Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled Body in Dance

Disability. Dance. Artistry.



"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

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