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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
Fuller during his time as a 3Arts Resident Fellow at UIC, to mean the ways in which we might make dance that can be performed consistently over a period of time without further injury or harm to the body. Sustainable choreography is defined by disability studies and performance scholar and director of the fellowship program at UIC, Carrie Sandahl in a 2018 lecture as that which acknowledges the existence of pain and injury in the body and seeks to generate movement that does not cause further injury. It centers the unique experiences and limits of a particular body (“Time out”).
Additionally, when I speak to my own explorations of bodily sustainability, I begin to use the term “sustainable movement,” rather than sustainable choreography. The distinction between these two terms is subtle, but important. Sustainable movement is a more flexible term that may in fact reject the notion that movement must be fully set in order to be performed. Improvisation techniques and choreographic tools that allow for the work to shift in light of new bodily needs fit more comfortably under the term “movement” than “choreography.” Sustainable movement
3 also gestures towards the ways that pain and impairment might be thought of as a generative source of movement, rather than avoided altogether.
When looking at the scale of the field through Lane’s work, I use “sustainability” to refer to the ways that a creative field, disability dance, gets built and maintained through generations of artists. I am looking at the mechanisms through which knowledge is passed from bodymind to bodymind, whether through class and rehearsal or in less formal settings. This knowledge might include dancemaking tools, technical skills and rehearsal decorum, but may also include the administrative skills required to organize rehearsals, maintain a budget, and secure accessible performance space. Additionally, I grapple with how new generations may build upon or outright reject some of the knowledge and values of earlier artists. I want to understand this growth and expansion as key to the sustaining of the field and, in fact, argue that a field stagnates without this constant re-examination of artistic and cultural values.
Throughout this project, I draw a distinction between the fields of disability dance and
“mainstream” dance. In the context of this work, disability dance consists of disabled dance artists who make professional dance work on disabled bodies. By contrast, the mainstream is the professional, able bodied dance world that has traditionally excluded disabled bodies from training and performance. My use of the term “disability dance” differs from its use by scholars and disabled artists like Sandahl and disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light, who, as Sandahl points out in her 2018 article, “Disability arts and culture: A model for imaginative ways to integrate the community,” use it to refer to dance made exclusively by and for disabled people
(91-92), whereas I use it as a sort of umbrella term to refer to a field of dance that includes disabled dancers and may include non-disabled dancers. My use encompasses all of the various names we use to describe dance with disabled bodyminds, such as integrated, physically
4 integrated, inclusive, etc. I do this not to flatten out the differences in these different approaches, but instead to point to the ways that each approach may learn and benefit from understanding the other.
Similarly, though the primary sources for my analysis throughout this project are the work of Lenzo and Lane, who largely work in the field of physically integrated dance,1 my writing necessarily reflects my own commitment and interest in work that engages movers across various forms of impairment. As such, I follow Margaret Price (2015), Sami Schalk (2018) and others in disability studies in using the term “bodymind” to undermine the presumed primacy of physical impairment in disability dance, as well as to hint at the ways that impairment categories
(physical, mental, sensory, illness) are not actually as discreet as this categorization implies.
Price further defines and explains the term when, drawing on work from trauma studies, she proposes the term “bodymind” in her 2015 article “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain” as a practical way of quickly and concisely acknowledging the ways that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other,” and as a reminder that mental disability is an important category of analysis often overlooked in disability studies
(269). Though I use the term bodymind in my own analysis, I follow the word choice of authors themselves when summarizing their work, who typically use “body,” rather than “bodymind.”
1.2 Review of Literature
This thesis draws on writing from the fields of disability studies, dance studies, and performance studies in an effort to put them each into conversation with Lane, Lenzo’s and my
1 A form which typically includes physically disabled dancers, often dancers in wheelchairs or dancers with limb differences, and non-disabled dancers, but does not (at least consciously) seek out performers with other types of impairments. Sandahl discusses the limits of physically integrated dance in her 2018 article entitled, “Disability art and culture: A model for imaginative ways to integrate the community,” saying that though work in physically integrated dance offers some exciting challenges to mainstream dance, its inventiveness is often limited by the ways it prioritizes non-disabled ways of moving and understanding movement (88).
5 own work, as well as in conversation with one another. In addition, I look to the writings of dance artists, both disabled and non-disabled, and disability activists in order to understand the past, current and emerging conversations in each of these fields. I organize this literature into three categories based on themes that appear in the dances I analyze. The first section draws on dance studies scholars and disabled dancers’ writing to trace some of the developments in the field of disability dance and, in particular, the recent move toward disability aesthetics. The work included in this section helps me to place the pieces I analyze in the context of the wider field. I aim here to expose some of the tensions and opportunities within the field of disability dance, as well as between the disability and mainstream dance worlds, so that I may then show how Lane,
Lenzo and I navigate and intervene in these conversations.
I then look to disability studies scholars and disabled activists, beginning with a brief summary of Alison Kafer’s political/relational model of disability, first proposed in her 2013 book, Feminist, Queer, Crip, which I use throughout my analysis, before diving into theoretical work around the concepts of time, ancestry and futurity. A consideration of the particular ways in which disabled bodies experience time, as well as the ways in which disabled bodies are often constructed as out of time (see Kafer, 2015, Samuels, 2017), is essential to the concepts of bodily and creative sustainability for disabled dancers and our field. In this section, I provide an overview of different approaches of scholars and activists to the concept of time and begin to unpack the role of time to disability dance.
The third and final section in my literature draws on a combination of disability studies and performance studies scholars, as well as writings by choreographers, to address themes of repertory, aging and pain in performance. Each of these themes address the work of one of the artists whose work I plan to analyze. Lane’s concern with building and sustaining the field of
6 disability dance hinges upon tensions between traditional repertory company models and the ways that disability dance builds work around individual bodyminds and movement styles.
Lenzo’s sustainable choreography derives in many ways from his experience of aging and how the aging process impacts his movement and cognition. My own work deals with the ways that pain is constructed both as a necessary part of dance and as a hindrance to properly executing movement by trying to imagine pain as a generative part of the dancemaking process. By placing these three key themes together, I hope to expose some of the ways in which our work builds on existing conversations across disciplines, as well as the tensions and opportunities between sustaining our field and sustaining disabled dancing bodyminds.
1.2.1 Disability Dance & Emerging Disability Aesthetics
Dance Studies scholar, Ann Cooper Albright argues in her 1997 book, Choreographing
Difference that disabled dancing bodies hold the potential to challenge Western society’s preoccupation with the ideal body. She argues that the tendency, even in integrated dance companies, to erase the disabled body through the use of ableist rhetoric actively denies those bodies a place to exist within dance and society, though this is often done with the best intentions
(65). Although the very presence of a disabled body in a traditional dance space would seem inherently to debunk ableist stereotypes, the use of these bodies may, in fact, reify harmful assumptions. Albright addresses this in her discussion of physically integrated dance company,
Dancing Wheels’ problematic use of physically disabled, wheelchair using dancers. She argues that, although their work features disabled dancers, Dancing Wheels denies the bodily difference of these dancers in their choreography and promotional material. She points to their use of seemingly empowering rhetoric such as “victory of spirit over body” as producing the opposite effect, by essentially covering up and negating both the disabled body and the lived experience
7 of those bodies (66-67). Phrases like these are supported in the repertory of the company, when, for example, a disabled dancer might be lifted out of their chair by an extraordinarily able-bodied partner for a triumphant ending signaling the victory of the dancers’ spirit over their wheelchair
(70-71). Instead of simply acknowledging the reality of disability, Albright argues, these phrases and dances contain disability, providing a safe, non-threatening way for the non-disabled audience to comfortably watch the disabled body in performance.
Albright proposes Contact Improvisation as a possible answer to these discourses surrounding concert dance featuring disabled dancers (84). Its capacity to include a much wider range of disability and its active affirmation of each participant’s ability means that contact improvisation focuses less on conforming the disabled body to fit within the ableist society than simple acceptance of disability. Albright explains her own experience improvising with a group of dancers, saying that the open acknowledgement of disability as a continuum allowed participants to speak about their disabilities without the stigma that often keeps people from sharing their experiences (86-87). She also says that the act of dancing and coming into physical contact with dancers of varying abilities altered her own sense of the physical body and disability. Dancing alongside disabled improvisers and seeing them perform with non-disabled participants, she says, forced her own reexamination of classical conceptions of the dancing body.
Telory Davies, a performance studies scholar whose research centers around disability in performance, makes a similar argument regarding the development of modern dance in her 2008 chapter, “Mobility: AXIS Dancers Push the Boundaries of Access.” Here, Davies proposes that the original purpose of the form was to open dance up to the possibility of more diverse bodies and that it is uniquely situated to allow disabled bodies access to dance (44-48). However,
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Davies’ discussion the work of Bill T. Jones and Stephen Petronio set on AXIS Dance company
(48-52), does not deal with the fact that established, non-disabled choreographers are still often the ones directing the work and that they retrofit modern dance to disabled bodies, rather than generating new forms based in the experiences and bodyminds of disabled dancers.
Rather than taking established forms and placing them on top of bodies for which they were never intended, disabled dance artists are increasingly interested in making work that is built specifically for and from their bodies. Sandahl defines this type work as “new integrated dance” (“Disability art and culture” 92-93, 2018a). Sandahl’s definition of new integrated dance includes work that positions the movement of the disabled body as the creative impetus for the work. Unlike her definition of disability dance, which features only artists with disabilities, new integrated dance may include non-disabled artists, but insists on the disabled body as the defining aesthetic for the work. In order to begin to understand the possibilities for what this might look like in practice, I look to work by disabled dance artists and the ways in which they reimagine both the artistic process and product.
Disabled dance artist, Alice Sheppard has been on the forefront of developing what she and others call “disability aesthetics,” which she defines as work generated out of the specific embodiment of the dancer/choreographer. Disability aesthetics, Sheppard explains in her
“Intersectional Disability Arts Manifesto” published on her website in 2019, defines disability itself as an aesthetic which might inform each part of the creative process, whether that be an entire piece that is created from the particular movement of a disabled choreographer or a dancemaking process that is built to flex and change with the emerging needs of the bodyminds in the space. Disability aesthetics are, by definition, not one, codifiable thing, but instead a network of shifting values and explorations around what it means to create dance in a disabled
9 body, including those bodies that exist at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression. In this way, Sheppard asserts that the creation of disability aesthetics is not simply about the movement of disabled bodies, but instead is concerned with developing deeply explored, rigorous, intentional decision making processes regarding what our particular aesthetic is and, perhaps just as importantly, what it is not.
This shift toward disability aesthetics in dance most interests me in this project, as the concept offers the interesting challenges to what dance is or might be and demonstrates how disabled dancers actively intervene in normative ways of making, producing and viewing dance.
I find it necessary, though, to contend with the norms of the dance field that Albright and Davies address and how disabled dancers have attempted to insert themselves into these existing forms and structures. This is due in part to my primary source material. In many ways, Lenzo and, in particular, Lane trained and continue to build their work and careers on traditional repertory company models, even as their work stretches the boundaries of these models. In this section, then, I am concerned both with what we might find of use in existing paradigms of dance training and repertory creation, as well as what new avenues disability might offer for dancemaking and the field of dance. To accomplish this, I draw on the work of Toby MacNutt
(2018) and Laurel Lawson’s (Wiederholt, 2019a) theorizing around and generation of disability aesthetics in dance, as well as writing from non-disabled dancers and dance medicine practitioners such as Liz Hurt (2019), Andrea Watkins and Priscilla M. Clarkson (1990), whose writing about dance training and conditioning provides helpful insight into the ways that technical capacity, in the strictest sense, and artistic merit are often constructed as one and the same in mainstream dance.
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1.2.2 Crip Time, Crip Ancestors and Crip Futurity
Feminist disability studies scholar, Alison Kafer proposes a new, political/relational model of disability in her 2013 book Feminist Queer Crip. In Kafer’s model, disability is understood as inherently political and always emerging in relationship to a person’s surroundings, environment and other bodies (7). Kafer draws on foundational work in disability studies that identifies and explains the ways that disability is typically understood as individualized, medicalized and depoliticized, while also arguing that this early work, in shifting the “problem” of disability from the bodymind to societal barriers to access,2 often has the unintended effect of minimizing the lived experience and political relevance of impairment, therefore eliminating impairment as a potential mode of analysis. Drawing on the feminist assertion that the personal is political, as well as critiques of the social model from disability studies and the disability community, Kafer argues that impairment is in fact both social and political. This shift in thinking opens up a new analytical lens that complicates a strict social or minority model understanding of disability.
In writing about the political/relational model, Kafer deepens the traditional understanding of crip time, traditionally thought of as the need that disabled bodyminds have for more time as they go about the tasks of daily living. Kafer argues that crip time is, in fact, “flex time not just expanded but exploded” (27). That is, crip time actively works against a conception of time in which bodies must conform to any predetermined way of being, but instead flexes to make room for bodies that need to move slowly, but also those that need to stim, move quickly,
2 Kafer draws in particular on the work of Michael Oliver, who first articulated the social model of disability in 1983. The social model locates disability in societal barriers that restrict full political, social and economic participation for people with impairments. Oliver contrasts this with the individual model of disability, which he argues constitutes the normative understanding of disability and locates the “problem” of disability in the individual, rather than societal barriers and attitudes (Oliver, 30-33).
11 erratically or even those that need to stop altogether. Crip time understands the precarity of the human body and makes room for those bodies to do what they need to get by. Kafer contrasts crip time with curative time, which understands bodies solely in relationship to their capacity for cure (27). Curative time is regimented and demands that bodies constantly move toward cure or rehabilitation.
Ellen Samuels, another disability studies scholar, takes Kafer’s work as a starting point to explore the less-often talked about negative aspects of living in crip time in her 2017 article Six
Ways of Looking at Crip Time. While she states that she values the ways that crip time has helped her to develop her own understanding of “normal” around which to organize her life, the aging process has called her attention to the more challenging and less liberatory ways that her crip body experiences the passage of time. Among the six aspects of time that Samuels identifies is that crip time is time travel. Here, crip bodies inherently challenge the assumed linearity of time as some young bodies experience symptoms more readily associated with aging, some bodies continue to be perceived as young even as they age, and some are treated as children even as they are obviously adults and/or elders. Samuels argues that in this understanding of crip time, the passage of time is experienced not as a straight line, but instead in “jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings.” She is careful to assert that we might hold on to the joy we find in crip time, even as we reckon with what it takes from us. Samuels offers a deeply complex understanding of the ways that crip bodyminds experience time or have time imposed upon them, simultaneously exploring both the pleasure and the pain of existing as a crip body in time.
Her work hints at the ways that crip time is always in tension with Kafer’s concept of curative time and the very real ways that this complicates crip experiences of time.
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In their 2018 book, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, poet, author and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha introduces the concept of the “disability doula,” which was originally proposed in a social media post by activist Stacey Milbern, to explain the process by which disabled people assist one another in being “birthed” into disability culture (240). This process, Piepzna-Samarsinha explains, is inherently rooted in the practice of disability justice. By building in roads toward culture and belonging for disabled people, activists and artists are actively working against dominant cultural perceptions of disability and toward a more just society (241).
Shortly after discussing disability doula-ing, Piepzna-Samarsinha discusses “crip ancestors” and the radical act of disabled bodyminds looking back to their predecessors while also looking forward to a world that honors the work of those crip ancestors. Because disabled people are disappeared both from history and imaginings of the future, Piepzna-Samarsinha argues, part of the work of disability justice is both recovering/embodying the legacies of crip ancestors and dreaming a liberatory future for disabled bodyminds (248-249). Kafer makes a similar point about crip futures when she examines the ways in which even supposedly progressive, feminist futures cannot conceive of a just future that includes disabled bodyminds
(27-28).
In both chapters and my conclusion, I draw heavily on Kafer’s political/relational model of disability in order to point to the ways that, as disabled dance artists, Lane, Lenzo and I engage with our own and others’ experiences of impairment as a foundational aspect of our creative, administrative, academic and/or activist work. Time, being one of the basic elements of dance, will almost always be necessary to contend with in critical work about the process and product of dance. As discussed in this section, time has also emerged as an important element of
13 the disability experience and has been taken up by the above authors and others, such as the disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid (Tovah, 2016). Disability scholars and activists contend not only with the ways that disabled bodies experience time, but also the ways that they written out of time and the processes by which they might be recovered. Through the work of these authors, I propose mainstream dance as inherently curative and theorize Lane,
Lenzo’s and my own strategic positioning of our experiences of impairment and disability as politicized and relational as an effort to intervene in those demands, alongside critiques of those moments where we fall back into curative patterns of dancemaking and training.
1.2.3 Repertory, Aging and Pain in Performance
Dance critic Marcia B. Siegel challenges traditional understandings of the use and function of repertoire in her 1996 article on the reconstruction of Doris Humphrey’s work entitled, “Humphrey’s Legacy: Loss and Recall.” Siegel explains and explores the process through which choreography is passed down, rejecting an understanding of repertoire as static and of dance more broadly as easily and consistently reproducible. Looking first to Labanotation, which she identifies as the most common and reliable method for passing down and archiving choreography, she argues that even this is prone to “potential slippages” in aiding the full reconstruction of work in the way that the choreographer originally intended (5). Noting the common comparison between Labanotation and Western music notation, Siegel states that
Labanotation is at a disadvantage partly because it lacks the widespread understanding of music notation, but partly because bodies are not analogous to musical instruments and will often interpret even the same movement in different ways (6). It is unclear how Siegel reconciles the body’s presence in playing and singing music with this statement, but her point that bodies move differently, are trained differently, and that these differences in dancing bodies are not typically
14 mediated by standardized instruments holds. Additionally, Siegel argues that Labanotation lacks a method of marking the context surrounding the notations. A notation taken down by the choreographer or someone intimately involved in the dancemaking process during or immediately after its setting, she states, is different than one recorded from memory many years later (5-6). Questions of authenticity and ownership arise throughout the process from initial notation to the transfer of that notation onto bodies and finally in the performance of the work.
Turning to the use of technology as a method of transfer, Siegel states that though this method may seem to more authentically document the choreographer’s vision and the dancer’s execution of that vision, and is certainly more easily accessible for dancers and directors, that video is still an interpretation that comments on the original choreography, rather than purely recreating it (7).
Having documented some of the barriers to and questions around maintaining and passing down repertory, Siegel calls for dance artists to engage with choreographers beyond the archival footage and notation of their work (8-9). She states, about Humphrey in particular, that there is a tendency to mythologize her and that neither staging reconstructions of her work without the context of her theoretical and cultural influences nor engaging solely with her theoretical developments as a jumping off point for reinterpretation will work against that mythologization and bring Humphrey and her work into being on a new stage. “I would like to see her entering our dance and life, and influencing it,” Siegel writes, “rather than visiting us once in a while as an honored but mysterious guest” (9). Through her explanation of the hazards surrounding dance notation and recreation and her final call to engage an artist fully in the reconstruction process, Siegel troubles and then deepens what it means to thoughtfully and effectively utilize repertoire.
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In a 1984 essay entitled, “Preface to teaching dance to senior adults” about her creative process, dancer and choreographer Liz Lerman shares lesson learned while setting3 a piece about the loss of her mother to cancer on senior adults. In searching for a population of older dancers to develop the piece with, Lerman landed in a retirement home called Roosevelt for Senior Citizens
(41). Documenting her weekly dance classes in the residence, she explains the ways that her own understandings about dance, teaching and life in general were challenged simply by engaging in movement with these senior citizens (41). Explaining the specific ways that her teaching had to shift to account for the needs of her aging dancers, Lerman noticed that engagement in a movement practice often challenged the medical labels (such as senility) that had been placed on her dancers by allowing them to explore new ways of relating to their bodies and one another
(42). While Lerman was clear about the artistic value of these new ways of dancing and thinking about dance, she notes that while observers often noted the rehabilitative value of dance for this population, they rarely understood the inherent artistic value and challenge of setting work on senior citizens (43). Although Lerman’s observations provide insights into the ways that our society understands who should/can dance and why, she often centers her own experience and the experiences of her college students, who she eventually brings in to dance with the residents of the Roosevelt (44-47). In doing this, Lerman undermines her own project of shedding light on the physical and artistic capacity of her older dancers by examining instead the improvements in movement, technique and general understanding gained by her non-disabled, young college class of dancers. Through this lens, the question becomes what happens when these older bodies are the primary artist, rather than the executor of a younger artists’ vision and what challenges might this work offer to the disability dance world, as well as mainstream dance?
3 A term used in dance to describe the process by which new or repertory work is choreographed, rehearsed, staged and performed on/by dancers
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In analyzing the work of queer, sick performance artist, Bob Flanagan from a critical disability studies perspective, Kateřina Kolářová ultimately argues in her 2010 article,
Performing the Pain: Opening the (Crip) Body for (Queer) Pleasures that pain is a powerful analytic for understanding disability, but only once our attention shifts from the solely material, individualized experience of pain to the relational and situational aspects of pain. First providing a brief overview of previous research on pain that argues current understandings construct pain as a fully individualized experience that, by definition, cannot be communicated or felt by another body (44), Kolářová looks at the ways that Flanagan’s queer, crip art challenges this dominant understanding of pain. Looking at Flanagan’s exhibition, Visiting Hours, Kolářová explores the ways that the work undermines medicalized understandings of pain by transforming a staged hospital into a site of sexualized, sadomasochistic pleasure/pain on display through x- rays, waiting room magazines and video footage played on screens meant to represent different parts of Flanagan’s body (45-46). Moving away from a discussion of how pain is understood,
Kolářová argues that Flanagan’s work instead calls our attention to what pain does. Instead of, or perhaps alongside, considering pain as an individual experience, Kolářová here looks at pain as a cultural product. This shifting of the discourse around pain from what it is to what it does challenges the isolation that is understood as inherent to experiences of pain (46-47). In making this shift, Kolářová opens up new possibilities of understanding and communicating pain through art and analysis.
Disability studies scholar and performance artist, Petra Kuppers challenges the
“invisibility” of conditions like mental disability and experiences of pain in her 2005 chapter entitled, “Bodies, Hysteria, Pain: Staging the Invisible.” Here, Kuppers exposes the ways that the public was taught to read hysteria in medical performances orchestrated by Jean Martin Charcot
17 in the late nineteenth century. Through these performances, Charcot developed what Kuppers terms a “machinery of visibility,” wherein an internal state is made visible through performance spectacles, but only ever legitimized through the medicalizing presence of Charcot himself in these performances (148-152). In contemporary performance, then, Kuppers argues that invisibly disabled artists must contend with this medicalized machinery of visibility in their own work.
Kuppers draws on two video works that she was involved with in order to explore the ways that invisibly disabled dancers are creating new ways of signifying difference outside of the medicalized machinery described in Charcot’s performances. For Kuppers, the use of video is key to directing the audience on how to perceive these bodies and come to terms with their own internalized assumptions about what disability is and looks like (158). These performances do not seek to normalize or systematize disability experiences, Kuppers argues, but instead to create space for the variety of ways that disabled bodies and minds experience the world (153-154).
While invisibly disabled bodies must always contend with the machinery developed and enforced by performative medical professionals like Charcot, the use of video and centering of bodily experience in these two pieces provides the opportunity to think in complicated ways about what invisible disability and pain are and how they might inform and appear through the creative process.
With this section, I hope to begin thinking in more complex ways about what disability dance is, or as Kolářová might say what it does, and especially what it does when placed in relationship to other marginalized forms of embodiment. Themes of exclusion from mainstream, rejection of medicalization/individualization and finding liberation in community, physical engagement and relationality outlined in work on pain and aging mirrors and builds on writing about disability. In placing the aging, pained performing bodyminds in conversation with the
18 disabled dancing bodymind, I propose that each of these categories offer productive challenges to the concepts of repertoire and sustainability. Using Siegel’s complication of the repertory model and her insistence on the centrality of the theoretical and cultural work of the choreographer in staging repertory, I argue that aging, pained and disabled bodies may not in fact exist in opposition to repertory, but instead that we deploy our own politicized, relational understanding of our experiences, work and aesthetics to reimagine the purpose of the repertory.
In order to begin to think through sustaining disabled bodies, we must attend to the ways that they experience the world differently, (though I acknowledge that the few different types of embodiment this project takes up does not account for the full range of difference present among disabled dancing bodyminds) and in order to sustain the field of disability dance, I propose that it is necessary to acknowledge the ways that the field continues to uphold other forms of oppression, even as it seeks to create space for disabled bodies. In order to begin unpacking these complex and intersecting worlds, I draw on the work of, in addition to those outlined above, disability studies scholars Margaret Price (2015) and Alyson Patsavas (2014, 2019), and dance studies scholar Nanako Nakjima (2011), as well as the writings of aging dance artists and critics collected in a special issue of the Performing Arts Journal in 1994 (Marranca, et al).
1.4 Methodology
This project springs directly from the respective “representational conundrums” that
Lenzo and Lane explored during their time as 3Arts Resident Fellows in the Department of
Disability and Human Development (DHD) at UIC. The term “representational conundrum” was coined by Sandahl and defined in her 2018 article, “Using our words: Exploring representational conundrums in disability drama and performance" to explain questions about disability representation that may not have a clear answer, but still stimulate valuable thought and
19 engagement around how to effectively represent the disability experience in art (130). While serving as the graduate assistant for the fellowship, I had the opportunity to closely observe and aid in the creative and archival process of Lane’s work. Additionally, though Lenzo’s fellowship predated my time in the program, I had multiple opportunities to see Lenzo’s work generated during the fellowship and hear him speak about this work several times. This project documents
Lane and Lenzo’s work and further articulates and explores the conundrum of sustainability in disability dance using their questions and practices as inspiration for my own artistic exploration and reflection. Following Sandahl’s lead, I recognize from the beginning that there may not be a clear answer or, more likely, may be several exciting answers to the dual conundrums of sustaining the field of disability dance and sustaining disabled dancing bodyminds.
This is a critical theory project wherein I draw on disability studies and dance studies scholarship to read Lane and Lenzo’s work, as well as their own publicly-presented perspectives on their work, separately and then against one another, drawing on my own embodied experience as a disabled dancer to more deeply explore the concepts each artist developed during their fellowship. I read their perspectives, documented through artist talks, podcasts, news articles and the final reports compiled by Sandahl about their fellowships, not to guide my reading of their artistic output, but instead to get a practical sense of how they approach the topic of sustainability and point to draw out their contributions to the field of disability dance. In their dance work, I look for clues as to what sustainability looks like in practice/performance. What does sustainability of the body value and how does that appear through the work? How might this be different than the values it requires to sustain a field? Do these two scales of sustainability cooperate nicely, or is there some tension between the two concepts?
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In the chapter entitled “Sustaining a Field: Ginger Lane,” I use Lane’s artist talk given at the culmination of her fellowship as a jumping off point to think through sustaining the field of disability dance. I perform a close reading of her 2019 work, Flow, along with two other pieces created before her residency, tracing the lineage of mentorship through these dances, as well as her arts organizing and advocacy. Drawing on the work of performance scholars, educators and critics like Siegel, I work in this chapter to theorize repertoire not simply as dance passed from body to body, but instead as a complex network of embodied cultural knowledge that moves in and through the bodyminds of Lane and her dancers. With this theoretical grounding, I argue that the precise problem of unique, irreplaceable bodyminds, which Lane identifies as a hindrance to the effective reproduction of disability dance, may actually, if understood through the lens of disability aesthetics and the political/relational model of disability, constitute the very method by which disability dance can and should be created and passed down.
In the chapter entitled “Sustaining a Bodymind: Kris Lenzo,” I analyze the work of
Lenzo, a former wheelchair athlete and current professional dancer with Momenta in Oak Park,
IL, alongside my own work in sustainable movement. Looking at Lenzo’s work, The
Journeyman, choreographed in 2017 in collaboration with Sarah Cullen Fuller, I take up and explore their concept of sustainable choreography in order to begin to understand the ways that sustaining a body plays out through the choreographic process. I argue in this chapter 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. Through Lenzo’s politicized understanding of impairment and his creative relationships with Cullen Fuller and Sandahl, as well as my own framing of pain as a generative partner in the dancemaking process, this chapter argues that, in order to sustain disabled dancing bodyminds,
21 we need to simultaneously work against the disabling impacts of dance while also insisting on the artistic value of pained, aging disabled bodyminds in dance.
I conclude by putting these two scales of sustainability in disability dance in conversation with one another. I contend in this section with the contradictions and possibilities inherent in imagining a sustainable field of disability dance that cares for the bodyminds making and performing the work. Drawing on the work of disability studies scholar, Alyson Patsavas in creating an “archive of pain,” I explore here what a repertory of pain might look, feel and move like, arguing that, if our field is to sustain itself, attending to and valuing our own experiences of pain and impairment must be central to our processes and performances.
1.5 Conclusion
This final conundrum constitutes the driving question behind this project and my primary interest in putting Lenzo and Lane’s work in conversation with one another. In my experience of watching Lenzo and Lane’s work, hearing them speak about their work and my embodied experience of working with Lane and applying Lenzo’s ideas to my own creative practice, I found some tension between the process of sustaining the field of disability dance and of sustaining the bodyminds that make up that field. Building and sustaining a field requires constant physical, mental and emotional labor that bodyminds are simply not built to withstand.
This is clear from the ways that dance is actively disabling for even those non-disabled dancers that take their care and training extraordinarily seriously, not to mention the added physical, structural, social, and various other stresses that impairment adds to dance training and a career in dance.
I do not, however, see this tension as unresolvable or a failure of the form. Instead, this tension and disabled dancers’ attempts to navigate it may be one of the most valuable, interesting
22 and liberating lessons to be gained from disabled dancing bodies. The ultimate work of this thesis is to imagine a field that is not only sustainable, but actively rejects the mainstream model of dance that insists on the breakdown of dancing bodyminds. Though there certainly exists some tension between these two scales of sustainability, the effort to build a dancemaking process that accounts for the needs of its dancers and understands those needs as an essential part of the work is necessary if the field of disability dance is to continue. My goal with this project is simply to document, analyze and complicate Lane and Lenzo’s work in addressing these conundrums so that we as a field might learn from their work and begin envisioning a sustainable future for disability dance and disabled dancing bodyminds.
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2. SUSTAINING A FIELD: GINGER LANE
2.1 Introduction
Ginger Lane was the 3Arts Resident Fellow at UIC for the spring semester of 2019.
Lane’s goal for her fellowship was to create a new dance work, Flow, that, as she put it in her project proposal, explores “how movement is expressed through the lifespan, translated and passed down in order to ensure the continuation of integrated, inclusive dance as part of the larger Disability Arts & Culture movement” (Sandahl, Ginger Lane Spring 2019 Residency
Report 1, 2019). Additionally, Lane restaged past work, set a new piece on members of the
Chicago inclusive dance community, was a guest on the Dancecast podcast with Silva
Laukkanen and mentored graduate students and younger dance artists like myself with an interest in dance and disability. The fellowship period concluded in May 2019 with an artist talk entitled
“Creating Legacy: Furthering the Art of Dance Through the Art of Disability.” Legacy became the driving concept behind Lane’s fellowship. As a dance artist in her eighties preparing to retire and pass on her artistic and activist roles to younger generations of disabled people, Lane primarily concerned herself during her fellowship with reflecting on the legacy of her work through dance. Through Flow, as well as the archival, mentoring and presenting work undertaken during the fellowship period, Lane developed and deployed aesthetic and administrative solutions to ensure the sustainability of Chicago’s integrated dance field.
Over the course of her fellowship, her interest in legacy became linked with the idea of generating, documenting and passing on an integrated dance repertoire. This conceptual tie becomes clear when Lane is asked by Dancecast host Silva Laukkanen during the podcast recorded over the course of her fellowship period in 2019 about her hopes both for herself and for the field. Lane answers that she wants to see more disabled dancers and choreographers
24 making work for the express purpose of building an integrated dance repertoire. She acknowledges, however, that this is no simple task. Disabled bodies pose challenges to traditional repertory models that assume the bodies performing the work are effectively interchangeable. “For example,” Lane says, “you can take a work by Martha Graham4 and you can set it – as long as the technique is there – you can set it on any number of people.” However, when the work is built on disabled bodies to suit the movement style, quality and range of motion of those particular bodies, the act of resetting that same work on new bodies is more complicated and, Lane explains, requires “a lot of adaptation, and a lot of collaboration (…) and a lot of experimentation.”
In order to begin thinking of building a disability dance repertoire, we must first come to terms with the ways that disabled people interested in dance are excluded from training at every level, from childhood dance studios through professional training in academia and with existing companies. Disabled dancer and choreographer Laurel Lawson explains this as not simply an issue of access, but as indicative of normative assumptions around which bodies can and should dance in her 2019 interview with Emmaly Wiederholt for website Stance on Dance (“Laurel
Lawson: ‘We're Fighting for Artistic Acceptance’”, 2019a). Even if disabled bodies can physically get into dance studios, Lawson argues, the teachers likely do not know how to teach people in wheelchairs or on crutches, and while adult disabled dancers may be able to “cope” with untrained instruction, that burden should not be placed on children who are still learning their bodies. This lack of training and disability awareness for instructors, or, to build on
4 Disabled dance scholar and artist Bailey Anderson is currently working on a project that complicates this simplified picture of Martha Graham as non-disabled through archival research that attempts to understand her chronic pain and mental illnesses as disability. This work is vital in exposing the ways that disabled bodies have been invisibilized in dance history but reaches beyond the scope of this project.
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Lawson’s argument, lack of disability-identified instructors, risks “further othering” disabled dancing bodies.
Because of these ways that disabled bodies are excluded from mainstream dance training, the building of disability dance repertoire must intentionally include the type of mentorship Lane undertakes in her work, or, drawing on Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha’s concept of disability doula outlined in the introduction, disability dance doula-ship (240). In another 2019 interview with Emmaly Wiederholt for Stance on Dance, disabled dance artist Alice Sheppard calls this intentional recovery of dance and disability lineages a “network of legacy,” which allows her to trace the disabled dancers, artists and scholars that have informed her understanding of dance in a disabled body and the possibilities disability offers the creative process (“Alice Sheppard: ‘I want to build a network of legacy’”, 2019b). Sheppard links the importance of mentorship and collaboration to the dearth of training opportunities available to her as a disabled dancer, saying that much of her thinking around the value of disability perspectives in the artistic process comes from scholars and work happening in other disciplines. The necessity of this supplemental approach, Sheppard states, derives from not only disabled dancers’ lack of access to effective training, but the ways that we are therefore cut off from the histories of disability in dance.
Through this lens, then, Lane’s mentorship of younger disabled and non-disabled dancers interested in exploring integrated dance, as well as her archival, activist and programmatic labor, become a much needed intervention in a field that lacks the formal, institutional support of mainstream dance.
With the dual goal of documenting and analyzing Lane’s labor in creating and sustaining the field of integrated dance in Chicago, I have organized this chapter by the three major projects of Lane’s fellowship. I begin at the end of Lane’s fellowship with her artist talk, teasing out the
26 key themes that Lane identifies in her choreographic and organizing work, including mentorship, legacy and the construction of repertoire. Lane’s own sense of her role in sustaining the field of disability dance acts as the lens through which I understand and explicate the relationship between legacy, futurity and the repertoire in this section. I draw on the work of Kafer and
Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha to understand the ways that both looking back to disability dance past and looking forward to disability dance futures exist in tension with dominant conceptions of disability. Lane’s explanation of her own integrated dance repertoire, as well as the key role that mentorship plays for Lane in the creation of that repertoire, I argue in this section, provides models for passing down and further developing disability dance knowledge.
I then move to a close reading of Flow, revisiting the questions Lane brings up about the sustainability of a field so deeply dependent on the individual bodies performing the work, and propose Lane’s use of disability aesthetics and relational understandings of disability enables the passing down of knowledge to her dancers through the creation of repertoire. Drawing on an expanded and complex understanding of repertoire as embodied, performed knowledge and
Kafer’s political/relational model of disability, I propose that the key to knowledge production and transmission in disability dance lies in the disability aesthetics of Flow, which require a deep attention to the differences in movement quality on the part of Lane, her dancers and ultimately the audience.
Lastly, I recount my experience of the 2019 Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, including
Lane’s workshop where she set a new piece on attendees. Here, I begin the work of articulating the tensions between sustaining individual bodies and sustaining a field using my own reflections as a dancer and assistant during Lane’s workshop. In this section, I underscore the active planning and labor that it takes to ensure that the field of disability dance does not perpetuate
27 many of the ableist demands that mainstream dance places on bodies before diving into how
Lenzo addresses those demands in his choreographic work in the next chapter
2.2 The Artist Talk
During her artist talk, entitled “Creating Legacy” and held at UIC’s Gallery 400 in May of 2019, Lane proposes her artistic, mentoring and programmatic work in Chicago’s integrated dance world as an active effort to build and sustain the field. Over the course of the event, Lane covered her background in dance both before and after acquiring her disability, showed clips from and traced themes of relationality, partner work and disability aesthetics through three of her works and ended with a reflection on her work with CounterBalance, Chicago’s annual integrated dance concert.
Lane began her talk by situating her work as emerging from the larger Disability Arts and
Culture movement, defining her artistic and administrative work in the disability community as inherently and explicitly political. Early in the event, Lane states, “I want my dancemaking to be a positive statement that embraces many different types and styles of movement, that shines a light on the value and possibilities of inclusive dance, that judges the artistic merit of the work and the dancer, that strives for excellence and virtuosity, and hopefully moves the conversation forward.” Part of this, she says later in the talk, includes creating pathways into the field for new disabled dance artists, expanding ideas around what dance might be and creating spaces for inclusive dance to be performed.
In these moments, Lane draws explicit links between her artistic work, her activist work, and mentorship, introducing both political and relational understandings of disability and her creative process. Not only that, the political and relational rely on one another in Lane’s work in ways similar to Kafer’s political/relational model of disability outlined in the introduction of this
28 thesis. By situating her work as a way to assert the value and possibility of disability in dance, she draws on politicized understandings of the disability experience to inform her artistic process and product while proposing her mentorship of younger artists as an extension of both her artistic and activist labor.
Having explained a bit about her current work and goals, Lane moves on to speak about her training as a dancer before acquiring her disability, showing how this current work exists in relationship not only to her dancers and her activist work, but also to her former training as a non-disabled dancer. She says that she grew up as most young girls of her time practicing ballet and idolizing Margot Fonteyn. Music was a key part of Lane’s early training as the accompanist for her classes insisted that the students learn and understand music. These influences appear throughout Lane’s work, even as her movement grows, in her own words, more “subtle.” In explaining her creative process, Lane says she builds from music and focuses on a lyrical, seamless aesthetic, though she begins to point to some of the tensions between her aesthetic preferences based in the clean and expressive lines of classical ballet and her diminishing capacity to meet those aesthetic criteria. To address this, Lane says that her movement deepens and becomes more and more detailed as her range of motion becomes more limited, saying, “you become more subtle in expressing the emotion.” With this, Lane intentionally distances herself from adaptive approaches to dance, which impose codified techniques like ballet onto disabled bodies for which they were never intended, while still acknowledging that her affinities and practices are heavily influenced by her pre-disability training in ballet. She positions herself not only in relationship to other disabled dancers by expressing her interest and commitment to building work that “shines a light on the value and possibilities” of their bodyminds, but also in relationship to her former training as it informs her aesthetic preferences and creative process.
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Moving back to her more recent work, Lane focuses on three pieces developed with the dancers of MOMENTA Dance Company in Oak Park, Illinois, just west of Chicago. Through these three pieces, Prayer, Imperfect and Flow, as well as the other archival and documentation work of her residency, Lane retroactively constructs and documents her own integrated dance repertoire, which, as she shared in the Dancecast podcast, is a primary concern of this stage in her dance career. In this interview Lane presents a fairly rigid understanding of the repertoire, which Siegel, whose work I summarized in my introductory chapter, challenges as she recounts the successes and failures of efforts to restage the work of Doris Humphrey. Siegel’s understanding of repertory models as mediated by the method of translation (labanotation, video, etc.), as well as her insistence that reproduction of repertory work should contend with the theoretical and cultural background of the choreographer, offers a far more complex view of the repertory model than the traditional understanding outlined by Lane on the podcast. Though
Lane speaks about reconstruction of the repertoire in mainstream dance as a relatively straightforward task, Siegel’s work helps to explain the ways that dance artists engage similar questions to those that Lane poses in her call for building an integrated dance repertoire. Lane is not alone in wondering how repertoire is constructed or what it does for the preservation of cultural knowledge.
A written conversation about the role of repertory and reconstruction in academic dance programs published in the Spring 1997 Dance Research Journal, dancer and choreographer
James Penrod further addresses these questions around the relationship between knowledge transfer and the repertoire directly (Ginsburg). Penrod argues for the essential role of repertory in contextualizing and preserving dance knowledge. Though he acknowledges some of the challenges that Siegel identifies in resetting work from the repertoire, he believes that engaging
30 the repertoire in a multiplicity of ways – philosophically, kinesthetically, historically, etc. – underscores the essential role of dance in the artistic and cultural life of human beings, which he sees as all too often downplayed due to the ephemeral nature of dance (4). Though Penrod’s argument addresses academic dance programs specifically, he expands this call to all “dance organizations” with the resources for and interest in preserving dance repertoires (5). In Penrod’s understanding of the repertoire, we might begin to understand the ways that preserving dance not only preserves choreography, but also preserves cultural knowledge.
Lane begins her discussion of her past work with Prayer, a duet that she choreographed in 2009. This piece focuses on remembrances, with both Lane and her dance partner, Anita
Fillmore-Kinney, having just lost loved ones at the time the piece was choreographed. Lane speaks in her artist talk about Prayer becoming a way for both she and Fillmore-Kinney to work through their experience of loss. Lane, in particular, became a sort of artistic stand-in for
Fillmore-Kinney’s loved one. Importantly, Prayer also introduces the movement theme of younger, non-disabled dancers (often mentees of Lane’s) laying across Lane’s lap, which Lane traces through each of the three pieces she discusses in her talk. Lane shares that she only noticed this theme of physically supporting other dancers as she looked back at these three works and seems deeply interested in this creative choice that seems to mirror the mentoring relationship she develops with each of the dancers in these works. In this piece, Lane says, she begins to explore what new opportunities for movement her disability held, particularly in relationship to her younger, non-disabled partner. She and Fillmore-Kinney’s partner work, especially Lane’s ability to hold and support Fillmore-Kinney, becomes essential to Lane’s understanding of her own movement and dancing body in a way that mirrors their relationship off stage.
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The second piece Lane spoke about and showed was Imperfect, another duet with a new partner, Susan Ojala Myers, choreographed in 2018. In this work, Lane talks about deepening her interest in generating movement specific to the bodies in the piece. Imperfect explores the
“perfection” present in bodies deemed too old, too pained or too disabled by societal standards.
Lane accomplishes this by exploring stillness and valuing unique interpretations of movement, rather than insisting on uniformity and flattening difference, another theme that emerges for Lane across her body of work and in particular in the second two pieces she speaks about.
Additionally, her exploration of the relationship between the two bodies and the lived experiences of those bodies deepens in Imperfect. Lane explains that Ojala Myers’ age (she is older than Kinney was in Prayer) and their similar training background meant that they were able to communicate almost effortlessly throughout the rehearsal process and that they moved together easily. Imperfect continues the thread of Lane physically supporting non-disabled, younger dancers as they lay on or across her lap.
In Flow, Lane continues the trends of relationality through partnering work, but the relationships become more complicated and deeper. Flow features four dancers, including Lane, one disabled dancer in a manual wheelchair and two dancers with no apparent5 disabilities. With four dancers on the stage, each constantly moving toward or away from one another and in and out of different pairings, the relationship represented on stage is one of communal becoming rather than two people in relationship with one another. In this piece, Lane functions as the clear instigator that literally draws the others on stage both in real life by casting each of the three
5 Later in “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” Price draws on her own earlier work to argue that the concept of “apparition” may be more appropriate to describe those disabilities that have often been considered “non-visible” or “invisible,” such as chronic illness, mental disability and neurodivergence, emphasizing the ways that behaviors and affects associated with these disabilities may be situationally legible depending on the other bodies in the space and their own relationship to disability (272).
32 dancers and also in the piece as she begins on stage alone, slowly and methodically pulling each of the others out from the wings and onto the stage. Again, in this piece, Lane at one point or another supports each of the other three dancers as they lay across her lap, but also directs them in supporting and engaging with one another.
Drawing on Siegel’s complex understanding of the ways that repertoire is passed down and the potential hazards of reconstructing work without the appropriate context, as well as
Penrod’s emphasis on the essential role of the repertoire in providing context and cultural knowledge to new generations of dance artists, Lane’s own description and theorization of her work offers an opportunity to think through the specificities of building a repertoire – that is a body of work and/or a body of knowledge that might be transmitted from bodymind to bodymind
– for disabled dancing bodyminds. I propose that these three pieces act as a staging of Lane’s mentorship work and that, for disability dance in particular, this work is essential to the production of a repertoire. In taking on these projects with various younger dancers, Lane’s repertoire constitutes not simply a body of integrated dance work, but an active effort to pass down knowledge and expand the disability dance community in Chicago. In each of these pieces,
Lane supports and moves her partners in meaningful ways, as a choreographer, as a dance partner and, ultimately, as a mentor. Through this lens, Lane’s emphasis on the themes of honoring each dancer’s individual movement style and literally supporting her dancers as they move around the stage together become danced metaphors for the work she does back stage and in the rehearsal studio to pass not only repertoires of movement, but also repertoires of knowledge on to the next generation of integrated dance.
Lane, through the three pieces outlined during her talk, stages her own disability dance doula work. Not only because in each of these pieces she takes on the role of mentor, guide or
33 doula as she literally carries the younger dancers around the stage, but because through the creative process she actively trains dancers in integrated dance and, therefore, works toward a more sustainable field. In particular, Lane’s situating of her dance work as expressly linked with her political advocacy work and situated within the legacy of the disability arts and culture movement aligns with Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha’s description of disability doula work as essential to the work of disability justice.
Through Lane’s disability dance doula work, then, we might also understand legacy as always linked with futurity. Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha makes a similar move when, shortly after discussing disability doula-ing, she discusses “crip ancestors.” Essential to the concept of crip ancestry for Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha are the ways that disabled bodies are often imagined as lacking a future, or that a liberatory future is necessarily understood as one without disability (248-249). With this in mind, the act of looking back to our crip ancestors becomes a simultaneous practice of recognizing the value and knowledge of the crips that came before and envisioning a future that honors and builds on those knowledges. In situating herself as part of a larger network of disability art and culture legacy and birthing a new generation of dance artists,
Lane works to embody the knowledge she gained from her own doulas and, at the same time, imagines and actively builds a future for disability dance.
At the very end of her talk, Lane similarly links legacy and futurity when she discusses her work with CounterBalance, Chicago’s annual integrated dance concert. Over a decade of organizing, the concert has transformed from a small, free performance given in a conference room at the local disability rights organization to a full-blown concert held in a proper performance venue with paid local, national and international performers and companies showing new and repertory work. As Lane prepared to step down as artistic director in 2018,
34 along with her two co-producers, she secured new artists to continue the work of putting on this annual performance, as well as signing an extended contract with their current performance venue to ensure the concert not only continues but has room to grow. Here, Lane looks not only back at the work she has accomplished, but to the ways that her work intentionally creates space for new generations to continue imagining crip, dancing futures. She not only calls for an expanding disability dance repertoire, but she actually built a space for that repertoire to be shown and identified leaders in the field to continue the work of creating and producing disability dance.
2.3 Flow
With a broad view of Lane’s activist, artistic and mentorship work in mind, I turn now to the work she created during her fellowship period, diving deeper into the themes that Lane identified in her work and their importance to the development of a disability repertoire. In this section, I am concerned with movement and the repertoire specifically as embodied, performed, relational knowledge. For this definition, I draw especially on the work of performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, who further complicates understandings of the repertoire as simply “dance that is or may be reconstructed” in her 2003 book, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing
Cultural Memory in the Americas. In her first chapter, Taylor makes a distinction between the archive, which is perceived as stable and made up of documents, texts, videos and other tangible cultural objects, and the repertoire, which is understood as ephemeral and is made up of spoken word, movement, ritual and other time-based, or what Penrod might call “ephemeral,” practices
(19-20). In defining each of these concepts, Taylor argues that both the archive and the repertoire contain important knowledges, but that each one’s capacity for knowledge keeping and
35 transmission exceeds the other’s (20). The repertoire embodies and performs cultural knowledge, whereas the archive documents it.
Up to this moment, this chapter has concerned itself with Lane’s archival efforts to preserve and document her legacy in her artist talk, the Dancecast interview and other efforts undertaken during her fellowship. Taylor argues, similar to points made by Siegel surrounding
Labanotation and video, that the archive never contains the knowledge held in the repertoire, only represents it. A video recording of a dance performance is not the performance itself, but an interpretation of the performance (20). Taylor’s definitions of the archive and the repertoire allow her to explore the knowledges held in the repertoire and to unseat the presumed primacy of the archive in the Western world, which privileges the written word and other seemingly irrefutable artifacts as the primary and most reliable method of knowledge building, preservation and transference. In this move away from tangible, archival knowledge, Taylor highlights knowledges created and passed down through the body, particularly in Latin American performance and ritual. In Taylor’s understanding, the repertoire contains not simply movement passed from dancer to dancer, but instead a complex network of cultural knowledges that circulate in and through bodies. With this critique in mind, I now turn to Lane’s artistic work created during her fellowship, Flow, in an effort to understand the ways that her work embodies and passes along danced knowledges, realizing, of course, that my writing is necessarily part of the archive and therefore will not truly capture ways of knowing that live in the repertoire.
Flow is a physically integrated dance work featuring four dancers of different ages and abilities. Lane, a disabled, white woman in her eighties, begins the piece sitting downstage right in her power wheelchair with her head looking down at her hands resting in her lap. As the music, a measured piano solo by Philip Glass, begins, Lane slowly lifts her head, looking
36 directly at the audience. Soon, she pushes her right arm across her body, pointing directly stage left and sweeps that arm in a slow arc, drawing a semi-circle in front of her body with that extended arm. As she performs this sweep, she maintains direct eye contact with the audience, her gaze looking out just above her fingers, which do not extend fully, but instead curl slightly toward her palm. Lane replaces her right arm in her lap and down and out with her left arm, this time drawing a vertical semi-circle as a second dancer emerges from the curtains at stage left, as if Lane’s arm is gently pulling her onto the stage.
This dancer, Taylor Lane, a young, non-disabled, white dancer at the beginning of her career and Lane’s granddaughter, walks slowly backward toward Lane as she continues to draw
Taylor to her. As Taylor reaches Lane’s left side and feels Lane’s chair against the backs of her thighs, she bends back at the knees with a straight back and lays briefly across Lane’s lap before pulling herself back up to standing, still facing stage left. As Taylor stands back up, Lane positions herself to the downstage side of Taylor and places her left hand on Taylor’s right shoulder. They move forward together for four beats, then turning their gaze toward each other and holding eye contact as they move backward for four beats. As they move forward again, slowly turning their gaze in the direction of their movement, two more dancers enter from upstage right. One of these dancers, Susan Ojala Myers, is a middle aged white woman with no apparent disabilities and the other, Ladonna Freidheim, is a middle aged white woman in a manual wheelchair. Ojala Myers is placed downstage of and slightly behind Freidheim with her left hand resting on Friedheim’s right shoulder in a sort of reversal of Lane and Taylor’s positioning. Ojala Myers and Friedheim look toward Lane and Taylor as they enter. As both pairs move backward again for four counts, Lane and Taylor’s gaze stays fixed forward, but
Ojala Myers and Friedheim look to each other.
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As they finish moving backward, all four dancers bend forward at the hip and reach their right arms straight out, parallel with the floor. The two standing dancers’ backs are flat in near parallel, but the dancers in wheelchairs must bend through the spine to get their arms parallel with the floor. Bringing their upper bodies back to neutral and their arms back to their sides, the dancers move into a line across the downstage area, still facing stage left. Taylor is at the front of the line, with Freidheim, Ojala Myers and Lane positioned behind her in that order. They perform the same bend with the right arm reaching, but this time the return to neutral is performed in canon, providing the audience time to observe the subtle differences in movement quality between the dancers. Taylor’s and Ojala Myer’s return to neutral is performed with a sort of “snap,” whereas Lane and Freidheim must roll through their spines slightly to place them in line with their hips. Additionally, Lane positions her left arm under herself to push her upper body back to neutral, similar to how she placed her right arm on her lap after performing the sweep looking out at the audience and before raising her left arm to draw Taylor onto the stage.
Moving back into unison, the dancers reach their right arms diagonally behind them and look down at their hands so that each of the three dancers in front of Lane look back toward her and
Lane looks away. Leaving their arms, they shift their gaze back to stage left so that everyone is looking back towards Taylor and then circle their working arms up over their head and let that arm lead them back into the same parallel position as before.
This opening, and the entire piece, progresses slowly, almost meditatively, as movement, touch and glance circulate between the four bodies in the space. This pacing allows the audience time to trace these circulations and to note the ways that movements shift and change as they are translated by each of the four bodies in the work. These differences in movement interpretation become part of the aesthetic of the piece, rather than a distraction or an indicator of poor
38 technique, as they might typically be considered in a dance that relies heavily on unison, especially in ballet, which was Lane’s technical training background before acquiring her disability and, as she pointed out in her artist talk, still deeply informs her aesthetic preferences.
Lane is interested in ensuring the clarity of the movement and that the performers move in time with one another, but she is not at all interested in flattening out differences in movement interpretation between bodies. The clearest example of this comes in the canon as each of the four dancers return to their own neutral from the flat back in a straight line at the very front of the stage, when Taylor and Ojala Myers snap easily to neutral spines, but Freidheim and Lane roll through their spines with Lane using the added support of her arm pressing on her thigh. This moment simply sets up this motif of variation in movement based on embodiment. Because of
Lane’s commitment to highlighting the individual embodiments of her dancers and the differences in their approach to movement, the audience is encouraged to read difference not only in the disabled bodies on stage, but in all four of the performers present.
I propose that this piece embodies Kafer’s political/relational model of disability, wherein disability is understood as both inherently political and always emerging in relationship to their surroundings, environment and, most importantly for Lane’s work, other bodies. As
Lane’s assistant during her fellowship, I watched and rewatched the piece during the rehearsal process. I came to realize that the slight differences in approach to movement, along with the deliberate pacing of the work and the ways that the bodies move in and out of relationship to one another (either through proximity, touch or glance) illuminates and honors the various bodily differences of the dancers on stage.
Along with the political/relational model of disability, Diana Taylor’s third chapter provides useful insights into the connections between identity, the body and the repertoire. She
39 opens with an excerpt of Mexican playwright Emilio Carballido’s play, Yo, tambien hablo de la rosa (79-80) wherein the Intermediary character from the play feels her heartbeat and reflects on the things she knows and how she knows them. Taylor again emphasizes the centrality of the body in the repertoire but uses the Intermediary to expand upon how the identities of the body in question determine the method of knowledge generation, performance and transmission.
Comparing the Intermediary to both the Virgin of Guadalupe and La Malinche, both figures that emerged out of the Spanish contact with the Mexica people and are the two primary images of womanhood in the Mexican imaginary (86-93), Taylor explains that Yo, tambien hablo de la rosa exposes the ways that the repertoire is always informed by the gender and race of the bodies performing its knowledges. The body is central to the repertoire, and therefore the identities of the bodies that house the repertoire inform its performance.
Through Taylor’s analysis and the political/relational model, we may begin to understand the ways that Lane’s choreography enacts and performs her political commitment to the value and potential the disability experience offers dance. The differences of the dancers in Flow emerge not in competition with one another, but instead in relationship to and perhaps even in conversation with one another. This is as true for the non-disabled dancers as for the disabled dancers. For instance, in a section where Ojala Myers and Taylor move in unison side to side while lifting both arms out to their sides and raising one leg in a side attitude, the differences in the way they perform this simple movement become all-important. Ojala Myers’ long limbs float, never stopping the motion of moving up or down, but fluidly moving from one to the other.
Taylor’s shorter limbs move slightly faster and stop abruptly in a pose at the peak of the movement before dropping back down. This could be read as a difference in training, which certainly is a contributing factor, but instead, I argue that this slight difference and Lane’s refusal
40 to coach uniformity allow the audience to read this difference as inherent to the bodies performing the work. Perhaps Ojala Myers’ long limbs simply move slower, but perhaps her body (which is visibly older than Taylor’s) needs more care and requires that Ojala Myers perform the movement more deliberately. Placing these bodies in relationship with one another and having them perform the same movement without an attempt to flatten their differences in movement interpretation allows the audience to read the bodies in relation to one another and to begin to deconstruct cultural hierarchies of bodily difference.
In the traditional repertory model that Lane brings up in her Dancecast interview, these differences might be understood as a failure on the part of the dancers to faithfully interpret the vision of the choreographer. Lane’s commitment to preserving their differences, however, exposes how her politicized understanding of difference as aesthetically valuable influences her approach to making and rehearsing dance and reflects her deep commitment to disability art and culture. Even more than this, it models a form of dancemaking that values bodily difference for the dancers in her piece.
Drawing on Sheppard’s articulation of disability aesthetics wherein the disabled body is essential to the content, creation and form of the dance work, Lane’s valuing of the particularity of movement that each body brings to the piece becomes her disability aesthetic in Flow.
Disability Studies scholar Tobin Siebers, who Sheppard cites as part of her network of legacy in the Wiederholt interview outlined earlier in this chapter, offers another, extraordinarily broad, definition of disability aesthetics in his aptly-titled 2010 book, Disability Aesthetics. Siebers points to the near constant presence of disability in modern art, arguing not only that disability is present in much of what we understand as “good” modern art, but that it is precisely this emphasis on bodily difference that makes it “good,” stating “if modern art has been so
41 successful, I argue, it is because of its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful”
(9). Pointing to a broad swath of artists from well-known and revered artists like Magritte, to avant-garde artists like Paul McCarthy, to lesser-known disabled artists like Judith Scott and even vandals like the one that splashed sulfuric acid over Rembrandt’s self-portrait, Siebers argues disability serves as more than a subject of art, but rather a way of knowing, understanding and feeling bodies and aesthetics.
In using the difference in movement style among her dancers as an essential element of her work, much as Siebers’ work argues for, Lane marks that difference, and, by extension, the bodies that produce the movement, as aesthetically valuable. This specificity and attention to the particular embodiments of each dancer, however, poses challenges to the repertoire as understood in its simplest terms. If, for instance, the purpose of reconstructing works from the repertoire is to faithfully recreate the piece in exactly the same way it was originally shown, the possibility of that is diminished drastically by Lane’s disability aesthetics in Flow. Because the movement is built so specifically to each body on stage, as those bodies are unable to perform, or even as their movement style changes due to aging or further disability, it necessarily becomes impossible to reconstruct the work as it was intended. However, following Siegel and Taylor in thinking more broadly about what a repertoire is and its function in preserving and conveying knowledge, disability offers new possibilities for thinking through how a repertoire is used and what its importance is to new generations of disabled dancers.
For Flow, the importance of the movement lies in its specificity to the bodies on stage, but, in theory, that specificity could be replicated on other bodies, even bodies that do not match the impairments of the original dancers. The key element is not necessarily that the body replacing the original dancer fits exactly in the movement as originally interpreted by Freidheim,
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Ojala Myers, Taylor or even Lane herself, but rather that the movement is made to fit the body performing the work. With Siegel’s call to take up not only the dance itself, but also the theoretical and creative life of the choreographer, setting Flow on new bodies that do not align with the embodiments of the dancers the piece was originally set on, as long as the reconstruction honored Lane’s commitment to tailoring the movement to fit the bodies on stage, is possible. The danger in this separation of a piece from its original cast, of course, lies in the possibility for a reconstructed integrated work to be set entirely on non-disabled dancers. Again, returning to Siegel’s call for honoring the intention and work of the choreographer, as well as
Diana Taylor’s theorization of the repertoire as mediated by identity, Lane’s investment in disability culture and advocacy must be a part of any effort to reconstruct. As Lane stated early on in her artist talk, her work artistic cannot be separated from her advocacy work, and, as such, the reconstruction of her repertoire must intentionally and deeply engage with both with Lane’s development of disability aesthetics and her investment in the disability community.
2.4 Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival
If we decide that the specificity of movement matters rather than the bodymind itself, however, we risk overlooking the essential element of disability dance, the disabled dancing bodymind, and may in fact miss opportunities to build a field that values and sustains those bodies. The entire point of a dance repertory, in the strictest sense of the word, in the mainstream is that the dancers eventually need to be replaced once they are too old, injured and/or pained to perform the work. What if, though, those original bodies are already old, injured, pained or any combination of these? What opportunities does disability offer us in thinking through bodily sustainability and how does the repertory model of mainstream dance preclude caring for
43 dancing bodies? These questions came up originally for me toward the middle of Lane’s fellowship in her workshop held during the 2019 Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival.
On April 6, 2019, the second annual Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival (CIDF) was held at the
Mayor’s of Office for People with Disabilities located just west of UIC’s campus in Chicago’s
Medical District. It was a full day of workshops, film showings, lectures, and dancemaking for disabled and non-disabled people, with Lane setting a work-in-progress on attendees during the final session of the day. The organizers, myself included, made every effort to build in accommodations, including the obvious ones such as captioning and American Sign Language interpreters, but also those that are often forgotten in event planning, such as quiet spaces, chairs scattered throughout the space and breaks built into the day to accommodate bodies that need to rest. When asked in an interview with Barbara Keer (2019) for Splash Magazine about her goals for the 2019 festival, CIDF’s founder and director, Deb Goodman echoed Lane’s interests in mentorship and building a body of work, saying “My wish is to bring more dancers, especially disabled dancers into the community, to inspire them to seek training and a stage. My hope is to offer a networking opportunity that will inspire collaborations.”
Over the course of the day, we moved as a community through moments of what
Sandahl, drawing on the work of performance studies scholar Jill Dolan, identifies as utopian performatives in her 2004 article “Black man, blind man: Disability identity politics and performance.” Sandahl defines these as opportunities to imagine and practice for a future outside of the normative pressures of everyday life (595). These moments are often fleeting but help marginalized communities to both think through what a future without oppression might look like, and in doing so, actually work toward that future. I saw moments of performative utopias throughout the day. I saw them in people helping one another to access resources and food. In
44 people feeling comfortable with stepping into and out of a space as their bodies needed and without fear of judgement, as might normally occur in a mainstream dance space. In an experienced wheelchair dancer taking a moment, without being asked, to help a newer dancer to understand the proper way to turn quickly in their chair without hurting themselves or falling over. These moments, though always brief, allowed disabled attendees and their allies to be in community with one another outside of the expectations of a normative, curative world and, hopefully, to go back in that world with a clearer vision of what a more just society might look like.
Traditionally, dance space is not only exclusive of disabled bodies, but I argue works within and enforces Kafer’s concept of “curative time,” wherein disabled bodies are expected to be constantly working toward improvement and cure (27). In this conception of time, bodies are required to conform to ableist assumptions of how bodies function and what a productive body is, does and looks like. Curative time cannot imagine a future where disabled bodies exist, let alone exist happily and hold value. Dance, in its never-ending desire for bodily improvement and perfection of form, approaches the body in a similar way. What then happens in a space like the festival that is a dance space specifically built for disabled bodies? How does time function in these spaces?
Over the course of the day, time bent to the needs of the bodies occupying the space.
During the first workshop, for instance, we started late as bodies took time to arrive and move into the dance space. As the day went on, people moved in and out of the space as needed and workshops were lengthened or shortened according to the needs of the bodies in the space. We took time to check in with one another and address any needs that arose. Kafer, as explained in the introductory chapter of this thesis, calls this rejection of curative time “crip time” (27). She
45 describes crip time as not only the change in timing that occurs when disabled bodies occupy a space, but as a complete reimagining of how time functions and the expectations it holds for how bodies exist in time.
In these moments of cripped space and time, as we perform and imagine utopia in community with other disabled dancers and our allies, we collectively build a repertory of actions we might take to build a more sustainable dance future. Shifting away from the dance- specific use of the term repertory and drawing more on Taylor’s definition of the repertoire as a set of embodied and performed knowledges, we can begin to see how these crip dance utopias help us not only to identify and deconstruct the curative demands of mainstream dance, but also to identify specific actions that we can take to work against those demands. This work, I argue, is essential to sustaining a field of disability dance. In order to sustain disability dance, we must work not only to nurture new artists and develop/value individual ways of moving, but also build spaces and practices that actively center the needs of disabled dancing bodies.
These essential tenets of the field, however, are not a given. Simply placing disabled bodies in a dance space, even one ostensibly built for those bodies, does not automatically bring these repertoires of knowledge to bear. During the last session of the festival, for instance, Lane set a short work-in-progress piece on the attendees. The piece is simple and consists of many repeated movements. This workshop took place at the end of a long day and many attendees were worn out and, having just had a break from moving during a lecture section, starting to cool down and cramp up. Lane began her session by jumping right into the choreography, but quickly backtracked and encouraged people to take a moment to warm their bodies back up. However, there simply was not enough time to warm up and we had to get on to the business of setting the piece, which would eventually become the final piece for CounterBalance later that year. I acted
46 as Lane’s assistant during the workshop, having met with her to learn some of the movement before the festival. I knew the piece required me to be on my knees and to get down to the floor and back up quickly, which is hard on my body on a good day, but particularly hard when I have not had time to warm up and am already feeling sore from being so active earlier in the day.
As Lane began to set the work, she moved quickly. She needed to get a large section of the piece set and the allotted time demanded that she set a phrase or two at a time and move quickly on, taking little time to check in with the bodies in the space or to review. I stayed in the front of the group helping to cue the next movements as we ran the piece, with Lane often switching the music and pace in between runs. I began to notice that every time I turned around there were fewer and fewer dancers on the floor. People were exhausted and the pacing and physical demands of the movement were simply too much. Many chose to sit in the chairs that we set up around the edge of the large space, but some left altogether. I eventually had to stop getting down on the ground and chose instead to cue those movements verbally and through gesture.
I bring these issues up not in criticism of Lane, she was simply trying to accomplish a set of goals in a given amount of time, but instead to point out that time, space and movement are not cripped simply by the presence of disabled bodies, even when those bodies are the ones determining the rules of engagement, and that the movement that may be sustainable for one body is likely not for the next. Crip time must be worked at, especially when it comes to incorporating crip time in a creative practice as intensely curative as dance. This, I believe, points to critical tensions between sustaining disabled dancing bodyminds and Lane’s work in sustaining the field of dance. Whereas sustaining bodies often requires slowing down, taking stock of the bodyminds in the space and building movement from that place of awareness,
47 sustaining a field often requires one to move at a pace set by ableist assumptions about how bodies can and should behave in order to meet production requirements. At the same time, however, sustaining the field of disability dance requires sustaining the bodyminds performing the work. How, then, might we begin to reframe sustainable movement as central to the practice of disability dance? How might this shift require us to think in new ways about how a field is built and sustained?
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3. SUSTAINING A BODYMIND: KRIS LENZO
3.1 Introduction
Kris Lenzo’s 3Arts UIC residency fellowship took place during the spring 2017 semester.
As the first disabled person invited to dance with MOMENTA dance company in Oak Park,
Illinois in 2003 after he requested the installation of an elevator in their space at the Academy of
Music and Movement so that he could see his daughter perform (Romain, 2016), Lenzo is one of the founders of physically integrated dance in the Chicago area (Kris Lenzo Spring 2017
Residency Report, 1, 2018b). Before entering the dance world, Lenzo was a national champion in wheelchair basketball and track (McDowell 2, 2018). As a wheelchair dancer whose legs end just below the hip, Lenzo relies almost exclusively on his arms and shoulders to move both onstage and in his everyday life. By the time of his residency, the intense physical engagement of his dance career and his earlier time as an athlete, as well as aging in a disabled body in general, had resulted in pain and injury that demanded a rethinking of how he approached dance and choreography. He needed a way of moving without causing further pain and injury in order to be able to continue to dance.
This question of how to continue a dance practice without added pain or injury to his body became the driving question of Lenzo’s fellowship (Kris Lenzo Spring 2017 Residency
Report, 2018b). After conversations with Sandahl and the choreographer he collaborated with over the course of his fellowship, Sarah Cullen Fuller of Loyola University Chicago, they began to think of and call this method of generating dance “sustainable choreography.” The solo piece
Cullen Fuller set on Lenzo during the fellowship, The Journeyman, became their first attempt to generate sustainable choreography and, appropriately, dealt with themes of disrupted sleep rhythms, memory loss, pain and aging.
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Over the course of his fellowship, Lenzo performed the piece across the Midwest, including a premiere in Oak Park during MOMENTA’s spring concert, a performance in Grand
Rapids, Michigan as part of the Disability Art Now Symposium, and in Kansas City at
Dance/USA’s 2017 annual conference, as well as speaking, performing and showing video of his work at multiple events and classes across UIC’s campus (McDowell 3, 2018). One of Lenzo’s main goals for the piece, and perhaps an essential part of sustainable choreography for him, was that it would travel easily and be translatable to many different types of performance environments. With a repertoire of works that consisted largely of duets and a few group pieces,
Lenzo saw an opportunity with The Journeyman to expand the number and type of gigs he could take on. For Lenzo, as for most dancers, sustaining his career and sustaining his bodymind are necessarily linked.
I first saw Lenzo perform The Journeyman at the 2017 In/Motion Dance Film Festival run out of Loyola University Chicago’s dance department by Sarah Cullen Fuller and her colleagues. The piece was shown as part of a session on physically integrated dance during which Lenzo and Cullen Fuller spoke briefly about the choreographic process for The
Journeyman, Lenzo performed the piece, and a short documentary film entitled Ripped about his life, family and dancing was shown, followed by a short question and answer session about
Lenzo’s work.
Though I saw this early showing of the work and have seen it performed several times since at different events and concerts, my personal investment in the idea of sustainable choreography came about a year and a half after Lenzo’s fellowship. In my first semester of graduate school, while taking a Disability Art and Culture class with Sandahl, we were assigned a creative project where we were asked to creatively explore a disability art “conundrum.”
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Having earned my undergraduate degree in dance, I had since found it almost impossible for financial and disability-related reasons to sustain a dance practice while also working full time and was hoping to use the project as a way to “rediscover” what dance looked and felt like on my body. After a conversation about the project I had in mind, Sandahl suggested Lenzo’s sustainable choreography concept as a starting point for my own work. Through this project, I began to grapple with the limitations and possibilities pain offers the dancemaking process and to think through building a practice of sustainable movement – a term I find to be more flexible and capacious than “choreography,” which implies set movement performed in the same way over time.
Using Lenzo’s articulation and application of sustainable choreography as a starting point and my own further exploration to complicate and expand the concept, I hope in this chapter to explore the relationship between the body and the dancemaking process, arguing that disability dance offers unique opportunities to rethink the role of the body in sustaining the field of disability dance. Essential to my argument is the assertion that care for and attention to the body is not only necessary to sustain disability dance, but that this care and attention also holds creative potential to reimagine the dancemaking process, including harmful and exclusionary practices often assumed normal and necessary in dance.
In a 2019 article for Dance Magazine, choreographer Liz Hurt takes readers through her dance career and the common demand from instructors and directors that young dancers prioritize dance, and, in particular, perfect technique, over everything else in their lives, including, perhaps even especially, their own bodies. Hurt questions the demands for passionate compliance placed on dancers in training, citing a common quote from her ballet master demanding that she and her classmates “die for it” as they held a relevé or performed some other
51 challenging technical skill. This command from dance instructors frames leaving a balance as failure, even if the reason for stepping out stems from pain, injury or exhaustion, and the stakes of that failure as life and death. Hurt further illustrates this point through the often told and retold story of Anna Pavlova denying surgery after contracting pneumonia because her doctor told her that, though the procedure would save her life, she would no longer be able to dance. “If I can’t dance, I’d rather be dead,” Pavlova is credited with saying in this legend intended to illustrate to young dancers the kind of dedication their craft requires. Hurt observes that young dancers do lack the devotion that this story seeks to instill, but instead that they lack the ability (or, perhaps, as Hurt’s earlier anecdotes illustrate, are trained out of the ability) to listen to their bodies and behave in accordance with its needs.
A 2006 study entitled “The Relationship between Passion and Injury in Dance Students” by social psychologists Blanka Rip and Robert Vallerand along with curator, critic and arts administrator Sylvie Fortin addresses the role passion plays in identity formation and harmful, injurious behavior in young dancers. The authors make a distinction between harmonious passion, characterized by positive, but not exclusive, identity formation and healthy involvement in a given activity, and obsessive passion, characterized by exclusive identity formation around a particular activity and potentially harmful behavior related to that activity (14-15). In their study of 81 Canadian dance students aged fifteen to thirty-one, participating in a range of western dance forms including modern, ballet and jazz, the authors conclude that harmonious passion is associated with what they define as positive coping responses to injury, including consulting a health professional and communicating with their instructors, as well as spending less time
“suffering from acute injuries” (18), whereas obsessive passion was an indicator that students would spend more time “suffering from chronic injuries” and would be less likely to take time
52 away from dance when injured. While these findings certainly indicate an alarming tendency of motivated, passionate dancers to ignore pain and injury, their methods and analysis do not account for Hurt’s articulation of the demands placed on dancers by instructors and the field itself. The authors of the study say as much later in their conclusion, writing that a full study of the relationship between passion and injury in dance should account for the “social construction process through which passion for dance develops and injuries are sustained and rendered normative” (19). Can we blame dancers for not seeking treatment when their field constantly tells them that being successful means dying for their art, and can we really assume that seeking alleviation of pain through western medicine is always an effective course of action?
I work in this chapter to cultivate a skepticism of the ways that pain, injury and disablement (even death in Hurt’s examples) are framed as natural, even necessary and desirable outcomes of dance. At the same time, I argue for the value of pained, injured, aging and/or disabled bodies in dance. I simultaneously call for a dance practice that actively acknowledges injurious demands and works to avoid further harm to bodies while also asserting that the movement of pained bodies is artistically and aesthetically valuable. In short, I argue that pain and injury as a result of dance should be avoided as much as possible, and yet that the pained/injured/aging/disabled bodymind constitutes a valid location from which to make dance.
Further, I believe that these two seemingly contradictory arguments in fact rely upon one another. In order to grapple with the ways that dance quite literally breaks down the bodyminds of its artists, we must attend to and work against disabling dance practices which threaten the ability to sustain dancing bodyminds while at the same time insisting on the necessity of disabled bodyminds in dance.
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In order to make this logical leap, I rely heavily on Kafer’s proposal of a political/relational model of disability, which, in situating impairment as also socially constructed, opens up impairment as a potential mode of analysis. By attending to impairment and the lived experience of disability, Kafer argues, we may begin to value disabled ways of being and understanding, while also critiquing not only barriers to access but also the ways that society produces impairment (7-8). Additionally, and importantly for my purposes, Kafer argues that the act of imagining disability futures is essential to and reliant upon a political/relational model. Through the political/relational model of disability, valuing the lived experience of disability/impairment and taking it seriously as a way of being in, relating to and understanding the world and bodyminds around us opens up the potential for imagining a disability dance future that cares for the bodyminds performing and generating the work while also insisting that those ways of being can and should inform both the creative process and the aesthetic of the work.
Using Lenzo’s work in sustainable choreography, I show how disability offers the field opportunities to develop alternative methods of dancemaking that understand care for the dancing body as an essential part of the work, rather than, at best, an added bonus or something to be undertaken by individual dancers outside of the studio. In this section, I draw on writing by scholars, dancers and critics who challenge the ways that aging in dance is perceived as inherently facilitating a decline in technique and artistry to argue that Lenzo’s work at the intersection of aging, pain and disability offers new avenues for imagining a dance practice outside of normalized disabling dance practices. Documenting and analyzing the work of Lenzo and Cullen Fuller, I argue that their concept of sustainable choreography mobilizes Lenzo’s
54 experience of aging, injury and pain to reconceptualize traditional thinking around rigorous dance training, virtuosic technique and successful choreography.
In the following section, I complicate the concept of sustainable choreography through my own dancemaking practice and experiences of chronic illness and pain, ultimately proposing the slightly revised concept of sustainable movement to account for the ways that movement practices must evolve as pain shifts and changes from moment to moment. Using the work of scholars writing on cultural understandings of pain and dance artists working in and through pain, I argue that dance, for all of its focus on pain and injury avoidance, is actually built in/on pain. Here, I am interested not in pain avoidance, but in the aesthetic and practical opportunities offered by those bodies dancing with/in pain.
I conclude the chapter by putting sustainable choreography and sustainable movement more deeply in conversation with one another and further elaborating on their place in the development of disability dance. Drawing on work of scholars writing about the place of disability in dance, I turn my attention back to the sustainability of the field of disability dance, arguing that Lenzo’s and my own interest in concert dance expands upon and shifts focus from earlier efforts, which focus largely on process-based practices like contact improvisation and community dance.
3.2 Sustainable Choreography
The term “sustainable choreography” emerged out of conversations between Lenzo,
Cullen Fuller and Sandahl early in Lenzo’s fellowship as the three began work on identifying the driving “conundrum” behind the fellowship. Sandahl defines sustainable choreography in her final report for the fellowship as “the emerging practice of choreography that does not injure or strain the dancer’s body” (1, 2018b). Sustainable choreography is set movement that can be
55 practiced and performed over a long period of time without causing harm to the dancers’ body.
This work centers the needs of specific dancer’s bodymind and builds the movement around their impairments without asking them to perform movement that might cause harm, pain or further injury. This concept became the driving creative force in Lenzo’s fellowship.
While the idea of training dancing bodies to extend careers and survive/prevent injury is certainly not new, what Lenzo’s work offers is the opportunity to imagine not what a more sustainable training regimen for dancers might look like, but how sustaining bodies might open up new aesthetic and practical possibilities in the dancemaking process. In the past, discussion of sustaining bodies in dance has focused largely on training, the goal being to build enough strength and flexibility to safely and repeatedly perform physically demanding choreography with as little strain and injury as possible. This is illustrated in the introductory chapters of the
1990 book Dancing Longer, Dancing Stronger: A Dancer’s Guide to Improving Technique and
Preventing Injury by dance scholar Andrea Watkins and muscle function and exercise specialist
Priscilla M. Clarkson. Drawing on the then emerging and still relatively young field of dance medicine, as well as exercise science, Watkins and Clarkson use their first two chapters to explain the foundational philosophy of their work and what they see as the benefits to what they call “Strength and Flexibility Conditioning” (7). They argue that taking class is simply not enough training for dancers and that conditioning our bodies outside of class will lead to greater success in the incredibly competitive world of professional dance, as well as greatly extending
56 our careers.6 Their book, they say, helps dancers and dance instructors to locate and assess the
“weaknesses” of their/their students’ bodies and then develop a training regimen to be undertaken outside of class to address those weaknesses (5).
In the final moments of their second chapter, Watkins and Clarkson address the perceived differences in the physical demands placed on contemporary dancers as opposed to well-known dancers of the past, a period which they do not fully define, noting that they often hear about dancers of the past having “natural” talent that did not require training outside of the dance studio. They provide a few reasons for this discrepancy, saying first that we cannot fully know the training regimen of dancers past and that famous performers of the past may simply have been “’natural’ performers” (9). Watkins and Clarkson also ask their readers to consider the large swaths of dancers who never came to prominence and speculate that had they conditioned their bodies outside of class, they may have gone further in their chosen career. Finally, the authors point out the importance of recognizing how dance technique and artistry, which seem to be inherently linked for Watkins and Clarkson, if not one and the same, have intensified over the years, saying, “What was technically demanding fifty years ago is now common dance vocabulary. In many instances it was easier for dancers of past generations to acquire the necessary technique by class participation alone” (9).
6 This perspective is far from unique among dancers, dance instructors and dance/sports medicine practitioners. See also Liane Simmel’s 2013 book Dance medicine in practice: Anatomy, Injury Prevention, Training, which sprung from the author’s own experience of pain while dancing and outlines exercises and stretches dancers can undertake outside of class to solve and prevent pain/injury (1-2), or a 1996 UK study by Peter Brinson and Fiona Dick entitled Fit to dance? The report of the national inquiry into dancers’ health and injury, which explicitly links “healthy” dancers with budgetary concerns for dance companies in their stated aims for the study (14). Justin Howse opens the third edition of his Dance technique and injury prevention, published in 2000, by commenting on how often he receives requests for the anatomical, technical and choreographic knowledge contained within the volume before arguing that many injuries in dance boil down to “technical faults” on the part of the dancer executing the movement (ix-x). While equipping dancers with anatomical and technical knowledge to dance safely and effectively is essential, I argue that the pervasive understanding that dancers must constantly be conditioning, exercising, stretching, strengthening, and “dying for it” in order to have an even moderately successful career often unintentionally individualizes experiences of pain and injury among dancers while ignoring the economic and cultural pressures at the root of the disabling effects of dance.
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While I do not dispute the factual grounding of many of the claims that Watkins and
Clarkson put forth in these two chapters, or even the premise that identifying potential areas of weakness and addressing those through some form of training outside of class is at least beneficial and perhaps even necessary, I argue that their work exposes the curative norms baked into the practice of dance from the very beginning of the training process. Dance training, in
Watkins and Clarkson’s work, exists entirely to discipline, or, to use their word, condition, dancing bodies to perform the most challenging technique with ease. In many ways, Watkins and
Clarkson do some of the work that I call for in the introduction to this chapter. They recognize that dancers are often injured and seek to address the source of that injury, but they do so by placing the responsibility for those injuries solely on the dancer themselves. It is the dancer’s responsibility to continually condition their body in order to delay injury and extend their career.
In identifying the source of injury in the dancer’s perceived weakness, rather than the demands of the field itself, Watkins and Clarkson perpetuate an extremely limited, individualized understanding of dance, technique and the industry that, much like Rip, Vallerand and Fortin’s study, largely ignores the structural, financial and cultural barriers facing aspiring professional dancers as they go through training and enter the field. Their work both naturalizes the dancing body by proposing that there are/were some bodies that “naturally” meet the demands of dance training and performance while also arguing that even bodies who do not meet these natural standards can and should be conditioned to meet them in order to be considered dancers. What makes up this “natural” dancer remains unsaid, but dancers must either be that natural dancer (in which case, Watkins and Clarkson argue, conditioning would still likely improve their technical and, therefore, artistic capacity) or condition their bodies to imitate a natural dancer as closely as possible.
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Lenzo’s work in sustainable choreography through his fellowship and creation of The
Journeyman, then, offers not only a theoretical destabilizing of the concept of dance and dancer, but practical tools to begin working against conditioning practices that demand conformity to ill- defined and yet ubiquitous ideas of how a dancing body must perform. The showing of The
Journeyman that I first attended at the In/Motion Dance Film Festival at Loyola University, part of a larger presentation entitled “In/Motion Presents: Physically Integrated Dance Practices,” began with a brief talk by Lenzo and Cullen Fuller explaining their process and the thinking behind the piece. In video recording of this performance, Lenzo rolls into the space and Cullen
Fuller walks in behind him, saying that Lenzo will first share some of his insights about the project and she will “chime in.” Lenzo takes the audience through some of he and Cullen
Fullers’ history of collaboration and how this particular project was different from earlier projects. In the past, Cullen Fuller set a duet on Lenzo with his long time dance partner, Anita
Fillmore Kinney, who also danced with MOMENTA. With his fellowship, Lenzo wanted a solo piece that addressed a series of what he calls “issues” that he faced in his personal and creative life. Counting the issues off on his fingers as he goes, Lenzo begins with trouble sleeping. He pauses and glances up at Cullen Fuller then around at the audience as he searches for his next issue. He continues, smiling slightly, “…which leads to trouble with memory.” The audience laughs lightly. One louder laugh is heard above the others. Lenzo swipes his arms at this louder laugh and jokingly responds “be quiet” before contextualizing his comment for the audience, saying, “that’s my daughter, Cynthia, saying ‘yes, he has trouble with memory.’” More laughter bursts from the audience as Lenzo continues listing the issues that The Journeyman explores, including, along with insomnia and memory loss, pain and “the challenge of creating dance and movement vocabulary with an aging body that doesn’t move as well as it did five, ten, fifteen
59 years ago.” He emphasizes the last point, joking, “I was an old man when I started, so now I’m a fossil.”
For Lenzo, the process of making The Journeyman and, by extension, the concept of sustainable choreography, is deeply tied to aging and its impact on the bodymind. The ways that he experiences pain, memory loss, sleep and movement are tied to and underscored by the experience of aging. In a special 1994 issue of the Performing Arts Journal featuring writing by artists of the American Avant-Garde who were, at the time, fifty years old or older reflecting on the process of aging and how it has impacted their art and interests (Marranca et al., 9-10), dance critic and choreographer Deborah Jowitt discusses the complicated relationship between aging, dance and spectatorship. Jowitt begins by recounting a conversation during intermission with a young graduate student who, describing one of the dancers in the piece, calls her the “older woman.” Jowitt describes hiding her shock at this description of a woman who was “probably all of thirty-three,” but absolves her viewing partner of blame saying that she herself would likely have described the dancer in the same way when she was younger (23). This story, Jowitt argues, reflects the general standard by which dancers’ bodies are judged, and points to the ways that this is unique to dance. At the age when musicians, actors and other performing artists come into their prime, dance artists have already aged out of performing by industry standards. “At the point when many performers are leaving the stage,” Jowitt writes about aging dancers, “they’re just beginning to understand what performing is all about” (24). This enforced disappearance does a disservice not only to the dancers, but to the field in general, which deprives itself of the artistry of these dancers.
Lenzo’s lighthearted comments about his aging, forgetful, disabled, dancing bodymind underscore how the concepts of “aging” and “dancer” exist in opposition to one another. Much
60 like the comments made by Jowitt’s companion, the logic of Lenzo’s jokes rely on the fact that the audience already knows that his bodymind does not look like the conditioned, young, non- disabled, normalized dancing body. As the audience, though, are we laughing at Lenzo’s body or at the idea of this perfect dancing body? Kafer’s explanation of the relational nature of disability helps to explain how, in this moment, Lenzo and the audience collectively construct and deconstruct what “dancer” means in this moment. Lenzo, with a wink and a nod, positions himself as a dancer whose bodymind looks, moves and, perhaps most importantly, experiences movement differently than Watkins and Clarkson’s conditioned dancer, affording the audience the space to question and briefly reimagine their understanding of dancing bodies.
Dance scholar and dramaturg Nanako Nakjima, drawing on Jowitt’s writing as well as the work of other dance artists and scholars, further examines the role of aging in dance in her 2011 article entitled “De-aging Dancerism? The Aging Body in Contemporary and Community Dance.”
Looking first to the postmodernist innovations of the Judson Church and their use of pedestrian movement in the 1960s, Nakajima challenges the perception that this shift in movement style opened up western concert dance to body types outside of those typically accepted in earlier forms, saying that the work of the postmodernists was still largely performed by young, non- disabled bodies and that their bodies defined the logics in which their theoretical and creative work was founded (100). Though skeptical of the Judson Church’s work in de-aging dance during the height of their creative output, Nakajima draws a connection between the Judson’s earlier work in “the democratization of the performing body and the negation of virtuosity” and the ways that this facilitated many of the members’ later involvement in community dance practices and even their extended performance careers, which last/lasted long after the presumed shelf-life of most western concert dancers (101-102). Nakajima is careful to point out, though,
61 echoing Jowitt’s earlier point, that the aging bodies of the Judson Church members in performance still often cause dissonance for the audience and are understood as anomalous and even less artistically viable. Nakajima goes so far as to ask, “If dancers are aging but still dancing, is the art of dance degenerating? If seniors dance, is this only a cultural movement but never raised to the status of art?” (102). These questions speak succinctly and effectively to both the naturalization of the young, non-disabled, conditioned dancing body as well as the artistic and technical potential of imagining a new approach to dance through the practices of aging dancers and choreographers.
Jowitt and Nakajima’s analyses point to the ways that the mere presence of aging bodies on stage signifies a degeneration of technique and artistry, which, as Watkins and Clarkson’s work illustrates, are inherently linked in dance. No matter how much conditioning one does, eventually a dancer will fail to meet the technical standards they once met. Does this reduction of technical capacity by normative dance standards, though, really indicate a reduction in artistry?
Even if we accept that dance must be physically challenging in order to be artistically viable (a conceit that I am not personally ready to accept), is it true that aging bodies lack the capacity to meet physical challenges on their own terms?
Later in the talk briefly described above, Cullen Fuller speaks to her efforts to find ways to challenge Lenzo even as they built movement that avoided pain and injury. After Lenzo finishes speaking and hands the floor to Cullen Fuller, she again briefly summarizes their past working relationship before discussing their process for The Journeyman. As she explains their approach to creating the solo, she shares that her primary question as a choreographer was “what are the ways that I can absolutely challenge him (…), but also, what are the things that I haven’t seen him do as much of?” For Cullen Fuller, sustainable choreography and choreographing on
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Lenzo’s disabled, pained and self-professed aging bodymind is not about lessening the challenge of movement, but instead about exploring forms of movement that offer new challenges. She explains further, saying that The Journeyman is based on sleep and wake cycles and explores these through “extended amounts of floorwork,” which created a new challenge not only for
Lenzo’s bodymind to execute but for Cullen Fuller as a choreographer.
Cullen Fuller’s explanation of The Journeyman’s creative process offers insight into she and Lenzo’s commitment both to taking his “issues” seriously in the dancemaking process and to continuing to challenge one another both physically and artistically. Sustainable choreography is not simply unexamined, “easy” movement, but a rigorous commitment to the experience of the bodymind performing movement. Later in her article, Nakajima turns to the career of Butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno, arguing that his work exposes the ways that “aging causes no degeneration of dance forms, but it accelerates a dancer’s development of the artistic faculty” (102). Pointing to the cultural differences around aging in Japanese and European/American cultures, Nakajima explains that aging dancers in Japan are held up as “national treasures” (103). Ohno, in statements about his creative process, credits his creative success to his distrust of techniques that seek to discipline his body without attention to the particular ways that he experiences movement. Instead, he engages in an improvisational practice wherein he must forget technique in order to fully attend to his dancing in the moment. One critic, Nakajima points out, links
Ohno’s forgetfulness to senility and credits the performance quality this senility/forgetfulness creates with the fascination Ohno’s dancing inspires. Ohno is careful, however, to point out that this “forgetting” training that he espouses both for himself and for other dancers is not actually possible. Training, in Ohno’s understanding, stays with a body, even as that body refuses regulation in the ways that their home technique demands.
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What Ohno, via Nakajima, frames as forgetfulness, if read from a certain (young, western, non-disabled) lens, may constitute a failure to meet the technical standards of dance and, by extension, disqualify Ohno’s work from being considered art, as Nakajima’s earlier questions hint. However, I want to try to understand this process of “forgetting,” as well as
Lenzo’s desire for a dance that fits his aging, disabled, pained body, as a technique and aesthetic in and of itself driven by Ohno’s lived experience and age-related impairments. Drawing, as in the previous chapter, on the work of Siebers, Sheppard and other disability scholars and artists to articulate and define disability aesthetics, I propose that this process of forgetfulness is indeed a practice that requires discipline and conditioning, albeit of a different form than those outlined by Watkins and Clarkson. In particular, Sheppard’s articulation of an intersectional disability aesthetic that accounts for the lived experience of the body through the creative process aids in understanding the “forgetfulness” that comes from aging and/or disrupted sleep as a method through which Ohno and Lenzo generate their own techniques based in their lived experience.
This technique, certainly, informs and transforms the dancemaking process, as Ohno’s calls for forgetting technique show, but also inform the aesthetic of the work. Ohno describes not a simple rejection of all technique but instead a reimaging of technique through his own bodymind.
Though it may appear on the surface that this work lacks rigorous physical engagement and/or fails to challenge the dancer artistically/technically, especially if viewed through the lens proposed and perpetuated by Watkins, Clarkson, Hurt’s instructors and, indeed, most of the mainstream Western dance world, Ohno and Lenzo’s practices may actually reframe the concept of rigor entirely, asking practitioners and audience members to question what physically engaged movement looks and feels like.
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In an evaluation of the 2017 3Arts fellowships, arts management consultant Peter
McDowell (2018) further explains how Cullen Fuller and Lenzo, with the support of Sandahl, approached movement generation through sustainable choreography. McDowell also highlights the importance of having Sandahl, a disabled artist in her own right, in on early conversations about the work, saying that she was able to advocate alongside Lenzo for the centering of his
“issues” in the choreographic process. In particular, he elaborates their approach to the floorwork that Cullen Fuller spoke to during the performance at Loyola. Lenzo explains through McDowell that he was often able to bring up painful moments in the choreography during the rehearsal process and that Cullen Fuller would work with him to find a less painful way of performing the movement. For instance, when Lenzo found that moving in and out of the floor exacerbated the pain from shoulder injuries, Cullen Fuller worked with him to shift the brunt of the impact to his torso rather than his arm and shoulder (3).
This partnership in navigating sustainable choreography constitutes more than a simple accommodation of Lenzo’s impairments in generating movement, but instead builds his lived experience into the aesthetic and creative process of the work. The Journeyman takes Lenzo’s lived experience not only as the abstracted subject of the work, but also as its defining aesthetic.
Its insistence on the centrality of Lenzo’s experience of movement, as well as the ways that the concept of sustainable choreography emerged through Lenzo’s relationships with both Cullen
Fuller and Sandahl, underscore the artistic value of understanding and generating movement through a political/relational lens. The convergence of Lenzo, a disabled dancer, Sandahl, a disabled scholar, artist and dramaturg, and Cullen Fuller, a non-disabled choreographer with many years of experience in choreographing on disabled dancers, facilitated the creation of sustainable choreography as a concept. Only through their relationships to each other and to the
65 field of dance, as well as their politicized understandings of movement and the lived experience of disability, is the concept possible. The Journeyman, then, is their first attempt at staging sustainable choreography. The piece itself is about five minutes long and begins with Lenzo seated on the ground far off on stage right, with him and his chair facing each other. He begins moving by slowly lifting his arms out to the side before wrapping them around his chair and pulling himself up into it as it still faces him. Sitting backwards in his chair, Lenzo performs three large, long swoops with both arms that move him from stage right to stage left.
Throughout the work, Lenzo works to reduce stress and impact on his body and, in particular, his shoulders. His movement initiates largely from his scapulae, ensuring that his back and torso take on the brunt of the work. In the moment following his entrance, Lenzo sits backwards in his chair facing upstage so that his whole back is on display for the audience. He scoops his left arm up to a long, curved diagonal and softens his torso as that elbow folds in toward his side. From this soft, bent position, that same arm twists up and over itself, poking out to the side as his upper torso folds, allowing the twist to reverberate through the rest of his body.
Later in the piece, once Lenzo is out of his chair and on the ground, he lays downstage right on his back with his head toward the audience and his arms stretched out to his sides. He lifts both arms, right then left, straight up in front of him with the palm of each hand facing in toward the other. He quickly turns his palms toward the front of the stage, leading with his pinky fingers and causing his arms to bend slightly. He opens his arms back to the side one at a time, maintaining the facing of his palms. As his arms open, they bend even more and his middle back lifts slightly off the ground to make room for his scapulae to control the movement of his twisted arms. Swinging his arms above his head and rocking his hips up toward the ceiling, Lenzo brings himself up to sitting with his back toward the audience and arms out straight to the sides. He
66 scooches quickly to his right by reaching his hands out ahead of him on the floor and sliding his hips in between his hands. Seated facing upstage again, he curves to his left, supporting himself with his left arm and extending the curve of his back with his right arm up over his head. Sitting straight up with his arms stretched to the sides, he performs the same scooch and curve movement he just finished, but this time he folds forward after returning to sitting, slides his hips upstage and lays on his stomach. From here, he performs three quick rolls to stage left, sliding his right arm underneath him in the way Lenzo described for the McDowell report on the fellowship. As he rolls, Lenzo extends his right arm under his torso and out to the left before completing the roll onto his back and returning to his stomach. Each time his right arm reaches under him, he slows slightly, taking care to fully extend before shifting his weight onto his side and back.
Admittedly, for someone less familiar with Lenzo’s work, this description may not seem wildly different than most western contemporary dance, except, of course, that Lenzo is disabled.
However, for Lenzo, it constitutes a massive departure from his earlier work, which consists largely of duets with a smattering of group pieces during which Lenzo spends much of the work lifting and otherwise physically supporting other dancers. In these pieces, Lenzo carries, flips, holds and lifts his partners, his shoulders bearing the brunt of this work. A moment from
Indecision, a duet choreographed by and featuring Lenzo and Fillmore-Kinney and restaged for
CounterBalance in 2019, illustrates this trend particularly well. Fillmore-Kinney rests across
Lenzo’s lap with her feet on the footrest of his wheelchair. Lenzo supports her upper body with his left arm and spins them both with his right as Fillmore-Kinney repeatedly swoops her left arm around in large, open circles, her upper body rising and falling as they spin. The move is effective and impressive, so much so that a still from precisely this moment even became
67 primary promotional image for the concert, but must put enormous stress on Lenzo’s already injured and pained shoulders.
It should also be clear from my description that The Journeyman’s movement is still physically strenuous by any standards. “Any” standards, though, are not what the piece concerns itself with. The Journeyman is explicitly and exclusively concerned with generating standards for rigor and virtuosity without enforcing outside conceptualizations of those terms onto Lenzo’s dancing body. Just as Ohno’s forgetting technique takes his lived experience as an aging dancer as the basis upon which to generate movement, Lenzo and Cullen Fuller’s work in sustainable choreography takes his aging, sleep deprived, disabled, pained body not as a disqualifier for producing artistically engaging movement, but instead as an opportunity to reimagine dance through those experiences. This work and the concept of sustainable choreography not only make performance possible for Lenzo, but also open up possibilities for imagining a new dancemaking practice that understands the experiences of the performing body as essential to the movement generation process, rather than at best superfluous to and at worst a hinderance to that work.
Later in her writing briefly introduced earlier in this section, Jowitt recounts a few examples of dancers both past and present who have managed to continue performing to, at best, mixed reviews. In ballet, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev7 continued performing as they aged, though audiences were relieved when their careers ended, and The Royal Danish Ballet retains roles for aging dancers in their repertoire, though they reduced their retirement age from forty-eight to forty shortly before Jowitt’s writing was published. Modern and post-modern choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and more
7 Jowitt does not mention that Nureyev was HIV positive and the disease’s role in the decline of his career, or hiw public reception (“Rudolph Nureyev’s last years”).
68 continue/continued to perform well past when most dancers have retired or shifted out of performance. As Jowitt lists the dancers and choreographers that have managed to break with accepted norms around aging in dance, she is careful to stipulate that reviewers and audiences either quietly ridiculed their perceived decline in technique or qualified their praise by adding that they look and perform well for their age. As her list grows, Jowitt begins to conflate aging and other forms of bodily difference. She states that Tharp, as a modern dance artist, has the latitude to continue dancing whatever her body looks like, even saying, “if she only had one leg,
I’ve no doubt she could accommodate that in her choreography.” Shortly after, Jowitt comments on Beverly Blossom’s work in which she, as Jowitt writes, “gratifyingly, neither hides nor emphasizes her age and girth.” It is clear that, for Jowitt, aging bodies on stage open up the imagination to other forms of bodily difference that have traditionally been excluded from dance spaces. Her use of the word “accommodate,” often deployed by institutions and legislation to describe changes to programs and physical spaces to allow for the participation of disabled people – that is, changes typically made on the institution’s terms that stop short of real, structural change that would ensure consistent, equitable access – is particularly interesting, even if not intentional.
Jowitt’s imagination, however, goes no further than perceived health. She refers to aging dancers and others that break the mold of the stereotypically tall and impossibly thin dancerly body as “healthy-looking,” equating the perception of health with the perception of worth. In her conclusion, she remarks that square and contra dancers show that, “the impulse to dance, and dance with verve and style and joy, may be tied to health and stamina, but it doesn’t have anything to do with slender waists and unlined faces.” Jowitt uses the qualifier of health to position aging and otherwise previously dismissed dancing body types as worthy and artistically
69 valuable. Though I certainly support the conclusion, she effectively commits the same act against sick bodies that she argues against for aging bodies. In situating aging dancers as healthy, she unintentionally draws the line at unhealthy, or perceived unhealthiness. But what of sick dancers? This is the question I took on as I began my project on sustainable choreography in the fall of 2018.
3.3 Sustainable Movement
My project was an endeavor to understand the concept of “sustainable choreography,” as first presented by Lenzo, Cullen Fuller and Sandahl, and to apply it to my own movement practice. Going into the project, I thought of sustainable choreography as a sort of holy grail of disability dance. I understood it as choreography that can be performed over and over without fear of further pain or harm to the body. This idea, as I soon discovered, is unsustainable for my bodymind. I discovered this over and over again. I discovered it as I left my studio session annoyed that I could not find a way to move without pain. I discovered it as I left my first ballet class in years and needed to sleep for most of the rest of the day to recuperate. As a person with chronic pain that lives mostly in my stomach and the joints of my feet, legs and hands, I discovered that dance, very simply, hurts. I also discovered that it is better than the alternative.
Not moving hurts as much, if not more, than moving. I realized through this project that I had grown used to constant aches and pains that resulted more from the lack of dance and active physical engagement than anything else.
“What shall we do with pain?” disability studies scholar and rhetorician Margaret Price asks in her 2015 article “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain.” A key assumption of sustainable choreography, at least as Lenzo articulates it, is that pain and,
70 especially, (further) injury8 can be avoided through careful crafting and adjustment of movement.
Lenzo himself, however, has found that the concept of sustainable choreography is not as straightforward as it may seem at first. In conversations with him while I worked on my own project, Lenzo shared that he does not see himself dancing, at least with the same intensity that he has in the past, for much longer due to his pain and injuries. What happens, then, when pain is unavoidable? What shall we do with pain? Building on her articulation of the bodymind discussed in my introduction, Price offers more questions than answers, preferring to make connections and distinctions between ways of thinking about pain and care proposed by other disability studies scholars, than argue any one particular mode of thinking is correct. Shortly after posing this question, Price writes about and complicates the move toward “desiring disability” in disability studies and activism. Desiring disability, Price writes, includes pride frameworks of disability that insist on the disabled bodymind as both desirable and desirous,
Keah Brown’s #DisabledandCute campaign comes to mind (NowThis), as well as scholarly work that desires a future that “values difference and resists dualisms such as straight/queer or abled/disable” (274). Though Price shares that she often engages in and values the work of these desires, she also wonders what happens to those bodyminds whose experience of impairment is decidedly painful and undesirable. Drawing on work by Kafer and Alyson Patsavas that details their own “un-desires,” Price points out that “for all that feminist DS scholars unite personal, political, body, and mind, we rarely look closely at the possibility that some aspects of disabled bodymind are distinctly undesirable” (276).
In the 2014 article cited by Price entitled “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky
Bodies, Connective Tissue and Feeling Discourse,” Patsavas draws on representations of pain in
8 I write these two separately to call attention to the ways that, while they are certainly linked, especially in Lenzo’s experience and definition of sustainable choreography, they are not necessarily the same thing.
71 popular culture and her own pain journals to argue through a crip, feminist lens that cultural, historical and political discourses of pain work together to frame the experience of pain as one dimensionally tragic and to simultaneously obscure structural conditions that contribute to the actual tragedy of chronic pain. In a section on recovery, Patsavas states that dominant, biomedical notions frame pain as “individual, increasingly knowable (with advancing technology), and to be avoided at all costs” (208), a framework that echoes through Watkins and
Clarkson’s conditioning regimen and Rip, Vallerand and Fortin’s fretting over young dancers’ all-consuming passion. This way of knowing pain, Patsavas argues, forecloses the possibility of knowing pain otherwise, framing any effort to understand pain outside of biomedical knowledge as not only futile, but perverse. Patsavas deploys her cripistemology of pain to do just this, using the disability studies concept of interdependence to argue that the experience of pain “leaks” onto the bodies around us (213-215). Ending with a reflection on Kafer’s imagining of crip futures, Patsavas calls for future work that uses a cripistemology of pain to “think pain otherwise” (216). That is, work that accounts for the harm that strict biomedical understandings cause those in pain, as well as new frameworks that imagine pained futures as not only possible, but valuable.
Putting Patsavas’ work in conversation with the work of Hurt, Watkins and Clarkson, and
Rip, Fortin and Vallerand, exposes the ways that the field of dance, seemingly obsessed with pain avoidance, actually produces and valorizes pain while discouraging discussion of that pain.
It is not that dance is built around pain avoidance, but instead that pain is an accepted part of the experience of dancing. Dancers are expected both to feel pain and to work outside the studio to alleviate pain where possible or ignore it altogether where not possible until pain either goes away or puts an end to dancing altogether. While Hurt instructor’s “dying for it” equates pain
72 and death while framing them both as essential to producing successful dance, Watkins and
Clarkson’s attempts to mitigate pain and injury, as well as Rip, Fortin and Vallerand account of passion as perpetuating injurious behavior individualize the experience of pain in dance. At the same time, Watkins and Clarkson’s conditioning regimen promises delay (not prevention) of pain and injury only if dancers and teachers take personal responsibility to incorporate conditioning into their practice on top of their regular dance training, rehearsal and performance.
The industry places responsibility for painful experiences and the treatment of pain with the individual dancer, even as it tells them that pain is necessary to their economic stability and success as a dancer, but only as long as that pain remains manageable enough to continue executing traditionally, technically exceptional movement.
My project sprung out of a desire to reconcile my training as a dancer with the ways that dance felt, and, in many ways, continues to feel, completely inaccessible to me outside of the highly structured world of an academic dance program where my right to accommodations was enforced by the school. Outside of this world, I found the precarity of working in dance completely unsustainable. As many of my friends took on multiple jobs and gig work, I needed medical insurance and a way to pay medical bills I racked up while in crisis in my last couple years of college, on top of rent and all the regular costs of daily living. Full time office work was the only way to ensure some stability, but also meant that all of my energy was devoted to my full time job with very little left over to maintain any kind of movement practice. I bring up my own experience of precarity in pursuing professional dance not just to contextualize my project, but to hint at the systemic ways that dance as a field is made financially, as well as physically and mentally, unsustainable for all but those who come to the field with a certain degree of
73 wealth and support, as well as the ways that the financial interacts with the material, in my experience, to all but force sick and disabled dancers out of the field.
As I began graduate work, I hoped to find my way back to a dance practice but needed one that recognized how my body had changed since I danced regularly, due both to illness and time away from a consistent practice. My plan consisted of three components. The first included attending dance/movement classes and exploring how I might make them accessible to me in an effort to, if possible, understand my former training in the context of my changing bodymind. At the same time, I planned to spend time alone in the studio generating a short piece of sustainable choreography to figure out how/if my dancemaking process shifted in response to changes in my bodymind, and what that meant for me as an artist. I also kept a journal, jotting down notes on my thoughts, feelings and pains as I recovered9 dance through the classes and rehearsals outlined above. At the end of the project, I planned to have a short piece of sustainable choreography to show in class, a journal to accompany to work, and, I hoped, a clearer understanding of sustainable choreography and my own artistic practice.
As I dove into my project, I found it hard to shake normative expectations of what dancemaking should look and, most importantly, feel like. During my first rehearsal, I threw on music by fellow chronically ill and disabled artist, Collander, hoping to channel some crip energy into my movement. I set myself the task of staying in constant motion just to see how my body felt. Collander seemed fitting because, beyond just finding her music catchy and relatable, an interview about her work greatly influenced my initial approach to the project. In it, she speaks about crip time and its importance to her creative process. She states that her body
9 A loaded word borrowed from Patsavas. In her work on a cripistemology of pain, she writes about her use of pain journals as a recovery narrative, but one that differs from medical success stories that litter cultural discourses of pain and disability. Patsavas’ work “recovers the cultural, medical, and political discourses that shape experiences of pain” through a queercrip lens that understands pain as a cultural phenomenon (212).
74 requires her and the people around her to work with a gentleness and mindfulness, and that these qualities deepen the creative process (Burke, 2017). It did not occur to me that perhaps setting myself an improvisational score that did not allow for stillness was exactly the opposite of the crip time and the thoughtfulness Collander spoke about. With about fifteen minutes left of that first rehearsal, I took a different tactic. I turned off the music, and stayed still for a while, only allowing movement to adjust areas where I experienced pain. This felt more satisfying and interesting, but I wondered if it really fit the “sustainable choreography” brief. Either way, my time was up with the studio. Later that week, I took two movement classes of the four total I was able to take over the course of the project. After the first I fell asleep on the train on the way to class, and the second, as I mentioned earlier, kept me in bed all day afterwards. I began to find generating sustainable choreography unsustainable. The next week, though, held a couple of a-ha moments.
On the way home from class that Monday, still feeling defeated by my time in the studio,
I began the readings for the next class, the topic of which was disability justice. As I read a 2016 interview with Sins Invalid’s Patricia Berne and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha by Tovah on their show, Birthing, Dying, Becoming Crip Wisdom, I became fascinated with their concept of crip wisdom. Berne defines crip wisdom as, “the wisdom of slowing the fuck down and making movements that stay at the pace of the “slowest” members — disabled, parents, older folks, poor folks, caregivers — because when you move at the pace of the majority of people on the planet you have stronger movements.” The idea that crip bodies carry the wisdom of their experiences and that this wisdom might help us to generate new, more just ways of moving resonated with my experiences in the studio. With the concept of crip wisdom and its implications bouncing around in my head, I attended a lecture by Sandahl early the next week.
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In her lecture, Sandahl spoke about the concepts of curative time and of disability being a process of “continual becoming” in relation to Matt Bodett’s piece, What I Learned About
Healing (“Time out”, 2018c). Sandahl quoted Kafer to explain curative time as “an understanding of disability that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.” This concept helped me to explain and reject the expectations I had placed on my body during that first rehearsal to produce the miracle movement that would not cause pain, and to produce that movement in a single, hour-long studio session. Likewise, understanding disability as a continual process of becoming, as “neither a departure nor a destination” (Sandahl, 2018c), helped me to intervene in the curative expectations of sustainable choreography as I had envisioned it.
I went into the studio that week with a new understanding of my project. I began work with the few movements I generated at the end of the previous rehearsal. As I moved through the gestures, I noticed that my colon, the primary location of my disease in my body, would gurgle and glop in time with my movements. My colon always does this, but with my new goal of generating sustainable movement, that is, movement that acknowledged the crip wisdom present in my body, and sought not to cure or avoid pain, but to understand it and view it as an essential part of my creative process, I began writing out the different sensations I experienced as I moved around the space. I ended up with:
- Glop, glop
- Squeeeeze
- Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle
- Constrict
- Plunk
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- Release
With these sensations identified and named, I generated a single movement for each item on the list and put them together into one phrase. I eventually generated two more phrases based on this list. Initially, the phrases all tied together, meaning that I performed the list in consecutive order three times through. The linear way the movement progressed from one sensation to the next, however, felt unlike my daily experience, and, honestly, made for uninteresting movement. I broke the phrases back down into individual movements and pieced them together, allowing for moments of repetition and stillness. Samuels’ (2017) Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time helps to explain the ways that crip time is “broken time.” Though, as mentioned in the introduction of this thesis, Samuels’ work retains the celebratory ways that crip bodyminds experience and express crip time, it also accounts for the ways that we experience “the pain of crip time, its melancholy, its brokenness.” In this broken time, we “break in” our bodyminds to the new ways of moving, thinking and being. As I restructure movement, I break in both my bodymind and my dance to better reflect my own experience of pain. As I sense the timing of my bodymind, I move with it.
I pause as my stomach gurgles to see if it is just a momentary internal adjustment or if I need to step away for a longer break. My bodymind resists the curative time of dance, which in many ways feels like a celebration, but Samuels’ broken crip time makes space for the ways that I am still in relationship to the timings and techniques conditioned into my bodymind for so many years. I mourn the loss of those times, even as a I celebrate moving in my own times.
My dance unintentionally became an effort to imagine a pained dance future for myself.
Very quickly, the conundrum of my project shifted from “how can I avoid pain while dancing” to “how do I find a way to move that acknowledges and moves with pain, all while understanding that this goal, like my pain, changes from moment to moment?” This question
77 functions as my definition of sustainable movement, as it remains more of a question than a concept. The practice of sustainable movement changes and shifts, just as the body does. It is a process, not a product. It is not concerned with pain avoidance, but is a commitment to the complex, culturally informed experience of pain and its potential to generate and inspire, as well as restrict, movement. This pained project became an effort to recover dance for my bodymind.
The piece I ended up with hurts sometimes. The abrupt knee bending of “glop, glop 1”
(the movement for “glop, glop” from my original phrase), for instance, often hurts my arthritic knees. I address this in part by building flexibility into the timing of the piece, meaning I take the time I need to recover between movements and to take a moment of stillness when necessary. I resist the curative tendencies of dance in this small way by allowing my body the time it needs to recognize pain and move through and with it, rather than ignoring it or allowing it to keep me from practicing movement. I draw heavily here on Kolářová’s call outlined in the introduction of the thesis to shift our attention to what pain does. Taking pain seriously as an essential part of my dancemaking process demands a resistance of both dance’s tempos and its understanding of pain as individual and career-ending, but it also opens up new creative possibilities in dance. The recognition of pain as both a material reality and a cultural product that cannot be separated from biomedical discourses allows for, as Patsavas says, thinking pain otherwise, but also embodying and moving pain otherwise. Sustainable movement draws on a lineage of crip and sick artists and scholars to expose the harm that dying for dance enacts on dancing bodyminds in order to recover mournful, celebratory, desirable, painful alternatives to traditional western dancemaking practices. Valuing the experience of the body in dance not only offers practical answers to the question of how one might sustain dancing, but also opens up new creative opportunities for the field of dance.
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3.3 Conclusion
In this chapter, I documented Lenzo and Cullen Fuller’s creation of sustainable choreography to insist on the creative potential of Lenzo’s aging, pained, disabled bodymind and of his experience of impairment. While Lenzo shows an awareness of the ways that age and disability exist in opposition to the concept of “dancer” in the mainstream dance imaginary, his work in sustainable choreography employs politicized and relational understandings of his experience to develop a disability aesthetic that insists on the artistic, as well as practical, value of work built to sustain his dancing bodymind.
Building on Lenzo’s concept, my work in sustainable movement not only insists on the value of pained and painful dancemaking processes but understands pain itself as a collaborator in generating movement. Sustainable movement contends with the ways that pain is constructed in dance as simultaneously necessary to artistic success and also a disqualifier to performing technically excellent and, therefore, artistically viable movement. Engaging in sustainable movement practices, for me, means drawing on lineages of training in the mainstream dance world that no longer fully fit my pained bodymind while also drawing on the crip wisdom of that bodymind to recover movement for myself in my own crip time. Sustainable movement lives in the contradictions and breakages between past bodily conditioning and the present condition of my bodymind to insist that, though that bodymind no longer meets the technical standards it once did, its current, pained, shifting movements are not only artistically valuable, but offer productive challenges to the normative demands of mainstream dance.
Turning back to sustainability at the scale of the field, my intention in documenting and analyzing these works is neither to suggest that sustainable choreography and movement present an unqualified solution to the problem of bodymind breakdown in dance, nor to suggest that
79 these two efforts constitute the first attempt to build work based in the experience of impairment.
In a conversation with Lenzo about whether he has continued to make sustainable choreography, for instance, he shared that The Journeyman has been his only attempt, though he would like to make more. Additionally, though The Journeyman was intended to travel easily and be performed in nearly any setting, even during his fellowship when he was invited to perform in the quad at UIC (a not uncommon request for disabled dancers), the extended floorwork in the pieces made performing on concrete untenable. Similarly, though sustainable choreography in many ways returned dance to me, I still encounter many of the same time, energy and financial barriers that kept me from a consistent practice in the first place. Sustaining disabled dancing bodyminds, it seems, similar to my observations about sustaining a field at the end of my previous chapter, requires financial and structural, as well as physical and emotional, support.
Part of the power of these ways of generating movement, though, is precisely their critique of naturalized and systematized ways of generating movement and producing dance work. Many approaches to creating dance that understands the experience of the disabled bodymind as essential to the work deal largely with contact improvisation or community dance.
Ann Cooper Albright’s work outlined in my introductory chapter, for instance, essentially proposes contact improvisation as a solution to the representational issues she critiques in the concert dance and promotional material of Dancing Wheels. Contact improv, she argues, takes the body as the starting point for all movement and is therefore uniquely situated to the disabled dancing body. While Cooper Albright’s work highlights in helpful ways the centrality of the body, this argument unintentionally leaves behind an exploration of what productive and interesting concert dance for disabled bodyminds might look like in favor of the process-focused practice of contact improv.
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In her recounting of her work with mental health system survivors in her 2011 book,
Disability Culture and Community Performance: Find a Strange and Twisted Shape, Kuppers shares a model for community performance organizing that takes the community’s individual and collective experiences, including the ways that their experience exists in tension with dominant understandings of life in Wales, as the basis for their collective exploration. Again,
Kuppers here offers an alternative to mainstream artmaking practices different from Cooper
Albright’s assertion of contact improv as the ideal form for disabled bodies, but again intentionally distances the work of her community from the goals of concert dance when she shares that, though video of their work was shown widely in the UK and at international film festivals, their work’s intended purpose was local in nature. The group intended to intervene in and claim ownership of their own experiences, the myths of Wales and the stigmas around mental illness, not necessarily to present work to a wider audience. Kuppers underscores this when she points out the importance of their work being shown locally, saying
More importantly, then, our videos played and continue to play locally. The Mental
Health Self-Help Center uses the videos as part of its regular stand at the local markets,
where the stand functions to raise awareness of the center and its function in the
community. The videos have also helped the center to raise funds: they provide
marketing material and give an insight into the abilities, depth, and creativity of the
people using the center. In all of these marketplaces, where information is exchanged and
public visibility tested, our re-visions of ourselves tactically undermine stereotypes of
disability (93-94).
The goal of Kuppers’ work in community dance/art, then, consists of intervening in dominant understandings of the disability experience in order to materially improve the lives of the
81 community she works with. A beautiful goal that, much in the same way as Cooper Albright’s work, does not match the goals of Lenzo’s sustainable choreography or my sustainable movement, which seeks to carve out space in concert dance for disabled bodyminds in a way that serves and values those bodyminds.
In a patreon post published shortly before I began my project in August of 2018, though I encountered it later, dance artist and writer Toby MacNutt proposes “small dances” as a way into the dancemaking process for disabled bodyminds or those experiencing limited movement due to pain or illness. Small dances, in MacNutt’s definition, are contained in some way, either by time, part of the body, or space. In a small dance, the mover may move just their eyes or a finger, they may move for a short time in a small space like their bed where they feel comfortable or supported, depending on the movement available to them at a given time. The concept of small dance is incredibly flexible and is more a way of shifting how we think about movement generation than a codified technique and is concerned with centering the experience of the body within the dancemaking process.
In their writing about small dances, MacNutt offers a definition of dance that counters those put forth by mainstream dance like the perspectives espoused by Watkins and Clarkson, which include conditioning the body to perform technically challenging work. In MacNutt’s definition the condition of the body determines movement, rather than striving toward an idealized version of a dancing body. MacNutt proposes four tenets of dance. Dance is intentional, planned, aware of itself as performance crafted for an audience, and built to include elements outside of the movement itself such as costuming, lighting, text, setting, etc. Within these basic elements of dance, MacNutt makes space for multiple interpretations, stressing that the experience and incorporation of each will shift based on the mover and their body. Planning
82 for dance, for instance, may not mean set movement performed the same way over and over, but could include an improvisational score. The audience for a piece may simply be the dancer themselves and the outside element may simply be the way a blanket falls across the body or light reflects through a window. MacNutt offers a definition of dance outside of traditional technique and points to the ways that disability forces a reconceptualization of movement and dancemaking.
MacNutt’s concept of small dances, similar to Lenzo’s and my work in sustainability, begins to articulate tangible steps that disabled dancemakers are taking to make work that deeply values their bodyminds and experiences. Their work engages deeply with the presumed norms of the dancemaking process, ultimately offering a new definition of dance that rejects many of those norms while still offering a process that is largely recognizable within the frame of concert dance. Though these different forms are not infallible, I argue that they offer insights that may be essential to sustaining not only disabled dancing bodyminds, but the field of disability dance.
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4. CONCLUSION
4.1 Enacting Repertoires of Pain
The field of mainstream dance presents barriers to disabled bodyminds from training through dancemaking and production. Its curative tempos and rhythms demand that dancers be constantly conditioning themselves into technical perfection, while normalizing the disablement that results from those demands. Through this curative, disabling logic, injury, pain and disability exist in opposition to technically and artistically excellent movement, and therefore must necessarily lead to the end of a dancer’s career. The field simultaneously produces disablement while refusing a space for disabled bodyminds interested in dance. The dearth of accessible classes, along with lack of training for dance instructors interested in working with disabled dancers, ensure that even disabled people that imagine a future for themselves in dance find it nearly impossible to access competent, culturally informed training and performance opportunities. Economic and artistic success in dance is dependent upon normative and normalized understandings of dancing bodies that inherently exclude disability.
Once disabled dancers and choreographers break through these barriers to establish a career in dance, their work continues to challenge non-disabled methods of dancemaking and repertoire building. While the practice of dance often results in pain and disablement for non- disabled dancers, disabled dancers face living and working in a world and field not built to accommodate their bodymind, resulting in intensified experiences of pain and disability.
Likewise, because our work is set on our own distinctive bodyminds that are not easily replaced by another dancer, disability dance refuses replication and reproduction as understood by the traditional repertory models of mainstream dance.
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This thesis documented and analyzed the efforts of three disabled dance artists in addressing the barriers and conundrums outlined above in order to imagine a sustainable disability dance field. Lane’s archiving of her creative, activist and programmatic work challenges traditional notions of repertoire in dance and sheds light on the essential role of mentorship in combatting lack of access to training and performance opportunities for disabled dance artists. Drawing on work by Siebers and Sheppard in articulating disability aesthetics, I argue that Lane’s political commitment to valuing bodymind differences in the dancemaking process develops a disability aesthetic that insists on preserving differences in movement interpretation in her choreographic work, in turn modelling a politicized, relational method of creating movement for her dancers. With an expanded understanding of repertoire based in the work of dance critics and performance scholars like Taylor that understand repertoire as embodied knowledges passed from person to person through performance, Lane’s work may be understood not just as her own integrated dance repertoire, but as an active effort to build and pass along a repertoire of disability dance knowledge that may be taken up and further developed by the dancers she mentors and sets work on.
Lane’s work in ensuring the sustainability of the field of disability dance by mentoring future generations of disabled dance artists and securing future performance spaces, however, may not inherently challenge the disabling effects of practicing dance. Because of her proximity to and training in traditional methods of making and setting work, the possibility of falling back onto curative modes of dancemaking and training lingers, as outlined in the example of her community piece set during the 2019 Inclusive Dance Festival. Lenzo’s collaborative work in developing the concept of sustainable choreography, then, offers one possible solution to the issue of bodymind sustainability in disability dance. Lenzo, in collaboration with Cullen Fuller
85 as choreographer and Sandahl as dramaturg and fellow disabled artist, again draws on his politicized understanding of his experiences as an aging, pained, disabled dancer to develop a disability aesthetic that centers the experience of his bodymind in both the subject and process of
The Journeyman. Lenzo worked with Cullen Fuller to shift in their approaches to movement in order to ensure Lenzo’s ability to consistently perform the choreography with as little pain as possible, and in as many spaces as possible. The Journeyman recognizes the ways that Lenzo’s bodymind exists outside of normalized and naturalized understandings of the conditioned dancing body, but asserts the artistic and aesthetic value of his bodymind anyway, developing an aesthetic, technique and process based in his experiences of sleep deprivation and memory loss to create a piece that cares for and about his pained bodymind.
My work in sustainable movement extends Lenzo’s concept by examining the role of pain avoidance in dance, arguing that the experience of pain is actually central to dance training and choreography while simultaneously constructed as a barrier to producing artistically, technically excellent movement. Using work by Price, Patsavas and Kolářová, I argue that sustainable movement reframes the role of pain in dance by arguing that pained bodyminds carry crip wisdoms that allow for pain to become a generative part of the dancemaking process.
Through sustainable movement, I recover dance for my own pained, sick bodymind, arguing that movement made with/in pain is not only artistically viable, but opens up embodied critiques of the ways that mainstream dance both produces and refuses pained bodyminds.
By combining the lessons of each artist analyzed in this thesis, I argue we may begin to imagine a disability dance field that sustains itself through disability dance doula work that passes repertoires of crip wisdom and disability aesthetics from bodymind to bodymind while leveraging a critique of curative dance practices to insist on the value and artistic potential of
86 those bodyminds. Again drawing on Kolářová’s observation that shifting discussions of pain from what it is to what it does opens up new modes of analyzing and valuing the disability experience, this sustainable disability dance is made possible only through a critique of dance’s construction of pain and injury as both necessary and anathema to technically excellent movement paired with the proposal of pained bodyminds as artistically valuable. Patsavas offers a method of cataloguing and making pain legible in her 2017 article, “An Archive of Pain,” published in Crip Magazine and republished in 2019 for Disability Arts Online. Patsavas’ explanation of her archive opens with questions that surround the experience of pain, including
“where does it hurt” and “what have you tried?” Patsavas argues that these questions and the ways that they spill over from medical settings into everyday life, reflect the medicalization of disability experience, but states that a refusal to answer on the part of pained/disabled people leaves only the traditional narratives that devalue disabled lives. These ubiquitous questions simultaneously individualize pain and also construct the experience of pain as always available for questioning, both by medical professionals and the general public, limiting our potential understandings of pain. Patsavas concludes her article with a series of images that she took in moments of flare or crisis. These images, along with pain journals and journal entries written as part of her research process that make up her archive, Patsavas argues, refuse to ask or answer the questions that insist on understanding pain through dominant, medicalized discourses and instead offer new queer, crip knowledges about pain and disability. Patsavas, through her archive of pain, as well as her explanation of the rationale behind this work, offers a model for creating and preserving crip representations of pain that engages with and critiques dominant discourses that simultaneously construct pain as an unknowable and individual while laying the experience of pain open to examination and questioning.
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While discussing Patsavas’ article and archive with my friend and collaborator, Kelsie
Acton on Twitter, she remarked, “[I] was thinking about you and dance in terms of the opposition between the archive and the repertoire - what does the repertoire of pain look like?”
(@KelsieActon). This question constitutes a combined conundrum of Lane, Lenzo’s and my own work in sustainability and hints at the potential futures of dance that analyzing our work together offers. Taken together, Lane’s work in building, performing, and passing along repertoires of disability dance knowledge, along with Lenzo’s collaborative technique built to center his experience of movement and my own reimagining of the role of pain in dance begins the foundational work necessary to imagine a repertoire of pain. This repertoire, or, more likely, these repertoires, may understand the disabled dancing bodymind as producers and performers of embodied knowledges about pain in dance, including how pain has been understood and how we may reframe pain through the dancemaking process.
This movement and knowledge, once performed, may be reproduced across multiple dancing bodies with differing experiences of pain. In our Inclusive Dance Workshops, my co- founder Sydney Erlikh and I have begun to try and figure out what this production of painful repertoires might look like and what its use might be to disability dance. Utilizing a modified version of my own creative project, I guided our dancers through generating their own movement based on their experience of pain or impairment. The dancers each identified their own words and generated their pain phrases, just as I did in my own small dance. The group setting of our workshops, however, allowed us to take the process further. Once the dancers had their own phrases, they paired up with another dancer and they taught each other their phrases. In setting their phrase on their partner, the dancers had to make choices about how their partner would perform their movement. For instance, some wheelchair dancers had to coach their partner
88 who dances on their feet in performing a translated version of their movement that remained true to the original, while others needed to use auditory or visual cues to remind their partner what comes next. Most interestingly, some dancers’ pain prevented them from performing their partner’s movement as originally intended, resulting in a moment of negotiation and readjustment to ensure the integrity of the movement remained, even as it shifted to center the experience of the new bodymind performing the phrase. Next, they combined their two phrases, merging movement based in two separate experiences of pain into one, cohesive phrase.
A simplistic reading of this work might suggest that this spread of movement from one dancer to the next provides each a window into the lived experience of the other. This reading, however, limits the artistic and theoretical potential of our work in generating and sharing movement based in our distinctive experiences of impairment. In sharing our phrase, I argue instead that we challenge dominant discourses of pain in dance that insist on the experience of pain as individualized and in need of treatment or better training. Our collective phrases, then, insist not only on the artistic value of pained bodyminds in the dancemaking process, but on our collective responsibility to build movement that cares for our partner’s bodyminds. Though more exploration is certainly needed to fully understand the possibilities and pitfalls that a repertoire of pain presents, our collaborative work constitutes an early effort to construct, perform and pass along complex, embodied knowledges of pain and the disability experience.
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VITA NAME: Maggie Bridger
EDUCATION: A.A., Dance, Cottey College, Nevada, MO, 2008
B.A., Dancemaking & Dance Studies, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2011
M.S., Disability Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2021
PhD, Disability Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, Expected 2025
HONORS: 2021 New Works Artist, synapse arts, Chicago, IL, 2021
Schweitzer Foundation Fellow for Life Seed Grant, Chicago, IL 2020- 2021
Chicago Area Schweitzer Fellow, Schweitzer Foundation, 2019-2020
Member of UCLA Dancing Disability Lab Inaugural Cohort, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, June 2019
PROFESSIONAL Dance Studies Association, 2019-Present MEMBERSHIPS: Dance/USA, 2019-Present
National Dance Education Organization, 2020-Present
LEADERSHIP: CounterBalance Planning Committee , 2019-Present
Disability and Human Development Student Association, President and Social Events Committee Chair, 2019-Present
Bodies of Work Festival Executive & Program and Structure Committees, 2019-2020
Chicagoland Disability Studies Conference Planning Committee, 2019- Present
Dance/USA Deaf and Disability Affinity Group, 2019-Present
TEACHING: Co-Founder and Facilitator, Inclusive Dance Workshop Series at Access Living, Chicago, IL, June 2019-Present
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Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Disability and Human Development, Chicago, IL, August 2018-Present
Course Builder, University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Disability and Human Development, Chicago, IL, June 2020-August 2020
Co-Facilitator for Alternarratives: Inclusive Dance Workshop Disability Cultural Center at UIC, Chicago, IL, October 2019
Program Facilitator, Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago & Northwest Indiana, Chicago, IL, July 2012-December 2014
Teaching Artist, Changing Worlds, Chicago, IL, January 2012-December 2012
PRESENTATIONS: Bridger, Maggie. “Sustaining a Bodymind: Disability and the Value of Moving With/In Pain.” Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, Chicago, IL, 30 April 2021, Chicago, IL. Keynote Address.
Bridger, Maggie, Sydney Erlikh and Carrie Sandahl. “Art as Advocacy.” Epidemics of Injustice. University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Public Health, 18 March 2021, Chicago, IL. Guest Lecture.
Bridger, Maggie and Sydney Erlikh. “Disability Culture in Practice,” National Dance Education Organization Conference, Virtual, 25 October 2020. Conference Presentation.
Clemens, Stephanie, Ginger Lane, Kris Lenzo, Alice Sheppard and Alana Wallace, panelists. Maggie Bridger and Sydney Erlikh, moderators. “Disability, Dance and Chicago: The History and Future of Integrated Movement in the Second City”, CounterBalance 2020, Chicago, IL. 8 October 2020. Panel discussion.
Bridger, Maggie and Sydney Erlikh. “Inclusive Dance.” University of Illinois at Chicago, HuMed Affinity Group, Chicago, IL, 18 February 2020. Guest Lecture.
Anderson, Bailey, Maggie Bridger, Mel Chua, Sydney Erlikh and Victoria Marks, panelists. “Exploring Disability Aesthetics and Inclusion at UCLA's Dancing Disability Lab,” Eastern Michigan University Disability Arts and Culture Symposium, Ypsilanti, MI, 2 December 2020. Panel Discussion.
Herzovi, Michael and Bess Williamson, panelists. Maggie Bridger and Amy Heider, moderators. “Mobility, Access and Design,” University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, 11 October 2019. Panel discussion.
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WORK: Administrator, Annual Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, 2019-Present
Graduate Assistant, Bodies of Work, Chicago, IL, January 2019-Present
Access Coordinator, 3Arts Annual Awards Celebration, November 2019
SHOWING OF “Shared Time.” Chor. Maggie Bridger and Sydney Erlikh, CHOREOGRAPHY: CounterBalance 2020, Chicago, IL, 7 October 2020.
“Inclusive Dance Showing.” Chor. Maggie Bridger, Sydney Erlikh and the dancers, Access Living, Chicago, IL, December 2019
“This is What Democracy Looks Like.” Chor. Maggie Bridger, Welcome to Our World, Vol. 2, Chicago, IL, February 2013.
“Normal Distribution.” Chor. Maggie Bridger, Cottey College CoMotion Dance Company Spring Concert, Nevada, MO, April 2012.
“Overwhelming Nuance” & “Stop, Drop & Roll.” Chor. Maggie Bridger, CounterBalance III: An Evening of Integrated Movement, Chicago, IL, May 2012.
“I’ll Pass.” Chor. Maggie Bridger, Welcome to Our World, Chicago, IL, February 2012.
PERFORMANCE: “Community 2,” Chor. Ginger Lane, CounterBalance 2020 Chicago, IL, September 2019
“Left Side, Right Hemisphere,” Chor. Jackie Kinasz, Chicago, IL, September 2012.
“Food & Performance Night at DEFIBRILLATOR Performance Art Gallery,” Chor. Sarah Osterman, DEFIBRILLATOR Performance Art Gallery, Chicago, IL, June 2011.
“Marching Banned.” by Mucca Pazza, Chor by Peter Carpenter, Chicago, IL, June 2011.
PUBLICATIONS: Bridger, Maggie and Sydney Erlikh, “’We Are Distinctive Forms’: Disability Dance, Activism and Aesthetics in Chicago,” Dancing on the Third Coast edited by Lizzie Leopold and Susan A Manning. Forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, 2023.