Wheelchair Dancer

After You've Been To The Show: Writing The Dance

2011-11-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

After you've been to the show, you may feel a whole host of emotion -- some of which may be off balancing, some of which may be sheer utter joy. You may feel surprise, shock, anger; you may have cried and/or laughed. I've certainly had all of these feelings at dance performances. The question is what happens next. You may want to write about what you've seen; you may have to write about what you've seen -- compulsion or, perhaps, employment. Allow me to offer some biased tips.

I like to think about dance writing as a second performance -- a verbal interpretation of movement you have just seen. You, the writer, become a performer. How would you like your work to be received?
Decide what kind of piece it is going to be in advance. That way, you will ramble less, and your audience won't feel tossed around by you blathering on. You might want to write a reaction piece -- something that describes how you felt, what you were thinking, how you responded to what you saw. You might be tasked with writing a more formal review piece -- something that future audiences, other professionals in the community and/or funders will read. There are an infinite number of ways to write about what you've seen. Don't just blurt. Make some conscious decisions about what kind of piece this will be and write for your intended audience.
The previous paragraph is good advice for any piece of writing, but it is particularly important when writing about physical integrated dance. So much writing in the contemporary media relies on three things: cliches about disabled people, cliched word play about disabled people, and cliches about the non-disabled world. Make your writing stand out! Just don't go there. Write honestly and open-mindedly about what you saw. Tell your reader what you liked and didn't like and why.

s.e. smith provides you with a guide for language about disability here. The world doesn't need another piece of writing about overcoming disability, inspiration, disability not letting someone hold them back, wheels rolling. Read this piece and learn how to make your writing different.
Remember, too, that you have just seen a piece of physically integrated dance. It's an unusual form of contemporary dance that depends on the equal collaboration of disabled and non-disabled dancers. I've written about physically integrated dance as a genre in a variety of places on this blog. Some of my favourite posts are here, here, and here. Here's a quote from that last post: "As an art form, physically integrated dance takes trained dancers -- disabled and non -- and launches them on a collaboration of bodies. .... It's the mutuality between disabled and non and the potential for an accepting, kinesthetic effect on the audience that together define physically integrated dance."
It is fine for you to talk about the bodies and equipment of the dancers; you can talk about strength, grace, power, communicative potential, kind of wheelchair -- manual or power, crutch, cane, prosthetic and give a neutral description: carbon fiber, curved prosthetic; amputee; crutch or wheelchair user; light-weight manual chair; strong arms; flexible spine, etc. It is not fine for you to be talking judgmentally about dancers' bodies. You can also talk about certain moves and the qualities of those moves: speed, height or distance of a jump, lyricism, grace, precision, etc.

You do not have the right to judge anyone as too large, too small, too fat, too thin, too disabled, not disabled enough. ... Dancers put themselves and their bodies out there to do a particular kind of work. You are there to see and respond to that work -- not their embodiment and not their personhood.

Dance writing and dance criticism are complex and changing fields. Here are some very recent links to get you started on some threads of the current conversation.

The Dance JOT: journal of outlying thoughts on dance -- a free online quarterly journal of writing on dance.

http://www.theballetbag.com/2011/11/01/the-future-of-dance-criticism/ -- on the future of dance criticism and its relevance.

http://danceintuit.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/dance-critics-speak-up-in-dance-magazine/ -- dance critics dig in.

http://www.dance-enthusiast.com/barefootnotes/view/35/ -- why words matter.

Becoming A Subject

2011-10-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

One of the things about the Internet is its ability to turn your life perspective on its head. If you read my blog (and, well, you are probably doing that right now), you will know me as, I hope, a powerful independent woman -- hopefully, I come across as mouthy, not afraid to speak the truth, smart, sassy ... you get the picture.

Like many site owners, I make available an email address for you to contact me and, like many site owners, I often trace back referring sites for traffic. But finding out who is reading your site is something of a mixed blessing. Particularly when the contact is coming from academia.

Sometimes, I get emails from people who ask if it is OK to use my work. It is. As long as you give credit. Sometimes, it's a note from someone saying that a particular post was helpful to them in a given assignment. These kinds of notes lift my spirit. Two things sink my heart: requests for interviews and traffic from course sites.

I no longer agree to do interviews for students who wish to make me and my life part of their term papers. I don't answer questions any more, either. You can use my material -- I can't even track whether or not you cite me appropriately, but I will follow up if I find that you haven't -- but you are not getting more than anything that is here. No, not even if you are a PhD student and my life and work are somehow "critical" to your thesis. I'm done. And, yes, I'm slightly angry and resentful about how few of you do your homework, your preparation: reading about disability, disability arts and culture, the disability rights movement, dance, and disabled performers. I know these academic fields; I know what's out there; I know many of the people who've written it. Your lack of preparation does not make me feel inclined to trust myself to you -- no matter how ardent your appeal. NB: that's true for those of you who want to make documentaries, too.

Then, there's course sites. Every time I see a referral from Blackboard or some other educational course site, I go back and reread the post that has become part of someone else's lesson plan. I wonder what they are doing with it. What are people saying? How does the discussion go? Would I be horrified? Yes, probably. I think about how I would teach the post -- what I would combine it with, what points I would see as critical, how I would facilitate discussion. Risks I would take. Language and ideas that I would consider acceptable/offensive. What I would do about stuff that came up. I mull it over; hope for the best; close my eyes and try to forget.

Showing up in academia is different from finding that someone has linked to a post or two because the internet links only to your material. You can find out what someone thinks of your site; you can read the comments. Sometimes, too, you find personalized stuff about you (or your internet persona). But that is different. The internet is a sprawling mess of actions and reactions. Even when the post is locked, I am happy to find that my work has left my site and become part of a conversation somewhere.

By contrast, academia turns you (or your persona) into a project for study. It's a difference of purpose. A difference of focus. It's not quite a medicalization of a disabled body -- not all academic gazes are medical. But it does include that same kind of power dynamic. There's no way to know who is staring. And how. There's no way to know what meaning or what kind of value is being read into your life. You become something someone teaches and other people learn. You are nothing more than a topic, a passing reference in someone else's education.

And because the world of disability rights is still so new to academia, I fear that I and my blog often land in a hostile environment. Strange: what the Internet giveth, it also taketh away.

Who Needs It? Label: People Suck

2011-10-24T13:01:00.000-07:00

So, I'm sitting alone in the airport -- a small town airport. I've gone through security a little ahead of my friends, and I am waiting by the window. A woman approaches me. "There's a dollar over there. Is it yours?" I look. Sure enough, there's a dollar on a seat two rows over. I shake my head. Then, it begins.

The woman asks if I would like the dollar. I say no. "No," she tells me. "Take the dollar. You can have it." I respond: "It's yours; you saw it." "I'm giving it to you...." At this point, I get a little, well, pissy. I make it perfectly clear that I don't want to take the dollar. It is a strange situation after all. I didn't see the dollar. It's not my dollar. But the scene is sadly familiar. It's like this one from 2008:

Starbucks. Me drinking bad coffee and reading my email. A bright and beautiful teen picks up her coffee. School ended early today; she's with her friends, enjoying the freedom. She fumbles her purse, the change, and the drink. 10c falls on the floor at my feet. I turn to see what the noise is. And just catch her... "Please, keep it. I don't need it." I look at her. She has her whole future in front of her; she thinks she's doing me a favour. I realize how I must seem. There's absolutely nothing to say. Where would I even start? I leave the money on the floor, pack up my computer, and leave.

Just as that frisson of recognition happens, the woman turns to me with that sainted pious look on her face. "I'll take it," she says, "and I promise to give it to the next person who needs it."

That's the story. I'm in my wheelchair; I must need the dollar. This despite the fact that I am in an airport and am travelling (probably don't need the dollar any more than anyone else who just paid for a plane ticket). Despite the fact that I am carrying a cup of coffee that I just bought (for a dollar). Despite the fact that, in my mind's eye at least, I look as in need as she does (i.e, like any other passenger). Yes, it's the disability thing. I'm needy, because I am disabled.

When my friends come over, the situation shifts -- sharply. I go from being an object of forced charity to being a human being. She chats with my friends about the weather and gestures towards me, inclusively, as she talks. I glower. The atmosphere dissolves.

Except. But.

I am furious still with the predatory nature of charity. So overwhelming, it seems, is the urge to do good that the people who do it cannot see the humanity of those they are trying to help.

Watching Disabled People Dance

2011-10-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

So, you are on your way to your first physically integrated performance, but you don't know what to expect or how to think about what you might see. Allow me, if you will, to offer a somewhat biased guide.

Relax. You've done most of your part part by showing up. Sit back and let the performers do theirs. There's an unwritten contract in performance. Both parties have to do their part to make the performance successful.

In buying the ticket, you promise to show up, turn off your cellphone, put away your camera, open your mind and watch. The performers, in offering a concert, promise to show their best work -- work that transcends the ordinary, to honour your intelligence and spirit, to perform and not just execute.
Don't worry about meaning. Even if the dance follows a story line, you can create your own meaning. In fact, you are pretty much expected to create your own meaning. It's like reading a poem or a book. Or even seeing a film. It's personal. To you.

And related to that, don't worry about missing anything. There's a lot happening on stage. You can't see it all. Your eye will be drawn to some things and not others. That's OK. That's part of how you create your meaning. That's part of performance.
On stage. You don't have to have a long background in dance to appreciate what's happening on stage. You can enjoy the shapes, lines, turns, jumps, lifts, emotion, light, colour ... whatever ... without having to name it or know, technically, how it was composed.

The performers with and without disabilities are expecting you to look at them. It's not staring, if you watch carefully. But don't try and figure out who is or isn't disabled and what their disabilities are. This is not a medical show; it's an art performance.

All the performers, disabled and non, retain their personhood, no matter what equipment they use or don't use. Wheelchair users don't become chairs; non-disabled dancers aren't just bodies. But don't assume that the work is about the dancers and their lives and bodies, unless it is explicitly framed as such. The work is just that work. A certain amount of effort has gone into creating a thing for you to see -- it's not a reflection of reality. Nor is it a projection of your fears and expectations.
Speaking of your fears and expectations. Leave them at the door as best you can. That's a good way to see *any* work of art, but it is especially important when seeing work that includes disabled artists. There is so much societal prejudice around disability that leaving that behind will open you up to a new understanding of the world.
It is absolutely your right to like or not to like what you see. I hope you will like it for reasons more powerful than your belief that those poor disabled people are inspiring and that it is so nice that those other dancers help them. I hope you will dislike it because the choreography, staging, presentation or whatever did not appeal to you. And I hope you will have the opportunity to express both your likes and dislikes to the performers. We welcome feedback that engages with our work. We don't need to hear your commentary on our bodies, etc. Questions about our personal lives ... assumptions, etc.
Physically integrated dance is a powerful form of contemporary dance. Let us do our job: we will take you on a journey to new and unexpected places.

Staying Engaged

2011-10-20T12:44:00.000-07:00

Not only do I not understand her, I no longer have any idea about how to see where she starts her world.

Part of the gap comes from differences of perspective. We disagree about money, duty, race, gender, sexuality, class, expectations and obligations, disability, religion, politics, education, wellness, family and just about anything else you could name. I do not see how she can hold any of the positions she holds either per se or in tandem with each other. We appear not to value any of the same things in the same way, and while there are several people in my life about whom I could say the same thing, our differences here are divisive; there's no crossing these gaps.

So instead of looking at everything she's doing wrong and everything that I dislike about her, I'm going to look at me and what I've contributed to the mess. I have chosen, inconsistently, to do a mix of things that both in and of themselves simultaneously exacerbate and improve the situation. And then there's when and how I choose to deploy them.

Let's take the question of education -- because we fight about that one a lot. We get tied up if we start arguing who has more of it and at what cost -- financially and personally. Trying to be right is a pointless endeavour. We might be better off trying address the things that lurk behind the question of college degrees: obligation and responsibility.

Factually speaking, nothing I learned at college is of practicable use to anyone. Sharing what I learned or even what I was doing was always more alienating and distancing, so I learned that the facts of my subject knowledge never were the coin-in-trade. But being in a college environment exposed me to stuff I didn't know people knew. About how to be in the world. About how the world works. About voting, politics, credit, money, life-planning, self-presentation ... Decision-making.

I was shocked to find these were things people made choices about -- job offer? take it or leave it. The complexities of the dress codes -- I knew there were codes; I just didn't understand them so fully. Career, as opposed to work? Buy a house? Save? How? Budget? I had no idea. And where I came from, people didn't ever talk about it. You either knew (mysteriously), and life worked out all right. Or you tried hard, and life went wrong anyway. Or some things worked without trying; some things failed despite trying.

It was that uncertainty that got to me. The not knowing why and not knowing how or if.

College didn't teach me those facts, but it did -- or at least the people I encountered -- did show me that I might need to know stuff like this. I learned how to access this knowledge and how to interpret it. And that is the biggest difference between our notions of education. It's not the weight of the facts that I learned. It's the stuff I learned from realizing that other people had choices and options that I wasn't even aware of. It's the stuff I learned from copying people. From imitating those who looked successful.

So, I don't talk about my education; I share what I know of life-skills. Having them has changed my life; I am less scared about the world. I no longer believe that the rug will be pulled from underneath me at any moment. And when the forces of evil yank on my rug, I have the skills and the support to fight back successfully. How to share is the challenge. The best way would be to do it, little by little. By being with. By talking a little as things came up. By modeling and talking about what I do. By being human with each other. But that would require contact. And trust.

And that we don't have.

Architecting Your Space As An Act Of Love

2011-10-19T12:36:00.000-07:00

Love your body! This post is, I hope, part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival

Love your body. For a moment, though, I want to disagree with the terms of the request/engagement. To me, the question is not so much how can I love my particular body -- though, of course, I have work to do here -- but what can I do in the world such that I am not under the kinds of pressure that make calls to love my body so necessary.

In other words, I want to push back on the weighty work of always having to do self-care. Self-love. I do need to look down and love my physicality. I do need to figure out a way to love my body.

I am angry though. The call to love my body has awakened in me a deep slow anger. I am so tired of the work that we have to do to love our bodies and ourselves. It is necessary work; it is unending work. But today, I question why we have to do it. Why is it that I/we have to do the work? And do we have to do it alone?

I don't want to write another post about loving the difference that is my body. I don't want to write another post about disability as physical variation and as such a neutral part of humanity. I don't want to write another post about the joys of impairment and the pleasures of disabled physicality, sexuality and life. Granted, there aren't yet enough of these posts. Please. Write and read them wherever you can. Today, however, I cannot put these words on my screen. I am exhausted by this kind of project of self work.

We. Are. Here. Still. Again. Trying to figure out how to love our bodies. How to resist what the world does to us. How can we love ourselves? So this time, I want to think differently about how we love.

Public culture and public space are often so difficult for people with disabilities. On some days, just leaving the house can expose us to hostile stares, stupid comments, inaccessible architecture, inaccessible public transport.... I don't have to go on. On days like these, it can seem that self love is in tension with the world. You can do the work at home, with your friends, by yourself. You can look deep into yourself and gently draw out the threads of your personhood. You can softly tie them, weave them, knit them. You can tangle up your of strands humanity into a compassionate, open loving human being. You can do the work. You have to. I have to. We have to.

And that might be the most important part of loving your body. We have to. We. I/We/You have to find, create engage community. Perhaps that's just one person, perhaps it's even ten. No matter what the number, I'm beginning to think that love is not a lonely act. It is to be shared. In public and private. Perhaps your community are your friends. Perhaps not. But loving your body is learned, nurtured, and developed in the trust and love of community.

If you go out on the street, go in community. And that doesn't mean you have to go with someone in person. You can go with the sense of your community radiating from your mind. Lean into the wind with your community behind, beside and ahead of you. From there, shape the space. Your space. You probably can't change the accessibility of the world; you alone might be able to change an individual's mind, but there are a hell of a lot of individuals out there. It's a daunting job. Trying to do that leads to burnout.

You in community can create a little bubble of open, loving and loved safety. You won't have to figure out how to love your body alone. You will. You are loved.

Transition Time

2011-10-02T16:29:00.000-07:00

There's a moment in every creative process where the thing is "done enough." The choreographer steps away and hands the piece over to the dancers. It will be our job, from that moment on, to take care of the work -- to develop, nurture and explore its revelations.

This is a huge responsibility.

The piece is not finished; it's just that the formal creative process has come to an end. The choreographer may make tweaks later -- months, sometimes a year later. The rehearsal director will help us stay tight and focused with all of the detail. We will perform and rehearse the piece many, many times. It's ours now.

As a work transitions from creation and rehearsal to performance, it undergoes a significant transformation. In our case, we roll down the elevator from the studio into the theater. We feel the difference immediately. Somehow, the air is different; the atmosphere more formal, more serious, more ... hushed. We fill the space up with our laughter and shouts; we dump our stuff on the front row, wheel over the little mats with the wheelchair accessible symbol on them and leap onto the stage marley. As we warm up, lights go on and off; people run around with mics and clipboards. There's a good deal of organizing and then everyone is ready. We are for the first time about to experience the lighting design.

During tech week, we will go over the piece again and again. The scrim will be installed; the lights set and focused. The stage crew will figure out what needs to go where, when, and who will move it. The sound volumes will be set and the light and sound cues written. Everyone will practise running it. Sometimes, we will go full out; sometimes, we will do a cue-to-cue.

We will set our stuff up backstage -- figure out who changes where, where the lights will be, the heater (it's really cold in this particular theater). We will reacquaint ourselves with the floor -- this one has some unusual rolling spots -- and we will practice taking account of the floor. We will space -- again and again -- until we know by muscle memory how much force it takes, how many pushes, where people will be in order to not crash into each other, keep the sightlines and maximize the movement.

And despite all this rehearsing, we won't know how things actually will be until we've done the piece. Until an audience has seen it. Until *we've* seen, heard, and felt an audience as we perform it. (Yes, we can tell when you are utterly focused and when you are bored/distracted/not with us.) I won't know how I feel about this piece until the first run is over, and I've had a couple of days to live with what happened.

It's a huge responsibility to take this thing and to offer it to you.

Mobility, Movement, And The Bind Of A Chair

2011-09-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

In a recent talkback, someone familiar with the company commented that they had never seen the disabled dancers move so much.

That compliment caught my attention.

The piece in question is very different from anything else in our rep. We break a sweat, yes. But I am not racing around, pulling extreme wheelchair moves. I'm not exactly grounded, but I am dancing in the much more spatially limited context of my new props. So, the first thing that caught my ear was my default assumption that movement -- the moving of any part of my body -- was sort of bound up with mobility -- my ability to traverse space both while moving parts of my body other than those parts necessary to push my chair and/or simply moving my chair. Movement and mobility are not necessarily the same. You'd think that I might have figured that out a while ago. But apparently not.

As dancers, we are always seeking new movement. We train in different sets of movements and create new vocabularies of movement as we work in different settings, with different people, on different pieces. So, of course, working with props enables us to create new movement vocabularies. That's exactly the point. Thinking as a dancer, though, confused me. For a moment, I had forgotten that I was a disabled dancer and that for us things often have second and third layers of meaning that come along with people's understandings of disability.

But even landing on this nuance didn't really help me understand what the commenter was seeing. What drew their attention so much, what compelled them so much that they spoke out?

Talking with another dancer, a best guess was that the piece has us working out of our wheelchairs for most of the time. Just being out of a chair renders more of our flesh bodies visible to the audience. And, of course, as dancers, we are using those bodies fully. The commenter was simply responding to seeing new lines, new shapes, new movement vocabulary as we worked outside our chairs.

That's a neutral guess. But I wonder about the disability value of this. What do people see when they see us dancing in chairs? Do they think that the chairs compensate for our legs and therewith unintentionally erase our legs? Do they have images of us as flexible flesh upper bodies and rigid rubber and metal lower bodies? (Laurel's been really helpful in thinking about this one: here, for example.) Thus, when the commenter saw us moving around outside our wheelchairs, they saw, perhaps for the first time in their conscious mind, the full potential of our flesh bodies.

I'm really sensitive on this point. Is it possible that in other pieces, our hybrid metal and flesh bodies have become props? When the choreography is weak, the dance tends to feature a lot of moments when the non-disabled dancers jump on us, use our bodies and chairs as furniture, points of leverage that they can use to do something fantastic and eye catching. Meanwhile, we sit there. When the choreography is strong, we get to dance into moments of shared fantasticness -- moves where we are as active as they are. When I heard the commenter speak, I began to review other works that they might have seen. Have I felt like a prop? Do I look like one?

As I finish my review of five years of rep, I find myself overcome with a little cynicism. I'm betting that there's some wheelchair-boundedness going on here. If you start with the idea that because we are strapped in to our chairs (necessary to do the cartwheels and rolls and things that we do), we are bound to our chairs in a societally conventional wheelchair bound kind of way, it makes sense to think of us moving more now that we are moving with props (link to some of my posts on wheelchair-bound). No, we are not flying around stage, but we are liberated from those nasty binding little wheelchair things. And now, suddenly, we are free. You can see our full fleshly bodies at work.

The post-show talkbacks are really difficult for me to be in. But you can be sure that I am listening. Attentively. I learn a lot from you about what I do.

Staging Beauty

2011-09-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

You can tell a new show with a new piece is close: I'm thinking about what people will think. How will it go over? What will people think!!

Enjoying the beauty of the movement is one of the most accessible ways to appreciate a performance. As different as we all may be, we all have some sense of beauty, and a dance performance is likely to feed and challenge that sense. Even if you don't know much about dance, can't figure out what it means, and/or don't know why you like it, the bodies you see can touch you deep down. I remember going to my first dance performance and just crying (silently) throughout the whole thing. I had no idea why. Most recently, I had the same response to a performance of the Nederlands Dans Theater. This time, I knew why, but I kept crying nonetheless.

Dancers are regularly in contact with ideas and realizations of beauty. It's not the repeated applications of makeup that make us beautiful, though; it's the sweat and the work in the studio. Barely a day goes by without one of us calling the other beautiful as we rehearse. If we are not noting the beauty in ourselves, we are talking about a beautiful performance we've seen. Somehow, even though it is a much-used way to respond, calling something beautiful is still a meaningful response.

But beauty also has its underside when it is seen as a necessary precursor for professional success. I want to thank Eva Yaa Asantewaa at Infinite Body for unknowingly helping me frame my ideas and for connecting me to some important parts of the conversation.

A while ago, there was a large debate in dance and feminist circles about whether it was fair game to comment on a dancer's body. I didn't write a full post on it, but my observations about how, in dance critic Alistair Macaulay's eyes, arm fat suddenly became connected to disability can be found here. Dance Magazine has a 2008 piece on the role of the critic (the piece under discussion at Infinite Body), but buried even in that conversation is the question of beauty in a dancer -- and whether a critic can/should comment upon it. There's a reference to the John Rockwell piece in which he discusses the virtues of technique and beauty -- dancers should be physically beautiful as well as have astounding technique (NYT: subscription only). There's also another example of Macaulay's obsession with physical perfection with this reference to Lynn Seymour, a ballerina who is euphemistically said to have had weight issues.

In the Dance Magazine essay, the more accepting voice is that of Deborah Jowitt, dance critic for the Village Voice: "Jowitt cites the example of dancers Larry Goldhuber and Alexandra Beller, who use their ample size to their advantage. “It is less useful,” she says, “to talk about a person’s body than about the way he or she uses that body."" (That said, the DM author, Joseph Carman, seems snide: "ample size" is wholly unnecessary and highly prejudiced.)

The way in which a dancer uses a body is I think a useful way of undermining the discourse of beauty because it challenges how we understand dance and opens our understandings of who can dance. From this perspective, you can find beauty where someone focused on tradition and so-called perfection will see only flaw.

There's a caveat, though -- one that stems from disability. Dancing disabled bodies are beautiful. There's no doubt about that. Some of that beauty is unexpected; you see something, something that can only happen because of disability. Some of that might be you -- you never anticipated that you could find beauty in something that tends to occupy such a socially stigmatized place. Some of that beauty comes from the dancers' themselves. You can be conventionally attractive and disabled. Some of that beauty comes from the non-conventional bodies themselves. If you haven't been to a physically integrated performance -- go. GO and discover new beauty for yourself.

But beware: don't fall into the trap of thinking that the dancers are overcoming their disabilities. I'm going to generalize here for a second and tag this as a non-disabled viewer's response. There is a related response from disabled viewers, but it tends to be a little different. This overcoming idea (and, for that matter, other stereotypical ideas about disabled bodies) is at the heart of the riskiness of relying on how a dancer uses her body as a guide to beauty. Too often, I find the response to an integrated performance comes from the viewers' understanding of disability as a limitation. Then, when they come and see amazing, unexpected, and beautiful stuff, they unload that prejudicial understanding back onto the dancers. We are overcoming (or inspiring). It's a well-meant response -- one intended to communicate to the dancers that the viewer has appreciated the performance -- but, as I've talked about all over the place, I end up frustrated every time I hear it.

There's another side. I don't encounter this often, but when I do it is more shocking to me than the overcoming stuff. The beauty of integrated dance and disabled bodies can negatively jolt even those with disabilities. I suppose I think of it as a problem of familiarity and overgeneralization. You happen to be in a wheelchair with a certain body. You know what it can do, and you know how your wheelchair works. But that doesn't mean that it is the same for everyone who uses a chair or who shares your diagnosis. For these people, I think a moment of beauty that is also shocking registers as hostility towards the dancer -- I know that I have certainly encountered it that way: you can't be ....

So, perhaps, if you are using beauty as a way to interpret art -- any kind of art -- I would recommend transforming that lens into a mirror and asking what does it say about me that I respond to beauty in this way.

Music Dance Music Dance Music Dance Music....

2011-09-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

Often at post show talk-backs, we are asked about the relationship between movement and music. Most frequently, people want to know which came first. Then, they want to know if all of the movement is choreographed "to" the music, i.e., is everything we do connected to a particular beat or whether it's felt timing that just "happens" to end when the music does.

I'm really bad at talkbacks... but the Wizard reminds me that understanding this question is important: the answers provide a way of understanding or at least accessing much of what happens on stage. Opera: libretto vs music? Musical: words vs music? Films: audio, visual, script, acting? All of these ask how the different creative processes that go into complex artistic production relate to each other.

The answers range from "yes, all of the above" to "no, not quite any of the above" and sometimes include "yeah/no .... little bits of some of the above." Different people work in different ways. Sometimes, a choreographer comes in with music; then, the company has to get permission for the rights. How the music becomes a part of the work is then entirely dependent on the choreographer. Sometimes, everything happens to or on an explicit beat, and there is a clear correlation between music and dance -- one might express the other. Sometimes, not so much -- for either the beat or the interpretation. I've done pieces where the music is slow and sad and the dancing fast and furious. I've done stuff with an action for every beat. And stuff where we have "markers" by which we know whether or not we are late or not. If we end early, the music fades. In one piece, I like it when the music fades and there are a couple of seconds of dance in silence. In yet another, the fading of the music is a cue for the improvised movement to end. Variations are limitless.

Sometimes, a choreographer gets to collaborate with a composer. I like this process most of all. It's absolutely fabulous to watch how choreography and music grow together. Again, though, how this works depends on everyone involved. I've been in a process where the music arrived a week before; it was made at a distance from rehearsal video. It was FABULOUS (but unnerving). My favourite way is when the composer and choreographer spend time together during rehearsal. That way, we dancers get to hear and observe a little bit of the collaborative process and learn more of what the choreographer is thinking. From hearing about what the composer sees, we learn something of what the piece conveys.

I continue to think of the thing as a whole, though -- even though dance can happen in silence. I need to. It makes no sense for me to be thinking of dancing "to" the music. I know this isn't a musical performance -- no one has come for the music specifically -- but keeping my ear (and eye) on the piece as a multi-stranded work of art in which music and dance are intertwined. It's a rich and complex feast.

Parking Police

2011-09-18T17:20:00.000-07:00

As I pulled into a spot, yesterday, I was policed. By another person with a placard. I didn't move. I was there first. Disabled parking at this particular grocery store happens not to be closest to the entry. It's close, yes, but there are other parking spaces much nearer; the lady with a placard took one of these. I could see she wasn't happy not to have got designated parking.

The encounter got me thinking -- must be parking weekend; Bad Cripple also wrote about disabled parking this weekend. Anyway.

The people who set up accessible parking have to balance a number of considerations, the most important of which probably are space (for ramps and to get a wheelchair out of a car/van) and proximity to the destination. People who have placards have them for very different medical reasons. Unwittingly, though, we become part of the planners' calculations about where to put the spaces and how many spaces there should be. (Legislation for this is, I believe, set by the state.) Whatever the law, the practice is that in my parts of California at least there are never enough spaces. And with scarcity begins the zero-sum game and the policing of who gets the spots.

Yeah, I know there's abuse of the placards, but I tend not to see that or I don't know that I am seeing that. I don't think that encouraging and enforcing hierarchizing principles of access help members of the disabled community. When I look at sites like this one -- download an iphone app so you can report a fraudster, I feel really cross. Disability is not always visible. Even though we know there are abusers of the system, I think we do better to trust that people displaying placards need those placards . And I believe that those who need the placards will do better if we recognize that we are all in this together.

I am concerned with how we treat each other. I hate the way that we who have legitimate placards and need the spots turn on each other -- even if all that happens are comments and/or looks. I don't know how we decide that we need these spots more than anyone else, but we do. It's frustrating not to be able to get the parking, yes. But designated spaces are only that: designated. They are not a personal entitlement. If the place goes to someone else with a plate or a placard, that's it. You can't give that person a dirty look or try to get them to hurry up. I think it is permissible to check (once that person has gone) that they have a placard, but I also think that checking, if they DO have a placard, can come across as policing.

Policing is no understatement. A delicate and tactful enquiry about whether they need disabled parking is one thing -- asking them to produce their placard (which is what happened to me today) is another. I've been on both sides of it. I have asked someone if they need the space -- that's my way of getting around the "are you REALLY disabled" question. I'm literally asking about the space -- I need room for my chair. Sometimes, the space user is a disabled person who gets it. Sometimes, the question comes across as policing, and they get upset (with some justification.) Sometimes, though, I just get ticketed like everyone else who parks in more than one space at a time.

And speaking of policing, there's also the question of law enforcement. Friday was International Parking Day -- the idea being to turn parking places into, well, parks! I didn't do anything. I'd love to see that take a firm hold. But I also recognize that in places where public transit is poorly constructed and para transit poorly organized, cars are a necessity. So, again, I feel pushed to trade my desire for a green world against my desire for an accessible world. If we could work on this, perhaps the pressure around abuse and fraud could be reduced. Effective July 1st, the fine for placard abuse is $935. Is that money going back to the disabled community -- the ones most materially affected by the abuse? Hell, no. It's going to a cash-strapped city. This kind of policing should help us more than it does. Places like San Francisco and Berkeley simply don't have enough accessible spaces. Reducing fraud is part of the problem. Rethinking the system is another.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and trust that the placard user needs that space.

Whither Disability Art?

2011-09-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

The question of the function and/or purpose of art is already vexed; I usually don't go there with people. But I was curious about this particular take on the direction of art produced by disabled people. It's from an interesting report from London by Liz Porter about Liberty 2011: London's Disability Arts Festival. You can find an excerpt from her report here, and from there, you can download a word document of the full report.

What struck me this year is that Liberty has moved into being an inclusive outside arts festival with quality work being shown, professionally staged and virtually all family friendly - very appealing to a wider diverse audience and funders. I think this is appropriate and realistic to a degree particularly as festivals are popular and many disabled artists want to be a part of this scene. Yet I ponder what this means for the disability arts with a ‘rights or political slant’ – definitely missing this year.

...

Where would the disability rights movement be now if we hadn’t had the voices of Johnny Cres[c]endo and Ian Stanton who spread the messages for choices and rights for freedom from oppression. Such expressions must not be lost.

It's a hard question. Must art always be political? Is art political anyway, even it isn't explicitly about, say, the interests of a particular group -- even abstraction is political in a certain context? I wasn't at the show. But here are the lines of tension that interest me: Inclusive/quality/professional/family-friendly.

In my circles, rights-based art tends to be made primarily be non-professional artists (oh, god, the contradictions of professionalism and art). That might be because "professional" artists can't gain funding for what would be seen as making the same piece over and over again. What? You want equal rights again? Still? We paid for that 3 years ago. It might also be because the pressures of professionalism and acceptance as a professional sometimes require distance from explicit political messages: the nuance of a disabled body might be a sufficient political statement in itself -- particularly if the piece has, say, sexual overtones. Further, the art of professional artists is often expected to be multi-valent -- its meaning varies depending on who and how, where and when. It is not usually an expression of self, but an articulation of self and something beyond. It is not just a political statement, but it is an activist manifesto and beyond.

None of this would have to be the case. Funding and notions of professionalism do, however, make it difficult to survive if you challenge the status quo too much. We do wrong if we leave behind our political roots, but we also disadvantage ourselves if we don't grow and change.

Quality is a tough one. Did someone out there think that explicitly political work wasn't, ahem, quality? Professional and quality don't necessarily go hand-in hand. The technique of a professional is likely to be better than that of a non-professional. But that doesn't mean that the work isn't quality. Professional artists can turn in crappy work, and when they do, it is every bit as spectacular as the crappy work of community artists -- perhaps even more so. Quality is not objective, but neither is it purely subjective. It might be, say, better quality for a festival to present a full range of disabled artistic production than to present only what it deems quality work. It's a question all presenters and curators should grapple with.

I find myself mostly sympathetic to Ms. Porter's questioning, but with one exception. I'm not sure the work of disability arts and culture movements and the rights movement roll easily together. Take these lyrics by Ian Stanton (source: his obituary by Tom Shakespeare)

When it seems life’s getting harder I remember Douglas Bader
Cos that’s what my doctor said to do.
Said ‘overcome those negative feelings
You will find yourself revealing
Sides of you you never even knew’.

OR

I am sad, yes I’m pathetic,
I’m a fan of Oldham Athletic…

OR

You feel a rumblin’, It’s comin’ thru the land
You get to feel your time is comin’
You can touch it with your hand.
We are advancing, dancing on the way.

Politically powerful and persuasive. But what an artistic nightmare.

Reading Movement

2011-09-12T14:29:00.000-07:00

As we investigate the new choreographer and ourselves, I am finding that I have a new body. All that injury and all that physical therapy and extra training has made a new me. I am stronger in some places. Much stronger than I have been in 6 years. I also have some losses. And some new compensation strategies. I am trying not to call them tricks -- that makes me feel less real and less responsible. Strategies seem more planned. More careful.

I knew that I was different, but I am intrigued by how it is playing out in the studio. I now have a massively trained, massively stable core. It's like a tree trunk; yes, there are some bends, but the overall structure is solid. And yet, it can flex. It can even flex into extreme ranges without spasming -- most of the time. But what I notice is that I can now rely more on my core stability for movement than on my arms. And that changes how I dance.

More and more this week, I have noticed that I am trying to dance on momentum rather than strength (where strength equals arm strength and momentum equals the ride of the wheel). I am still doing more or less the same things, but the impulse comes from a different place. And the movement feels different.

That phrase I talked about yesterday. Well, we met it again today. But this time differently. Our instruction was something like "take the phrase into your body." We find ourselves spaces in the studio. I like to pick a spot where the sunshine makes odd shadow shapes. I review the original phrase. I watch the others do it a couple of times. I do it again and again myself. How to explain? It's like, well, it's like doing literary criticism -- each reading of the poem deepens your understanding of the text. You come to know what it means and better understand how it speaks to you. For a dancer, that process of reading is more a process of movement creation: to understand a movement phrase, you have to create a movement phrase.

In my corner, I repeat the phrase, all the while listening carefully for resonances in my body; I'm trying to sense where and how the movement falls. You can't impose upon a phrase; you can only discern what it and your body tell you. As I go over it again and again, I notice more that my head tilts that way, that I want to move my wheels, bend, arch, curl .... my arm slides up and out ... Soon, I have my own phrase.

We perform individually for the choreographer; he makes developments, changes, suggestions. We perform for each other -- seeing what we have each done, helps me understand the language of the phrase. I try some of the moves that I've seen, feeling out the meaning of each interpretation. It's rich, soft, subtle; I like this phrase. But then, just as I'm feeling comfortable with what I've seen and done, the choreographer asks for another version. A new "reading."

I wheel off to my sunlit space; the shadows have changed their orientation; I put my back to the light and start again.

In Process

2011-09-11T11:03:00.000-07:00

I've stopped writing because my head has been empty. Or perhaps I should say it has been too full. I'm in an intense rehearsal process. 7 hours a day, plus drive time. There are breaks, of course, but it turns out that we practice in the breaks and/or we can't keep stuff out of our heads. This is the most intense period of work I've ever done. It is also, perhaps, the most fruitful. I am growing.

I'm going to commit to blogging -- about dance, yes, -- but also about other things during this process. I cannot let myself become a dance machine. The last time we made a piece, I lost my sense of who I was; it sounds dramatic, I know, but I think this time, I will need to blog in order to maintain a non-dancing sense of the world.

For the record, then, here's how I've been living. We have rehearsal from 11:30 to 6, Monday to Friday. Some of that time is company class: we warm up together, work on things together, develop skills, relationships, trust, techniques, etc -- the things that enable us to do what we do. Then, we have 30 minutes to rest. We start again at 12:30 and go until 3? We have another break of 30 minutes... sometimes 45. Then, we work until 6.

Prior to that, I do what I need to do. Sometimes, that's physical therapy. Sometimes, it's bodywork. I've pared down my extra classes: now, I do less gyro, pilates and swimming than I would like, but the days are long and hard. I need to conserve my energy. My drive of 34 miles can take a sweet 45 minutes; that's good NPR time, music time, or personal silence time. It can also take 90 minutes; then, it's either utter angry hell or it's my time to focus on being a cog in the commute traffic wheel (here, for example).

When I get home, I don't feel real. I need to eat, stretch, heat, ice, bathe, EAT and sleep. So, I do. And I let my friends and my writing fall by the wayside.

So, perhaps, an insider's look at the way we work? How we create a piece depends on the choreographer, but here's an example of an actual moment from last week.

The five of us lined up in front of our floor to ceiling mirror; we looked intently not at ourselves, but at the choreographer. He danced a phrase. Then, he broke it down and taught it to us. Learning from a mirror helps get rid of the opposition-effect you have when you try to learn from someone infront of you: When they raise their right arm, do you raise your right arm or do you raise your left -- because that's what the mind sees? But learning from a mirror "flattens" the three dimensionality of the phrase. So, you have to keep flipping between the mirror, the choreographer, and the rest of the group.

"Going on..." When I hear that, I usually have to suppress a little moment of panic: I don't have it yet; I'm never ready. "Going on. " The phrase continues. I pick up a chunk here and there. "From the beginning..." "So, ...." And we begin to ask questions. We look at each other, trying to figure out what we've missed. We ask him to go over sections. We practice. I'm really bad at this; there's often detail that I don't quite get the first or second or even third time around -- particularly when it's fast. Others in the company seem to get it immediately: I feel a little more panic. The choreographer watches. Demonstrates some more. Gives personal instructions. I'm still stuck; I can see that there's a flip, but I have no idea how to make my hands do that. Eventually, we all have it.

The five of us line up in front of the mirror; he counts; we all do. It's satisfying. I've got it. It's beautiful.

The Aftermath

2011-08-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

Coming back from tour is hard. Or perhaps I should say coming down from tour is hard. After every sequence of performances -- home season or on tour -- I crash. Emotionally and physically. Over the years, I have learned some coping strategies.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that packing stresses me out. More than travelling, even. Unpacking, however, I find therapeutic. My medical stuff gets unpacked immediately because I need it that night. The rest happens over the course of the week. First, though, there's the sorting. I take out the remnants of food, my wooden silverware, my used coffee mugs and water bottle. These go away; Wizard declares them health hazards and heads for the dishwasher. Then, there's the clothes, the often still damp rehearsal and performance clothes (those truly *are* health hazards, but he seems not to notice). Rehearsal gear goes in the machine washable hamper. Costumes go in the handwash basket. Any unused clothes that have not been in too close contact with the former go back in the closet or wherever they should have come from. I pull out my wash bag and check my toiletries: refill any lotions, shampoos, hair product tubes, throw away any bits and pieces that got stuffed in the bag because I was lazy, and put the bag away. Same goes for the makeup bag. I make a list of anything that needs replacing.

After that, and yes, I do do it in this order, I check my wheelchair repair kit. It's usually fine; I put it in the car. Then, I check my wheelchair. This week, I have some serious maintenance. One of my sideguards fell off at the after party; I busted a move and .... disintegration. The screws shot everywhere. I can replace the screws; that's easy enough. BUT this should not have happened. I checked my chair before I left, but I didn't check the security of the screws; I just saw that there were 4 screws in approximately the right place. Had this actually happened on stage, it would have posed a significant risk to me and my colleagues. Plus, I would not have been able to do some of the moves; I use sideguards as support. My bad.

When I'm done with this part, I go through the remaining junk at the bottom of the suitcase. I wipe the case and air it out, if necessary. Then, depending on how long this has taken and when the next trip is, I either put the stuff back in or put the case away.

The processing of my stuff allows me to filter the performances and work my way through the intense loneliness I feel when I am not that closely connected to my colleagues. I revisit the mistakes I made; I decide which ones need practice and which were random. I revisit the high points. I think -- though there is no proof of it -- that putting away my things allows me to reestablish the boundaries I need to live in the every day world. Performance asks you to be so open, so vulnerable. I can't live in the world with that degree of unprotectedness, so I need the time to reestablish some limits. I polish my stuff. Clean and order my stuff. Gradually, I set myself and my world back on the right axis.

Seeing And Being Seen

2011-08-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

Repertory companies keep a "repertory" of work alive. That is, at any given time, we have a certain number of pieces in active repertory. These are our stock, our wares, if you like. We can draw on them at any time, selecting and tailoring programmes for different venues. The weird thing about it is that you can end up performing the same piece over and over and over and, yes, .... again. It's not quite like being on Broadway where you might do the same show most of the nights of the week for a very long time. But over time, you do build a deep familiarity with your rep work.

I say familiarity because, really, we don't do the same work over and over again. To be sure, the same things happen again and again (improvisation and, umm, unplanned choreography a.k.a mistakes excepted). We do walk forward at this point. We do do x, y, and z to certain counts of music. But none of that means that we repeatedly dance the same piece. Show after show, the same choreography reveals a different piece because we are alive, conscious and intentional in the material. (For my money, that's how I know the choreography is good -- does it have the potential to be rich, satisfying and different three years in?)

Some nights, the music starts, and I am caught up in an intense fierceness. It's like a smell on the breeze; we all scent it. And then, we go. Some nights, we seem more relaxed. Some nights, there's a journey, a switching backwards and forwards. Some nights, I feel like I can't find where my colleagues are. I wonder if my being in a different emotional space is communicable as part of the performance.

Our performances here have been different. I felt we were, well, I don't know. The intensity came from a different place, yet one that we all felt. I have never felt so alive and connected. I remember noticing the smells of our bodies, the smell of the air. The quality of the light. And I'm finding that I can't write about it. It was so personal, so powerful that blogging it feels intrusive. I hope though that the connection between us was visible to the audience, because seeing them was part of what made our performance so different.

The audiences were so visible to us that I felt that they were part of our performance. In theaters and dance performance spaces, we often cannot see much of the audience -- occasionally, we can see people in the front row. Sometimes, a piece asks for the house lights to be raised; occasionally, the ambient light from the stage reveals indistinct forms in raked seating. This time, however, I could see people's expressions, their stances (some people were standing). I'm surprised by just how much I know about the audience. I felt people move with us; I saw people move in to check something out. I felt people trying to figure out how we were doing stuff. The audience was so alive that I took a risk.

Stage lights can be dizzying; they are very bright -- too bright to look at directly; they change colour; they come and go; there's no stable anchor point. To mark where you are on stage, you often have to pick an architectural feature: the exit lights at the back of the auditorium, the lights from the tech booth or tech table in the house. Sometimes, floor lighting is available. Because the space was so light, there were more than a couple of architectural features that I could have picked. But I didn't. I chose a person.

I kept seeing a woman in the audience; every time I looked up, I saw this woman. She was in my line of sight; she was my center point. I didn't want to keep staring at her, but she was there. She radiated an energy that was equivalent to the one I was feeling on stage. After about two minutes, I felt I could trust her; I decided to use her as my anchor. I've never done that before. I've never picked a person to help me be stable, to help me find my place on the stage. It was an incredible experience. Not only was I connected to the other dancers, I was directly connected to the audience.

I don't know what this woman saw; if she could feel me; if my connection to her was visible to other audience members. But I do know that this venue, this person gave me a performance experience that I've not had. It will stay with me for a long, long time.

Getting Settled

2011-08-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

We've been here for two days now. I'm on tour with West Coast. Hooray -- Yes, that means I am testing my arm. I'm back, I think; I'm back. OK. Going gently. Will have to see how my arm holds up.

But to my point. We've been here, now, for two days. Touring is an amazing adventure. We were met with a chirpy welcome: "Our rooms are grandfathered in...." I've always wondered whose grandfather is responsible for all this. But, as it turns out, the room is doable, this time for me at least. We're on a three day trip with the express purpose of taking concert dance out of the urban theatre space into communities with less access to such performances. It's a sponsored tour that is spread out across the state over the duration of several weeks. We will be going back and forth and back and forth.

When we roll up to a full theatre, we usually have a full production team -- production manager, lights and sound peoples, stage crew, costume dressers. Getting us on stage is a big (and costly) thing. The spaces we dance in are designed for performance -- play or dance, but not usually orchestral music -- we can trust in the architecture of the floor and the sightlines. We know we will look good, that we will be able to present the work as the choreographer intended it to be seen (more or less), and that we will be safe. There are no such guarantees in venues like the ones planned for the next couple of months. We will be performing in all kinds of places.

Here's an example of some of the differences. At every location, we need to run the pieces to check for spacing. Every stage is different; you need to know where the rough parts are. How far you can go. How much effort you need to make that turn and land precisely. You need to know where the other dancers are. Whether the floor is spongy or springy. It's just part of the job to adjust.

Tonight's floor is linoleum on concrete. It's a community cafeteria/ hall. It's brutally hard. Sticky, yet unexpectedly slick. There's no give. Everything wheel-wise happens so quickly: my tires slip and skid. I've danced on floors like this when we do school assemblies, but I've never done full repertory on a floor like this. I'm a little scared that I will fall and be hurt or hurt someone else. This is going to be tough; it will take every last bit of skill that we have and trust in each other.

This community has made us welcome. There are temporary ramps; they've rented lights and hung them. The lights aren't where we would expect; instead, sunlight pours through the skylights adding a luminescence none of us could anticipate. Then, after sunset, the darkness is softer; we can see members of our audience. Usually, it's a sea of blackness out there. This time, though, the dusk is gentle. People's faces seem softer; their clothes less distinct. They are lit from overhead by our lights; it's a mutual experience. I suppose that we look as red as they do.

That, I think, is the biggest difference between performing on a concert stage in a dedicated performance space and performing in a community space: we can see people. They (and we) aren't hidden by stage wings, light trees, aprons. We aren't raised above the audience. We and they can see and hear everything and everyone. It's simultaneously cool and terrifying. More on the actual performances tomorrow.

Special Effects: Advances In Neurology: A Review Of Sorts

2011-07-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

Every so often, your email gives you a gift. Boom! This one was mine. Work by Neil Marcus. Hooray. And such work it is.

Special Effects: Advances in Neurology by Neil Marcus

More than a document of the early days of the disability rights movement, Neil Marcus' collection Special Effects: Advances in Neurology is also a window into California zine culture of the 1980s.

Art in revolution: social justice, the human growth movement, art in the everyday. From flourishing dystopia to speech storms, Neil documents living artfully in Berkeley, California, and in Disability Country. Publication Studio is proud to present this collection of reprinted documents with a new foreword by Melanie Yergeau and an interview by Esther Ehrlich.

$15 softcover; $10 DRM-free ebook
80 pp.
7 1/3" x 9 1/2" x 1/8"

ISBN: 9781935662563 (permalink)

On the publication studio website is also a free reading commons link, where you can read the book for free and annotate it - write on!

© 2011 Neil Marcus
ISBN: 9781935662563
Printed and bound by Publication Studio
717 SW Ankeny
Portland, Ore. 97205

All that? That's the publicity material from the website. I'd like to offer not so much a review as a meditation. Special Effects is some of the zines Neil created in the 80's -- though sometimes, the material seems so current, so biting and relevant. When you see a date -- November, 84 -- it's a dislocation. And that's the thing about Special Effects. Just when you think you know how to proceed, the text loops back on you or jumps you from your present to the semi-hazy (for me at least) past of the 80's. So, you can't just read Special Effects as you would a novel or a non fiction book; the center is unreliable; your present is unreliable. The visual effects are both stunning and disorienting. The texts are challenging and overwhelming. You'd expect all this from a zine.

But in a disability context, the norms of this form take on added significance. It makes sense for this content to be communicated as a zine. Regular text formats fail to take on the diversity and diverse experience of disability. Just as disability challenges who we are as individuals and as societies, so zines challenge our reading practices. SE couldn't be a pastiche or scrapbook; it has to be a zine. In another time and space, I'd love to find a way to think of this as a disabled text, instead of a text about disability, but that's another project. As a zine, Special Effects takes our readerly expectations, stretches them into that uncomfortable position before snapping us back to an altered reality.

One of the joys of reading SE is the voices. It's not a patchwork in an orderly, quiltedly sense, but a clamorous conversation of medical with commercial, political and governmental, personal and literary. And rightly. The voices are stunning; if things were linear, you would miss their force and/or become immune to their impact. So, entering the world of SE is kind of like agreeing to enter a labyrinth knowing that you can never find your way out and that you should use the tenuous thread you took as a guide not to trace the paths, but to scale the walls.

Because how else other than scaling walls would you ever be able to assimilate and take on the joy, love, exhilaration, anger, riotousness and immense cruelty that Neil shepherds you through? How else could you begin to understand this as one person's lived experience and not a mish-mash of old world, old school disability studies narratives? How else could you read this gentle manifesto?

I mean manifesto both in the sense that if you read this, you will get a sense of the political layout for the disability world -- for why and how we fight for such rights. But I also mean manifesto as its own kind of aesthetic. (I began this post before the events in Norway -- manifesto was not quite such a loaded word then.) I think of a manifesto not just in terms of function, project or purpose -- its uncovering, revealing of philosophy and intentions -- but also as having a particular kind of aesthetic in themselves. No two manifestos are alike. It's more that manifestos take what is usually understood about a particular relationship of language, form, beauty, normalcy and idealism and shatter them. But the fragmentation is both a destroying and a creation.

Here's a moment of how it works. In a section entitled "Classifieds and Personal:"

"SCAT SINGING for the disabled. Sliding scale. D.DK"

Ok. So, the sliding scale thing is old news to anyone from the music world. But here is it literal? Instead of seeing the joke, we are asked to see the reverse: the literality of it. This is what disability does. It forces us to question what we think we know. Scat singing is all too easily defined as "nonsense syllables," i.e, noise, not words. Sounds. Not words. Disability takes us right there. Does Neil want lessons in scat singing? Does some other disabled person want lessons in scat singing? What do we know about standard language? So-called nonsense? Words? Recognizable words? How do we know the difference between what we call words and what we call nonsense? How is that arbitrary? Dependent? Linguists know a lot about this; it's a key part of most theories of language, of course, but in the everyday world, the move from scat to "speech impairment" to "disabled speech" -- speech that arises from a disabled body and communicates itself in the world without judgement, as a language in itself -- that's powerful. What are the D. DK at the end? Or are they a beginning of a scat? Or is D. DK the person who wants scat?

So few words, so many questions.

That's how Special Effects works.

Living On The Edge

2011-07-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

This post is the immediate outcome of an intense and passionate conversation with Mia Mingus; it also has roots in conversations with Scott Rains and Riva Lehrer.

Mia and I met one sunny day in San Francisco. For coffee, supposedly. Well, we had our coffee, but our plans were altered as Mia ended up bailing me out of car trouble. The feeling of risk that came from my car running, literally, out of power and from me pushing it farther than I knew it could go softened into a conversation about edges and living on them. We agreed that we would both post today, Tuesday, at 10 AM. Her response to our conversation can be found here.

Mia's words and our interaction came at an important moment for me. For the past months, I've been thrown off an edge -- pitched from my regular dance life into a space of enforced rest, fear, pain, rehab and, finally, some recovery. I've felt that edge keenly. At lunch the other day, I was explaining to a friend that I had had this powerful conversation and that I was thinking about these edges and how they can shape your life. A second and very different conversation ensued. Emotionally, I'm not sure how to describe what these conversations meant to me. I feel supported and challenged; these are difficult issues. It's gonna be a long-ish post. Hope you can hang in until the very end.

A big part of disabled life is management (link goes to a post of mine about overcoming. Or not). You have to figure out emotionally and personally how to live with your disability and how to live your life with your disability -- that's more of an external thing. Theoretically, over time, you figure out how much you can do; what you can do; and when you can do it. The thing is, though, that I don't seem to be able to live consistently within my limits. That's no big shakes -- I know few people who do. What's important to me is *why.* And, for me, why has to do with what I tell myself. With what I believe I should do. And with my fear about what it would mean to live, well, like that. Whatever *that* might be.

But let me deal with the easy part first. Sometimes, I don't know where the edge is until I fall right off it. I'm talking here about the physical edge and the moment when I realize that in fact I was misreading my body signals or that I didn't know it would hurt/cause a problem/injure me until I had done it. How do you know when too much is too much? I encounter this moment often in dance. Sometimes, I feel my body stretching into a position or place. It feels good. I feel safe and strong. Months later, when something is hurting/wrong/inflamed, I will learn that the feeling that I thought was growth and expansion was in fact a warning signal. Sometimes, you just don't know that you are hurting yourself. Sometimes, the very things that you are doing to build strength and to support yourself are the things that hurt. Yes, I've managed to hurt myself in training -- quite badly, too. Sometimes, the edge creeps up on you before you even know it's there. Sometimes, the body is confusing.

More insidious, though, is what I tell myself about these experiences and my commitments. Why do I over plan? Overcommit? If I'm honest with you -- and I'm trying to be -- it's not because I can't say no. It's because I can't *let* myself say no. I can't let myself. Take my self care routine and the way I use assistive technology. I could do things differently, really, but some of it is that I don't want to be seen that way. I don't want to be associated with whatever societal judgment I think comes with using a particular technology or with needing to take a break, accept assistance, not do this project. I load myself up with .... well, I'm not quite sure what. But I do know that I can't let myself be seen like that.

Here are some examples. It was very difficult for me to start to use my wheelchair; I could (indeed, can) still execute the movements we call walking. Why would I want to be defined by the ultimate symbol of disability? Of powerlessness? Of vulnerability? Of .... It felt like giving up or giving in. I knew what people would say; I knew what I felt. I'd much rather limp, struggle, deal with pain, decreased mobility, ever shrinking distance, minimal life outside the house, an inability to come and go independently, to stay the course of whatever activity.

I didn't know then about the grey area so many of us live in. I saw it as an all or nothing situation, and I did not want to be seen like *that.* I've been in similar conversations with long term manual wheelchair users. Yes, their shoulders are trashed. No, they cannot go as far as they could in their earlier years. Yes, there is pain, fear, .... but use a powerchair? It's not an all or nothing situation. I and they know that. But how we feel, how we think about these complex moments of transition is one of the contradictions of the disability community. We have friends who use that equipment; we don't see any difficulty with them using that equipment. It's just not us.

It gets a little more complicated. Throughout this blog, I keep writing about how my chair is liberating, how much pleasure I get from using it, how much freedom it offers me. This is all a fundamental part of my daily life. But when I hit the dance studio, what I experience in daily life rolls over into art, beauty, power, grace. I feel limitless; I don't even notice the risks. I feel invulnerable. Now, I know that's not true. I'm always writing about falling; I've had several serious injuries. But the air in the studio seems different to me. The limitless of the movement that I can create with my colleagues sucks me in. It doesn't seem like I am flying hard and/or unreasonably fast; it seems natural. It feels right. I don't feel like I'm transcending my limits; I feel like I am growing into my body. My self. My place.

In some ways then, this is all a kind of misplaced way of understanding and creating self worth. One of the challenges of this post is to break that down. So, here's how it goes. I am scared of the changes in my body and the changes that might happen to my body. I'd rather not dwell on that. Instead, I work to counteract my feelings by developing a sense of self worth that is tied to what I can do and what I have done. My pride is here; my pride is strong; my pride challenges my fear .... until I fall off the edge. I then have to reassess and renegotiate.

It's not just me, of course. I am part of a disability community. I see/experience a contradiction in my circles. We talk amongst ourselves about valuing self care, but we don't often practice it. Without the practice, there are few models. Without the models, community understanding and discourse are more rare. In such scarcity, it is easier to force oneself to keep going -- because you don't want to let the community down and you don't want to let yourself down. And on it goes.

As you've probably guessed by now, I am a rules girl. I expect things to be, well, like a ruler. I expect the edges to be flat, orderly, smooth. I expect the edges to be the things against which you can draw clean straight lines. I expect. My language here is important. Throughout this post, I keep talking about edges as something you fall off. As imperceptible things that divide you from your ideal sense of self and ideal life. An edge is risky. Cutting, indeed. Sharp like a razor. Painful, sometimes. As the post goes on, I am keenly aware that I am not talking about boundaries. Thresholds. Dividing lines. Those somehow seem more neutral; I'm not even talking about being edgy. That would be hip or perhaps even cool.

No, I am talking about edges, because edges for me associate with free fall. That's the moment when you lose control over your body, your self (because somehow they are distinct), your life. Living on the edge, the title of this post, communicates the riskiness, the very unsafeness of life. My beautiful, joyful life.

Hands On

2011-07-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

I am literally trying to get a grip on stuff -- trying to make my hand recover strong, fast, and hard. Of course, trying isn't necessarily the best way to do this, but I am at that border line where, after 4 months, my hand is weakened. I have to get moving. It has to be strong to support and direct me as I wheel.

And that is where this post is coming from. As I do the band reps and ball squeezes and newspaper scrunching finger movements, I've been thinking about the value of my hand as I wheel and the difference for my hand between wheeling and dancing. I've been working to separate my hand from my arm and delicately exploring what my hands do when they aren't simple mobility/locomotion mechanisms.

I like my hands. I think of them as expressive. They have years and years of musical training and with all that work came a variety of fine motor skills -- some of which I still have, some of which not so much. I've noticed that they have aged and that the skin folds and textures appeal to me: When I was younger, I didn't think they would. I like the way my hands look, though I don't often paint my nails or decorate my fingers with rings.

But I also know that wheeling affects my hands. It's not just the broken nails and dirt (no, I can't keep my hands on the rims -- the fit of my chair isn't quite right -- and when dancing I like the extra precision of having a hand on the wheel). It's also the tension and semi-contracture that comes from wheeling. How to explain. There's a moment in a one piece where we tip over backwards and lie on the floor, wheeled butts up and arms outstretched. I'd like to be able to get my hands on the floor and relax in such a way that my fingers touch the floor. But most of the time, they won't. They can't. They are too curled up from wheeling. In most situations, this isn't a problem. Some body work and they come back. But in that moment, my dance is changed. Instead of feeling outstretched, yet relaxed and supported, I feel myself rising away from the floor. It's a very different feeling.

So, yes, there is an importance to my hands. In an earlier, well more like proto, start to this post, I wrote that "I experience my hands as anchors -- points of stability that rein in my wheels." I meant that I should begin considering my hands as alive in themselves instead of as intersections between my arm and the wheels. A wise friend wrote back, putting it much better than I could have: "Anchoring is an interesting way to consider hands when they're often describing the greatest motion and acceleration. What happens to balance and quality of movement if we make hands bases of contact?"

Yes. Yes. And yes. Since then, I've been testing how my hands feel on wheels and rims. They are no longer passively "describing" or getting dragged along behind the momentum of the wheel. I have begun to think of them as a person with their own sensibilities and needs. My grip changes not because a particular action requires a different grip, but because the expression and experience of my hands is changing. I am beginning to allow my hands to have an expressive quality when they are on the wheel not just while they are striking the wheel or while they are in the air.

This is new stuff. I hope to be able to test it in the coming weeks as I go back to full time dancing. Fingers crossed; hands interlocked.

Lady Gaga And The Wheelchair: II

2011-07-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

Was it wrong? Inappropriate? Offensive? Yes! Of course, it was.

You've probably heard by now that Lady Gaga herself rolled out on stage in a wheelchair. What did that look like? This! (Link goes to a google image search in which in several photographs that I don't have permission to reproduce Lady Gaga appears in a dark, mostly unblingy, old style manual wheelchair. She's wearing dark glasses and a mermaid's tail.) Apparently, Australian fans disliked what they saw; some threw eggs. Disability activists also (but probably for different reasons) disliked what we saw; I've never thrown eggs -- some wars are won better with words or with not buying a ticket.

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose we take Lady Gaga more seriously than, say, Kevin McHale (Artie on Glee). Yeah, the fame monster is hungry for publicity, and it needs to be fed -- in as many outrageous ways as possible. Yeah,

Here's what taking Lady Gaga seriously doesn't do.

It doesn't raise the profile of disabled people and encourage our acceptance either in general public spaces or on stage. Lady Gaga is not disabled in a way that requires her to use a wheelchair. Lady Gaga rolling around in a chair or using crutches or having a non-disabled dancer use a chair does not materially change our world. It doesn't raise awareness around disability and disability issues. It doesn't make people see wheelchairs as positive. It's just another person sitting in a wheelchair; the only thing that does is assure non disabled folks that it is OK to be in wheelchairs when you don't need them.

Seeing Lady Gaga's representations of disability does not assure people that it is all right to be disabled because disability can be glamorous and sexy. Everyone knows that Lady Gaga's performance is a stage realization and that for most people (not ruling anyone out here) disability is not really like that. (I know; not even my glamorous sexy life is quite like that). In fact, Lady Gaga's disability is so overtop that it harms public acceptance: real disability is almost never like that. In some ways, the lived experience of disability appears even more unsexy when contrasted with the Lady Gaga image.

We in the disability community aren't really helping ourselves when we make these and other similar arguments. The weightiness of experience and reality just isn't there.

So, what would it mean to take Lady Gaga seriously?

Here's a nuance. A nuance, yes, but an important one. Lady Gaga's disability is not about being disabled, so much as it is an exploration of the moments and ways that one might come into disability -- on stage and/or in the public eye.

In Paparazzi, she becomes disabled before the media; in Sydney, she became disabled before her adoring fans. (It doesn't matter that she's costumed as a mermaid; I've seen scholarly and web readings in this vein.) No, to me, it's about creating, testing, staging. It's not about being disabled. Lady Gaga's disability is only temporary -- I love Annaham's post about that here. Her emphasis on the temporary nature of Lady Gag's disability got me rethinking No, it's not about being and existing as disabled in, say, the same way that Kevin McHale's Artie does. Or any of the other non-disabled actors who are playing disabled roles. It's not even about having a disability identity... It is, for me at least, about performing the moment that one becomes disabled and that, as a non-disabled person, she is uniquely qualified to do. (I'm indebted to s.e. smith for a really helpful conversation about trying on different identities.)

Over the past couple of days, I've wondered whether or not, this disability exploration might have its roots in Lady Gaga's family history of lupus. I've spent a while thinking about this. I've come to think that family history and individual psychology might be a red herring, however; rarely does anyone of us do anything for any one reason or as a linear response to a complex situation. BUT, more to my point, it doesn't matter whether or not Lady Gaga has disability in her family or whether she herself has a disabling form of lupus. The point is as a non-disabled person she might, at any moment, become disabled.

How do we come into disability? What do we do? How do we respond? The moment that one is recognized as disabled in the public eye is life changing in so many ways. How do we present ourselves? This moment and its consequences are to me what Lady Gaga is exploring. Looking at newspaper reports, facebook, twitter and blog posts, I find I am interested not in how "unreal" her disability is, but in the reaction of everyone -- including activists like me -- around her.

(My first post on Lady Gaga and wheelchairs is here).

Overcoming And Success: II

2011-07-12T23:54:00.000-07:00

Disability challenges what we think we know, as a society, about overcoming and success -- though you would never figure this out from mainstream news media or people on the street.

For the average passerby, success means overcoming your disability. Whether you've climbed a mountain, pushed a marathon, or simply sipped your coffee, success is yours because you have overcome. In fact, overcoming is your primary success. Even if you have climbed that mountain, won a Paralympic gold medal, you will pretty much always have managed to overcome your disability.

I laugh when I think about what people are trying to do here. Non-disabled emphasis on overcoming is meant to encourage the disabled person, to assure her of her place in the world. It's meant to show her that she isn't limited by her disability or condemned to a successless/failful life. It's supposed to bring a disabled person into community and into contact with the "rest" of the world.

But the thing about disability is that you cannot overcome it. No matter what you do. You can be successful, yes. You can deal with it -- successfully, yes. But you cannot defeat or conquer it. You might manage to defeat, challenge, even overcome other people's expectations for you and for people with your diagnosis, but whatever it is you successfully managed to do, you did it with and in your body. Some things take willpower. More willpower than you ever thought you could have. But that's not you overcoming your disability. That's you drawing every last piece of strength and strength you didn't know was there to, say, get out of bed. To go to physical therapy. To take your medication, go to counseling, get out on the street, look people in the eye, and/or challenge the prejudice they are confronting you with. That's you and your disability out there. Together.

I know this. At least in theory. When I can keep hold of it, I know that I do better when I work with what the mainstream world would call my limitations. I don't see pushing myself and pushing my limits as defeating disability; I experience something like dancing as taking my limitations and exploring them. I'm not overcoming, but moving with. I know that I work even better when I allow my body to exist without judgment. I do my very best when I allow what others would judge negatively to become features -- to exist in their own right, without correction. There is no defeating here; there's only living. And learning to live in an integrated fashion.

Part I is here.

Falling From The Roller Coaster

2011-07-10T21:13:00.000-07:00

This is a heart-rending story about someone whose life was wrongly ended because of the absence of inclusive design and a serious failure to connect disability and design. It is also a story about how the writing of disability narratives in the media undergirds -- nay, enables -- the absence of inclusive design. In other words, though on different scales, both the events themselves and the way the New York Post reports them are serious problems.

Sgt. James Thomas returns from Iraq as a double amputee and wheelchair user. He decides to go to an amusement park and ride the roller coaster. He checked with a staff person about which rides would be safe for him; he was told they were all suitable. He fell from the roller coaster to his death because the lap bar and belt could not hold him in.

How did this happen? Sgt. Thomas placed his trust in the staff at Darien Lake amusement park. According to the New York Post, Sgt. Thomas asked which rides were safe for him. MSNBC observes, "People without legs are barred from at least one other coaster at the park, the Predator. Rules posted on the resort's website for the Ride of Steel say that guests must be 54 inches or taller, but add that people with "certain body proportions" may not be able to ride. The website also suggests that guests try using a test seat at the coaster's station house."

Let's just look at that for a second. Both the Post and MSNBC mention the height requirement. The Post states that Sgt. Thomas was 3 feet tall. BUT both fail to understand that a height requirement is pretty meaningless in this situation. Regardless of height from the hips upwards, Sgt. Thomas' safety depended on appropriate restraints: an "x" belt system across his torso might well have done the job (I'm no safety expert), but a lapbar and belt, no matter what his measured height were always going to be insufficient.

USA Today notes that that double amputees are also barred from the MotoCoaster. If amputees were barred from the Predator and the MotoCoaster, why did the staff person recommend this ride and why did the ride operator allow Sgt. Thomas on to this ride? Given those circumstances, how is it possible that none of the staff knew that the ride was inappropriate?

The MSNBC report amentions that "people of certain body proportions" might also be unable to ride. I'm not sure what this is code for. Are they talking age, size, weight? Or is there perhaps a deeper awareness that there is a serious flaw in the design of the roller coaster. A piece by WFAA News concludes with some of the accident history: A man with CP fell to his death from a similarly designed roller coaster, someone fell from this roller coaster and broke some ribs.

I don't know whether it is possible to design a roller coaster that is universally safe -- i.e., safe for absolutely everyone -- but I am willing to bet that a little more thought about body configurations, restraints, and safety, a slightly more expansive approach to think about who might want to use a roller coaster, would have led to a more inclusive design and a better outcome for everyone who uses this and other similarly designed rides.

Comments on the story run from "he died doing something he wanted to do" to "why would he, as a disabled man, want to do that?" to "Darwin Awards...." to "if they hadn't let him on, he would have cried discrimination." I am sickened. But I understand where such comments are coming from: the ignorance and sloppy journalism that continue to reinforce societal prejudice towards disabled people. Almost every piece I looked at was offensive reading. But let me stick with the Post for a moment: I found their story first.

The Post skews the story to stir up prejudice and ridicule at every point. Tabloid journalism style makes lavish use of lurid adjectives. The first line of the piece? "A rocketing roller coaster sent a legless Army combat hero flying to his death in a tragic accident at a Buffalo-area amusement park." From the very outset, Sgt. Thomas is made physiologically vulnerable (and perhaps a little laughable) before the technological power of the machinery. It is not surprising then to learn not that he "fell" -- that would be a serious moment -- but that he "bounced" from the roller coaster. Boing! Legless dude! Ha haha.

Readers are treated to the image of an operator who "let" Thomas' nephew lift him into the ride, minutes before the nephew realizes that the lapbar will fail because Thomas "has no lap." But by then it is too late. The ride is off -- the action is quick and fast: torpedo, crest, quickly climbs. Thomas doesn't stand a chance. His nephew is quoted describing how Thomas "flew" out of the ride and how futile it would have been to try and hold him, even if he could have grabbed Thomas' shirt. I cannot imagine how this man felt, as he watched his uncle fall. I cannot imagine the fear and shock and also the powerlessness. This is not part of the Post's story. The Post would rather concentrate on the way Thomas' disability informs how others react to the fall.

As the Post reports it, Thomas' disability is as much a horrifying element as the fall itself. As the rumours of the fall spread, the story is not word of a man has fallen to his death, but one of a "legless" man who has fallen. Indeed, "Some guy fell off, and he didn't have any legs." Here, "and" is a coordinating conjunction that suggests that disability is as awful as the fall itself. The Post underscores that point in the very next sentence: it concludes the paragraph with the screams of a "horrified" woman. Call it bad writing or call it prejudice, but as I see it, it is impossible to tell whether the screams are a reaction to Thomas' disability or a response to his fall. Indeed, I maintain that Thomas' disability status might be integrally important to understanding how the accident happened and to any future recommendations for safety, but it is not an equal part of the horror.

Other pieces on this story stress Thomas' disability narrative; how hard it was for him to go through rehab. How difficult it was for him to feel "normal." Only the Post scores this quote from a family member. Thomas' sister provides the last sentence of the article. Her brother, it seems, has gone on to a "better place," one where he can be found "running."

This piece of sloppy writing and others like it are the reason that inclusive design does not seem to be an obvious choice for fairground rides. Post reporter Candice M. Giove falls into all the old ways of thinking about disability as a tragedy and disabled people as objects of pity. Then, when systemic ignorance contributes to Thomas' death, the sergeant is portrayed as freakish. It is not freakish to want to ride a roller coaster. Sgt. Thomas is not an object of pity; he was a guy on a family trip who just wanted -- like everyone else on that ride -- to be scared and to have some fun. He'd worked hard to be there; he deserved to ride the roller coaster safely. And if it wasn't possible, he deserved to know that, too.

Overcoming And Success: I

2011-07-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about success and overcoming. Growing up, my mother taught me that success -- any kind of success -- was exclusively about successfully overcoming prejudice. And, in her mind, working for individual achievement was the ONLY way forward.

I stress both parts of that. She believed that I would succeed if I tried and that by trying I would succeed. She also thought that success was something I and I alone could earn; neither overcoming or success were about community efforts. She was able to sustain the contradiction that the world wasn't a meritocracy, but that if I worked, I would be able to do well because I had deserved it.

I think my mother learned this approach from living in community thinking about success, life, and well-being. It's a particular kind of self-help, self-advocacy that has taken hold at a grass roots level in places where systemic kinds of help have failed. Where injustice has influenced the educational systems, employment opportunities, housing, social and moral values.

In some ways, my mother was right. I did work hard; I did succeed; I developed a killer instinct that I used to squash the competition and to succeed -- by then I called it "win" -- at every opportunity. She gave me the tools and resources to beat the odds and to "make it" by almost any criterion you care to name. And as a result of her work, I am in a position to be writing this blog post, to be sitting, thinking about how I got here, what I gave up, and how I can live better.

I can see now, for example, that neither of us was really explicit and, I would say, prepared for the consequences of this approach. Constructing success as the product of individual work and consequent achievement takes the successful person out of community and isolates them. I saw my colleagues turn into competitors, I moved 3,000 miles away, I allowed many of my former friends to fall away, I felt I couldn't return to my community -- geographical and personal -- of origin. So, I didn't. I haven't. When I realized where I was, what I had done, and how things had worked out, I started again.

I started again when I realized that, as a disabled person, attempting to overcome any obstacle was not a practical or useful model of being successful. More on that tomorrow.

The Pull

2011-07-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

In this huge therapy journey, I am learning more about my body and my chair. (No surprise there, I suppose). I was, however, taken aback to learn more about the pull. Not *that* kind -- the wheelchair kind. So much of our everyday vocabulary concentrates on pushing. Pushing is, for the most part, how you go forward and what you do most of the time. It's also how other people, for the most part, interact with your chair. Pulling is somewhat underestimated.

It's taken us a long time to figure this stuff out -- months, in fact.

There are two major kinds of pulls. The first involves going backwards. You know the kind? A straight pull backwards. In theory, I could/should have known this. In practice, however, I discovered that I am more lazy than my technical knowledge.

As with so many things, pulling is most efficient if it originates with your shoulder blade. The general idea is something to do with retracting the shoulder blade and pulling from there. Both your power and your stability come from the correct meshing of all the muscles that surround your shoulder blade. That is, of course, much easier to write than to execute. The shoulder is complicated, strong, and yet vulnerable; something as small as a knot or two might prevent proper function -- never mind the daily abuse that chair users subject our shoulders to. (to which chair users subject our shoulders!)

I'm spending a lot of time with the shoulder here, because it's much easier to pull with your forearm. And I have been doing that. A lot. Much more than I realized. Part of what I am learning is how to use my shoulder. How to retract and pull. AND, even more complicatedly, I am learning how to pull and how to manage the exchange of muscles so that I can reach the outermost point of the pull, breathe, and then begin to push. That transition, that changeover is really, really hard.

Try it. And, for that matter, try the reverse. Try pushing from shoulder blade and then, instead of releasing your arm before pushing again, try keeping it active. Push, transition, pull, transition, push. Exhausting. And complicated.

In the middle of all this, we discovered another kind of pulling, the kind you do when you aren't really thinking about it. The kind you do when you are stabilizing the chair, checking its direction, steering, slowing, balancing -- I've heard one colleague call it "feathering." It's the kind you do with what I have been calling your "off hand." Your offhand stops you from having to push, pull yank. It enables you to ride smoothly, invisibly correcting a push that went off course; it enables you to counteract the absurd slopes of pavements. It turns you when your other hand is up in the air or supporting a partner. Your offhand does a lot of invisible work.

Discovering has made visible and hopefully possible the next stage of recovery.