Sara Chesterman
I was set a task. Be big,
be bold, take centre stage, don’t blend, take up space, be a leader, make
people follow you, make them adapt to you. I was thrown, shocked; my stomach
churned and tears welled up in my eyes. I yearned for my doona, its soft comforting
darkness. I wanted to hide. But I don’t want to, I thought, it’s exhausting,
and I’m exhausted. I always feel like I’m taking centre stage. Even
when I just go to the corner store to buy some milk, people stare.
I was confused, trying to suppress the tears I thought, I don’t want to
do it, but I’m supposed to want to do it. What’s a performer who doesn’t
want to perform?
I was in Byron Bay; I had been given a grant for professional development as a dancer. The Australia Council had generously forked out a considerable sum of money so that I could live away from home and study a three-month intensive training in dance performance and improvisation. The course was Janis Claxton’s Spirit in Motion Training Course (SIMTC 2000). I had been attending class every day for the past eleven weeks, sitting in a room with twenty dancers, interpreting leg movements with my arms, leaps through the air with spins of my chair and lying on my back, trying to coordinate immobile hips with mobile arms to roll across the floor.
And now a week before our final performance, suddenly, I hated it all. I was exhausted. In my head I wailed, but I’ve just spent 11 weeks sitting in my wheelchair trying to move like you guys, trying my hardest to fall in, to interpret and copy, trying to fit in and learn like you have, I’ve sat in on classes and learnt exactly the same steps as you. I’ve attended all of your classes and not only have I done all the exercises that you have, but I’ve created my own versions. And now I’m tired and I want to meld. I want to stand in line and kick my leg in perfect time, just be one of the pack like a chorus line dancer. It’s just not fair.
We were in improvisation
class and had been practicing for weeks together learning techniques for generating
movements, and working as a group - how to interpret someone else’s movement
and make it your own, how to blend with someone, or oppose what they were doing,
how to fall in with another persons pathway and slipstream along.
The task was to improvise in small groups using voice and movement. The only
directions we were given were two or three words, chosen at random from a pack
of cards with things like burning, pathways, gyrating, rolling, legs and swooping
written on them. We could expect combinations like mumbling buttocks, or swivelling
lips. My task was to stop trying to blend and fade away into the group and rather
than follow, to take the lead. The difficulty was that the other dancers didn’t
know that I was their leader.
Janis shuffled through the cards. The words flipped before our eyes - sinking and reaching. My heart sank with dread. We started. I moved, I thought ‘Okay I’m not going to care, I’m just going to show them. They asked for it, they’re going to get it. I’m going to move and if one poor little toe gets near my wheel it will be one sorry little toe if it doesn’t follow.’ So I spun my chair not looking at what anyone else was doing. I stopped worrying about what their legs might be doing, about how I could interpret the subtle pelvic shift that happens when a toe reaches out to take a step. About how my spindly little arms could push a chair and keep up with a dancer leaping across the room. I shoved my chair, one great angry shove and I spun. And as I lifted my head to look up from my wheels I glimpsed a dancer spinning in perfect time, gliding softly to a halt as my chair wheels slowly lost momentum.
I pushed my chair again,
one sweep through the space, a pathway straight to the front. I reached up then
let myself fall, slowly, slowly sinking till my hand touched the floor and I
was stuck half out of my chair, flailing. I waited in stillness until I was
ready and then slowly, slowly, in my own time, not caring, I struggled, pushing
and falling, grasping on brakes, handles, wheels and struggled to sit myself
upright. And then upright I felt myself falling the other way and as my arm
came down it contacted a back that had just scooted in beside me, catching my
fall. Perfectly timed, I rested my head and as she gradually arched her back
to stand up, my chair spun around and I was upright. She gave me a push, sending
me back to stop at someone else’s feet. They were reaching for the sky
so I followed their eyes and lifted my arm to reach with them, a shorter sitting
version of a reaching body. I turned my head to look left and there across the
room were five dancers, reaching and turning their heads. Finally the call came
‘end’. It was over.
After class I went down to Woolworth’s, hungry, light-headed and on a high.
I zipped down the aisles, shooting under people as they reached for the high
shelves only narrowly missing their lifted heels. I zoomed past trolleys, braking
suddenly to set myself in a spin if they misjudged my moves. I reached for my
rice cakes with my slippery fingers and after 4 packets landed on the floor
one hit my lap and I was off. I glided towards the checkout coming to a halt,
touching the heels of the girl in front who lost balance and ended sitting in
my lap. I was in the queue at the cash register, the one clearly labelled with
the blue disabled sign so that I knew which pathway I was supposed to take.
Since my accident in 1996 that resulted in C6/7 quadraplegia I have continued dancing, studying with many inspiring teachers. Inclusiveness is fundamental to both Janis Claxton’s and Helen Clarke Lapin’s approach to dance. Janis is passionate about getting everyone dancing, showing students how to find joy in their body no matter what their particular physical state may be. Helen teaches Contact Improvisation and has made her work open to people with different physicalities for many years. She has also taught classes that are both specifically focused on integration and those that are designed for groups with a specific need. The presence of a person in a wheelchair or of someone who can’t see in one of her classes just leads her to reinforce that the improvisational form asks a dancer to assess their skill of being present in the moment. Martin Hughes has worked for many years with Janice Florence, a dancer with paraplegia, in their company State of Flux. In my first class with him he deftly flipped me from my chair onto his lower back and took me rolling on the floor across the room. When I first turned up to a workshop with Al Wunder, giving him no prior warning of my wheels, he slipped a few words like roll, spin and brakes into his instructions as he carried on his class as usual. And, faced with teaching a room full of dancers to stamp and slap their bodies in time, body percussion and percussion teacher, Greg Sheean gave me cymbals to tie to my chair strapped sticks to my wrists and made me a wheeling music machine in no time.
SIMTC 2000, directed by Janis Claxton, was a three-month professional training in alternative dance held early this year in Byron Bay. The core of the course consisted of a weekly program of classes in contemporary Hawkins-based release dance technique and movement improvisation taught by Janis Claxton, percussion and body percussion by Greg Sheean and voice by Cleis Pearce This program was extended by a series of intensive classes given by visiting teachers; Contact Improvisation by Helen Clarke Lapin from Sydney, Contact Improvisation by Martin Hughes, Melbourne, Aboriginal Dance by Matthew Doyle, Sydney, and Movement and Theatre Improvisation by Al Wunder, Theatre of the Ordinary, Melbourne.
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e m a i l - <Proximity> |