Scaling Sustainability in Disability Dance by Margaret Bridger B.A
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Scaling Sustainability in Disability Dance BY Margaret Bridger B.A., Columbia College Chicago, 2011 THESIS Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Disability and Human Development in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2021 Chicago, Illinois Defense Committee: Carrie Sandahl, Chair and Advisor Akemi Nishida Alyson Patsavas ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis committee chair, Carrie Sandahl for her unwavering support, invaluable advice and endless kindness, as well as my committee members, Alyson Patasavas and Akemi Nishida, for their insight and generosity. Thank you to Emily Horowitz, Helen Rottier and Amanda Lautermilch for your constant support. To Sydney Erlikh, I could not have asked to be paired with a more giving, driven and committed creative and academic partner, thank you for everything you do for me and our community. To Kelsie Acton, Bailey Anderson, Mel Chua, Margaret Fink and Bianca Frazer – you each helped me think more deeply and compassionately about disability identity and experience. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and for your friendship. Thank you to my family for always supporting my creative and academic endeavors with incredible love and excitement and to Paul Krause for patiently reading every iteration of this project and ensuring that I laughed everyday while researching and writing this thesis. MB ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1 1.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................1 1.2 Review of Literature ....................................................................................4 1.2.1 Disability Dance & Emerging Disability Aesthetics ...................................6 1.2.2 Crip Time, Crip Ancestors and Crip Futurity ............................................10 1.2.3 Repertory, Aging and Pain in Performance ...............................................13 1.3 Methodology ..............................................................................................18 1.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................21 2 SUSTAINING THE FIELD: GINGER LANE......................................................23 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................23 2.2 The Artist Talk ...........................................................................................27 2.3 Flow ...........................................................................................................34 2.4 Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival ..............................................................42 3 SUSTAINING A BODYMIND: KRIS LENZO ...................................................48 3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................48 3.2 Sustainable Choreography .........................................................................54 3.3 Sustainable Movement ...............................................................................69 3.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................78 4 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................83 4.1 Enacting Repertoires of Pain .....................................................................83 CITED LITERATURE ..........................................................................................89 VITA ......................................................................................................................93 iii SUMMARY This thesis explores two challenges presented to traditional dance practices by disability dance and its artists – how to sustain a dance repertory when the work is built to fit the unique embodiments of disabled dancers and how to sustain the dancing bodymind in a field that often results in pain and injury for its practitioners. Each chapter performs a close reading of the disability aesthetics employed by a 3Arts Resident Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, examining how they, as disabled dance artists, explore and answer these questions in their own work. The first chapter looks at the work of Ginger Lane, arguing that the precise problem of unique, irreplaceable bodyminds, may actually constitute the very method by which disability dance can and should be created and passed down. The second chapter documents the work of Kris Lenzo and my own creative exploration of his concept of sustainable choreography to propose that thinking about pain in dance requires contending with the ways that pain and injury are understood both as a naturalized part of professional dancing and as a disqualifier for a career in dance. I conclude by grappling with the contradictions and possibilities inherent in imagining a sustainable field of disability dance that cares for the bodyminds making and performing the work, proposing a vision for danced repertories of pain. iv ABSTRACT The presence of disabled bodyminds in dance presents challenges to the function and production of repertoire, as well as traditional methods of conditioning the body to avoid pain and injury in dance training and choreography. Whereas repertory models of mainstream dance presume that dancing bodies function similarly and are therefore essentially interchangeable, these methods of movement and knowledge transfer must shift in order for the field of disability dance, built to fit the unique embodiments of its dancers, to sustain itself. Additionally, though mainstream dance demands that dancers train their bodies to reduce the possibility of pain or injury, disabled dancing bodyminds often already experience pain and injury that might signal the end of a performer’s career in mainstream dance. This thesis uses a close reading the disability aesthetics employed by two 3Arts Resident Fellows at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ginger Lane and Kris Lenzo, as well as my own embodied engagement with their work, to explore the tensions and possibilities between these two scales of sustainability in disability dance – that of the field and that of the bodymind. Drawing on work across dance studies, disability studies and performance studies, this critical theory project leverages a critique of normative practices in mainstream dance in order to imagine a sustainable disability dance field that passes repertoires of knowledge from bodymind to bodymind while insisting on the artistic value of pained, injured and aging bodyminds in the dancemaking process. v 1 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction By its very nature, dance made for and by disabled people presents exciting problems around repertory and bodily wellbeing. Because disability dance is set on disabled dancers and must therefore be built to fit the specific embodiment of each individual dancer, the ways in which a repertoire is built and knowledge is handed down must shift from the traditional methods used in mainstream dance, which assume that the bodies creating and performing a dance all move and function in approximately the same way and are therefore easily interchangeable with one another. Additionally, because disabled dancing bodyminds often already experience chronic pain and may be more likely to incur injury due to navigating a world and a field not built for them, disabled dance artists must build care for their bodies into their dancemaking practices in ways that differ from practices encouraged by mainstream dance, which focus largely on training and conditioning the dancing body out of pain, rather than how to dance with/in pain. In short, disability dance poses challenges to normative methods of both repertoire building and pain/injury avoidance and care. It is these two scales of sustainability in disability dance that this project explores. Drawing on the publicly presented work of two disabled dance artists and 3Arts Resident Fellows at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Ginger Lane and Kris Lenzo, I outline the ways that dance might be made more sustainable for dancing disabled bodyminds, as well as what it might take to sustain a field like disability dance. In many ways, this project is very practical in nature. It asks, what are the practices through and by which knowledge and choreography is transmitted from dancer to dancer? And how are dancers building care and recovery into the choreographic process and the staging of their work? What does the daily 2 practice of sustaining disability dance and disabled dancing bodies look like? It is also, however, an exercise in imagining a disability dance future, or multiple futures, where the disabled dancing bodymind is not just accommodated, but where disability itself is understood as the method through which knowledge and movement are generated and passed down. I use the term sustainability throughout this work in a few differing but specific ways. While the term has occasionally and inconsistently been taken up to articulate a move toward environmental awareness in the field of dance (Barbour, 2008; Greef, 2016), my work does not take up issues of environmentalism and its role in dance. Instead, I follow Lenzo’s use of the term “sustainable choreography,” created in collaboration with choreographer Sarah Cullen