Curtis was just like doing Contact with anybody else. It wasn't—a fact that had more to do with my preconceptions than his physicality. At first, I was scared of crushing his body. After seeing him dance with other people more familiar with him, I recognized that he was up for some pretty feisty dancing, and gradually I began to trust our physical communication enough to be able to release the internal alarm in my head that kept reminding me I was dancing with someone with a disability (i.e., a fragile body). My ability to move into a different dancing relationship with Curtis was a result not only of Contact Improvisation's open acceptance of any body, but also of its training (both physical and psychic), which gave me the willingness to feel intensely awkward and uncomfortable. The issue was not whether I was dancing with a classical body or not, but rather whether I could release the classical expectations of my own body. Fortunately, the training in disorientation that is fundamental to Contact helped me recreate my body in response to his. As I move from dancer to critic, the question which remains for me is: does Contact Improvisation reorganize our viewing priorities in the same way that it reorganized my physical priorities?
Emery Blackwell and Alito Alessi both live in Eugene, Oregon, a city specifically designed to be wheelchair accessible. Blackwell was the president of OIL (Oregonians for Independent Living) until he resigned in order to devote himself to dance. Alessi, a veteran contacter who has had various experiences with physical disabilities (including an accident which severed the tendons on one ankle), has been coordinating the DanceAbility workshops in Eugene for the last five years. In addition to their participation in this kind of forum, Blackwell and Alessi have been dancing together for the past eight years, creating both choreographic works, such as their duet "Wheels of Fortune," and improvisational duets like the one I saw during a performance at Breitenbush Jam.
Blackwell and Alessi's duet begins with Alessi rolling around on the floor and Blackwell rolling around the periphery of the performance space in a wheelchair. Their eyes are focused on one another, creating a connection that gives their separate rolling motions a certain synchrony of purpose. After several circles of the space, Blackwell stops his wheelchair, all the while looking at his partner. The intensity of his gaze is reflected in the constant vibrations of movement impulses in his head and hands, and his stare draws Alessi closer to him. Blackwell offers Alessi a hand and initiates a series of weight exchanges which begins with Alessi gently leaning away from Blackwell's center of weight and ends with him riding upside down on Blackwell's lap. Later, Blackwell half slides, half wriggles out of his chair and walks on his knees over to Alessi. Arms outstretched, the two men mirror one another until an erratic impulse brings Blackwell and Alessi to the floor. They are rolling in tandem across the floor when suddenly Blackwell's movement frequency fires up and his body literally begins to bounce with excess energy. Alessi responds in kind, and the two men briefly engage in a good-natured rough and tumble wrestling match. After a while they become exhausted and begin to settle down, slowly rolling side by side out of the performance space.
Earlier I argued that, precisely because the disabled body is culturally coded as "grotesque," many integrated dance groups emphasize the classical dimensions of the disabled body's movements—the grace of a wheelchair's gliding, the strength and agility of people's upper bodies, etc. What intrigues me about Blackwell's dancing in this duet is the fact that his movement at once evokes images of the grotesque and then leads our eyes through the spectacle of his body into the experience of his particular physicality. Paxton once wrote a detailed description of Blackwell's dancing which reveals just how much the viewer becomes aware of the internal motivations as well as the external consequences of Blackwell's dancing.
Steve Paxton is considered by many people to be the father of Contact Improvisation, for it was his workshop and performance at Oberlin College in 1972 that first sparked the experimentations that later became this dance form. Given Paxton's engagement with Contact for twenty-five years, it makes sense that he would be an expert witness to Blackwell's dancing. Paxton's description of Blackwell's movement captures the way in which Contact Improvisation focuses on the becoming—the improvisational process of evolving which never really reaches an endpoint. Contact Improvisation can represent the disabled body differently precisely because it doesn't try to recreate the aesthetic frames of the classical body or traditional dance contexts. Despite their good intentions, these situations tend to marginalize anything but the most virtuosic movements. Contact, on the other hand, by concentrating on the becoming of a particular dance, refuses a static representation of disability, pulling the audience in as witness to the ongoing negotiations of that physical experience. It is important to realize that Alessi's dancing, by being responsive but not precious, helps to provide the context for this kind of witnessing engagement as well. In their duet, Alessi and Blackwell are engaged in an improvisational movement dialogue in which each partner is moving and being moved by the other. I find this duet compelling because it demonstrates the extraordinary potential of bringing two people with very different physical abilities together to share in one another's motion. In this space between social dancing, combat, and physical intimacy, lies a dance form whose open aesthetic and attentiveness to the flexibility of movement identities can inform and be informed by any body's movement.
Needless to say, my involvement with Contact Improvisation—training, teaching, and researching the form—during the last fifteen years has primed me to see these liberatory possibilities in this work. That training has also allowed me to reimagine my own physicality in the midst of a disability. Although I would not want to minimize the excruciatingly painful process of dealing with a sudden and severe mobility impairment—the exhaustion, the intense and unrelenting pain, not to mention the aggravating bureaucracy of American medical institutions—I was grateful that I never once thought of giving up dancing. Contact helped me imagine other ways of moving, other ways to be fully present in my body. Although I still struggled with my own preconceptions about how to dance, and although I still found it difficult to accept the limitations and boundaries of my changed physical possibilities, I was deeply grateful for the model that the DanceAbility work gave me. Yet perhaps more important than helping me to imagine how to dance with my disability, Contact helped me continue to reconceive dancing even as I began to regain my range of motion and strength in my back. Suddenly I wasn't interested in getting, as one self-help book put it, "back into shape," for I didn't want simply to return to dancing as I had experienced it before. Rather, I wanted to acknowledge this powerful legacy of disability, to keep it marked on my body.
Many of our ideas about autonomy, health, and self-determination in this late twentieth-century culture are based on a model of the body as an efficient machine over which we should have total control. This is particularly true of the current medical establishment, which is based upon an arrogant belief that doctors should be able to "fix" whatever goes wrong, returning us all as quickly as possible to that classical ideal. Talking over with doctors all the possible interventions into my condition made me realize that I wasn't sure I wanted to take part in such a system. Indeed, these medical personnel never seemed to notice the irony in their contradictory advice, suggesting, on the one hand, that I should retire from dancing (at the ripe old age of 34), and on the other hand claiming that they could fix me up "as good as new" with the latest technological advances in surgery. What they could never envision is that the experience of disability was tremendously important to me—through it I began to really understand my own body and recognize that no matter how limited, mine were strategic abilities.
I refused the surgery and made a dance.
NOTES
1. Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in FeministStudies/Critical Studies, Teresa de Lauretis, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 219.
2. Of course, it is important to recognize that almost every category of cultural identity predicated on the body (gender, class, race, sexuality, age, as well as ability) fits into this classical/grotesque divide.
3. Gus Solomons, Jr., "Seven Men," The Village Voice, March 17, 1992.
4. Melinda Ule-Grohol, Dance Movements in Time (Cleveland: Professional Flair, 1995), 1.
5. Ynestra King, "The Other Body," Ms., March/April 1993, 74.
6. One might argue that this is no mere historical coincidence, but rather a very specific social backlash against proactive groups working on disability issues. For further discussions of how society molds bodies into its own ideological images see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: the role of immunity in American culture from the days of Polioto the age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
7. Adam Benjamin, "In search of integrity," Dance Theatre Journal, 1993, 45.
8. Ibid, 44.
9. Chris de Marigny, "A Little World of Its Own," Ballet International, June 1993, 29.
10. Ibid, 29.
11. I am indebted to Jodi Falk for lending me a copy of the British TV program "Here and Now" that contained a spot on Toole's retirement. In her presentation at the 1996 CORD conference, Falk quoted a June 1996 review of Candoco which lamented his departure, calling the rest of the company a "competent but unremarkable bunch of dancers." See "Questioning the Dancing Body" by Jodi Falk in the 1996 CORD Conference Proceedings.
12. Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and AmericanCulture (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 186. For references to Judson Dance Theater see Sally Banes' work on the era, especially Terpsichore inSneakers and Democracy's Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962-1964.
13. Curt Siddall, "Contact Improvisation," East Bay Review, September 1976, cited in John Gamble, "On Contact Improvisation," The Painted Bride Quarterly 4 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), No.1 (Spring 1977), 36.
14. Steve Paxton, "3 Days," Contact Quarterly 17, No. 1 (Winter 1992), 13.
15. Ibid, 16.