AXIS in New York Times!

A Dance Company Mixes Arms, Legs and Wheels
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: October 30, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/arts/dance/01sfculture.html?_r=1

Axis Dance Company, founded in 1987, currently has seven dancers, four of whom are physically disabled and perform in wheelchairs. The initial impact of this on an audience is vexing. It’s a visual mixed metaphor, and you can’t help feeling, well, sympathy for dancers without legs. Like much that is surprising in art, however, Axis’s work instructs the viewer in how to appreciate it, and the lesson is delivered with cogent force: Sympathy is irrelevant. Forget what isn’t here, and pay attention to what is. Recognize the chairs for what they are and not as substitutes for what they are not.

See that? The lap of a seated dancer is a body part, as exploitable as a shoulder. Or that? A chair on its side, a wheel spinning in the air with a dancer lying across it, rotating slowly and elegantly, a lovely movement impossible without the chair. Or that? As dancers pair off, the partners aren’t simply men or women. Two chaired dancers in a pas de deux, or one in a chair and one on her feet: as if a whole new gender had emerged, these are unfamiliar kinds of flirtation but flirtation absolutely.

“We don’t look at being disabled as an obstacle or a limitation,” said Judith Smith, 49, a company founder who dances in a motorized chair. “We look at the possibilities. There is a potential for movement that is radically expanded from what another dance company would have.”

Next weekend the company, which travels frequently, is presenting its home season at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in Oakland, in a program that includes a new work by the choreographer David Dorfman. One recent afternoon in a studio upstairs from the theater, Mr. Dorfman was putting five company members, two in chairs, through a rigorous rehearsal of the new work, an extended riff on the theme of protection tentatively titled “A Light Shelter for a Storm.” As the choreography unfolded, even in a run-through, the different physical capabilities of the dancers unified into the collaborative message of bodies in motion. The wheelchairs, it was readily clear, are part and parcel of the dancers’ moving bodies, integral as limbs.

This was most evident in the pyrotechnics of Rodney Bell, 39, who, paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle accident when he was 19, became a dancer after several years of playing wheelchair basketball. His use of the chair makes that athleticism clear. In any given sequence he may rise up on his back wheels, rearing like a bronco and spinning in a tight, furious circle, a wheelchair pirouette; or tilt forward to balance on the tiny front wheels as if en pointe; or spill the chair sideways and overboard, balancing on one rim with a hand on the floor. He’ll even pull the chair over on top of him and climb back into it.

Mr. Bell, who is Maori from New Zealand, said he began developing his chair acrobatics in the hospital shortly after he was injured, when a nurse punished him for being difficult by “putting me in the hallway upside down.”

If the other chair dancers are not as virtuosic, they are musical and fluid, moving on wheels in syncopated or even hip-hop rhythms and performing waist-up choreography within their chairs, appearing as bodies fully in motion.

“It’s not so much a thing as a real body part,” Alice Sheppard, 40, said of her chair. “It’s not like dancing with a chair,” she said. “It’s like dancing.”

Ms. Sheppard, born in Britain, is a former professor of medieval studies who has a disorder that causes involuntary muscle movements. She joined Axis three years ago after she attended classes offered by the company and became enthralled by the art of movement. Asked if she took to dancing because it helped her physically, she said no.

“It was an artistic choice, not a therapeutic one,” she said.

Sonsherée Giles, who dances without a chair, was asked what it’s like to perform with someone in one. It’s second nature, she said. “I don’t really think about it anymore,” she added. “When I first joined the company, I was more aware of the chairs. Mostly you think about your toes.”

Another company member, Janet Das, said the ability to create ensemble work with disabled dancers was a talent, a gift that some have more than others. The hardware, she said, takes some getting used to, but she likened it to learning to work with the floor, another unyielding barrier that is nonetheless, at times, a foil.

“It’s not without trial and error, and we do have accidents,” she said.

Mr. Dorfman, who had never before worked with a physically integrated company, as Axis prefers to be known, said the ensemble appealed to his aesthetic.

“I love virtuosity,” he said. “But dance is about humanity, too; it’s a mix. And with this company you have a whole new range of those things to explore.”

He paused and addressed the new work.

“On a soulful level I see them all as the same folks, but on a body level they work differently,” he said. “This piece is not about that, but it’s not not about that.”

As if on cue, the company began a run-through of a segment of “Light Shelter.” Mr. Bell, in a wheelchair meander across the floor, called to Ms. Giles: “Hey, you want to go for a walk? You can walk, and I can roll. ’Cause you can’t roll.”

“I can roll,” Ms. Giles replied insouciantly — and proceeded to cross the stage in slow somersaults.

Performances run from Friday through Nov. 8 at Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice Street, Oakland, Calif; (510) 625-0110, axisdance.org.

Chuck & Rodney after the preview of the new piece by David

How To Hear "Come With Me" When It's Spoken Through a Power Wheelchair

by Zach Pine

One thing I love about dancing improvisationally in a group is the wonderful richness of experience that can be created, often unexpectedly. During our rehearsal last Monday, I had an unexpected moment of communication - one that is unique to physically integrated dance.

This past month, I've been dancing with the AXIS company, class participants, and community dancers rehearsing for the upcoming David Dorfman commission. Our sessions have always included improvisation, and offered great opportunities to practice the art of non-verbal communication. This past Monday, in the midst of a dance, I found myself non-verbally communicating with another dancer. My message was: "I'm standing right behind you - don't back up," and I sent it without any conscious thought, by thumping and wiggling gently against the rear handles of her power wheelchair. At a break later, I asked her if the message had gotten through, or whether I was just lucky that she didn't back up into me. She told me that my message had in fact gotten through, and invited me to feel free in the future to step up onto on the shelf at the rear of her chair if I found myself there again. A few minutes later, I found myself standing behind her in a dance. I signaled my presence as before, then stepped up onto the back of her chair. Then, unexpectedly, I felt her start to move her chair forward. She did it very gently and expressively, and I "heard" this as "come with me." So, rather than step off, I let her carry me forward. But I only took a short ride before I hopped off - because I didn't want to overstay my welcome, and I knew I hadn't yet learned to distinguish between "come with me for a short ride" and "let me carry you on long adventure." I'm going to work on that.

AXIS for Everyone

By Emmaly Wiederholt

Here’s the number one reason I love AXIS Dance Company: it celebrates the individual. Yes me, you, him, her, and each of us in turn. It celebrates aesthetic, line and form by celebrating my big feet and your wheelchair, his small stature and her big thighs. It celebrates our bodies, and not as an idealized sculpture, but in a very real embrace. It celebrates movement, the kinetic embodiment of our own kinesiology. It celebrates the reality that yes, we don’t all share the same physical abilities, but we each have our own unique physicality. Dancing viewed in this light is almost akin to penmanship; for each person in the world that can write, not one of us forms letters quite the same way. Two people may lift their arms above their heads, but it will be two different bodies, two different people with two different thoughts, hopes, dreams, anxieties, and stories. And so this is why I love AXIS, because it begs the question, “What can I do with this body?”

Every Monday evening for this past month I’ve taken BART to Oakland to participate in AXIS’ weekly open class at the Malonga Center for the Arts. It attracts a generously assorted group of students: experienced dancers, new dancers, high-schoolers, seniors, dancers with two good feet, one good foot, dancers in every kind of wheelchair imaginable, mixed ethnicities, mixed genders, mixed everything. And every class I leave feeling grateful that dance is something everyone can do. How dreadful were dance something only the few and elite could truly love and enjoy. No, dance reaches its greatest height when it is simply movement for the sake of movement, a celebration of our flawed, varied, and ever universal humanity.

Last August I attended the preview of David Dorfman’s commissioned piece on AXIS Dance Company, to premier on November 6- 8 at the Malonga Center. Watching the forty minute guided improvisation, I fell transfixed. What I saw weren’t two dancers in wheelchairs and three dancers on their feet moving in tandem on stage. What I saw were five dancers, each as different as can be, but no less or more able than the next, generating momentum and each pushing their own unique physicality. It was beautiful, engaging, and everything I wish dance always was.

Beyond transcending dancer stereotypes is the other fact that AXIS is fun. Yes genuinely fun. People smile. No one aims to compete, to show off, to please. We’ve all come together to move. You’re in a wheelchair and my knee is bothering me so let’s be careful, but let’s have fun as well. I’ll dance how I dance and you dance how you dance and together we’ll relish in our differences, enjoy our similarities, become more than we could individually. Dance need not be a lofty, idealized, or antiquated art form. Dance can be something anyone can do, regardless of physical ability. Thank you AXIS for demonstrating how.

More Rehearsals with David

Here is some more rehearsal footage:

A short clip of rehearsal with David Dorfman: Day 1

One Week with Dorfman

We just completed our first week with David and what feels to me like my first week with AXIS. I rehearsed with the company for 2 weeks before heading out-of-country this summer, but after this week and the very exploratory, creative process we have submerged ourselves in, I feel much more connected with the other dancers and the life of the Company.

Working with David has been a total joy. We have worked hard, but there has been a powerful air of acceptance and encouragement to bring all of ourselves to the rehearsal process. This environment allowed us to generate a great deal of material in our first three (and subsequent) days together, and then to present it in an improvised structure in the Malonga Theater on Thursday night.

I feel that after this first week's research we are now digging deeper as we head into the second week. I am ready and eager for the next step.