This piece explores the degree to which theater can be experienced as bodywork--like a massage, a yoga class, a therapeutic zen dance session. It is a meditation on gravity, rest and slow movement through experiments in physical improv and contact. Diverse bodies and abilities unfold into variable social sculptures.
Some theorists say disability is a social performance, situated along a spectrum of what is considered “the normal body”. How normal is your body? How does it move? How has it hoped to move? How do you, in your particular skeleton, contend with gravity? What is your gravity story? A broken bone, a decade older or younger, the thing that slipped out of your hand?
What if we went the opposite way of rush and grasp and push and leap, but instead to sea level, to slow, to gradual and consistent? Letting all bodies into the choreography--what creativity unfolds when taken lying down? Do you have your best ideas gliding sideways through a dream just before waking up? A poetic soundscape prompts your inner monologue to become part of the theater, whether or not you choose to physically participate. Complete stillness lets you be in it, too.
The piece draws on the work of integrated dance companies (troupes composed of both disabled and non-disabled dancers) like Axis Dance of the San Francisco Bay Area and Heidi Latsky Co. of NYC; Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist Is Present”; American Apparel’s 2010 series of ads with disabled model, Jes Sachse; the painter Sunaura Taylor; and many other other performers in the disability culture movement and somatic arts fields.