"My Dream" from China Disabled People's
Performing Art Troupe staged in Brussels
The most powerful word I found in
the search of the Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance, is the question of “Are you in pain or
pleasure?” Why? It is because the how I want to perceive the things as it meant
to be deliver to me as the choreographer and the dancers represent. Not my
thinking, but theirs message is important to me as an audience (Albright 56). Through
the hardest dance the dancer ever performed, her deliberate conscious intent was
to confront herself and some of the audience in the world to deconstruct the representation
of codes of dance production and communicate an “other” bodily reality.
The dancer wanted for the audience to feel the physical and emotional vulnerability
as her flesh being unveiling before their eyes a little at time through a
square flame of light and the glint of metal in the softness her naked flesh seating
on a wheel chair in the middle of the stage. The dancer experienced disability frailty of
life as how felt as if a knife cuts and makes a marked on her skin. What I feel
of her story is the physical and psychic scars being cut internally. She also
felt the how personal and social negative reactions to disability.
Do you see pain or pleasure?
So to speak, she wanted to trick the audience with her disability performance to
surprise and challenge the audience in theatrical performance; hoping the
audience may perceive as enactment rather than the disability. The dancers must
negotiate all the time with ideal and the deviant bodies to represent with “spirit
over body”. Unlike the traditional approaches
to choreography and conventions of proscenium stage and namely the paralysis of
the lower body, there is more to understand and appreciate the wide range of
the disabilities: vision impairment, deafness, neurological, and physical and
psychic, etc. The message of her dance and disability was to reconstruct the
American population in dance community and professional dance companies to readjust
the dance of disability the binary paradigm adjustment by provoking the conscious
mind to re think about “What kind of body is the dancers body?” (Albright 56-63).
It seemed that some of people are still being ignorant right here in our
dance department and some students discriminating “other” disable dancer/s. I
have been involved in the disability community to choreograph and dance for
them to benefit. I hope to see more of the able and disable dancers diverse in
dance community.
Disability International
Link & Resources
http://www.danceability.com/links.php
