“As a dancer, I am a body on display. As a body on display, I am
expected to reside within a certain continuum of fitness and bodily control,
not to mention sexuality and beauty. But as a woman in a wheelchair, I am
neither expected to be a dancer, nor to position myself in front of an audience
gaze”. Ann Cooper Albright, a dancer who was severely albeit temporarily
disabled, said this in her article ‘Strategic Abilities: Negotiating the Disabled
Body in Dance’.
Her words force us to address the
questions about acceptable and indeed unacceptable ideas of body and sexuality.
Different dance forms and different cultures prescribe different aesthetic
ideals when it comes to the dancing body. In one context, a dancer’s body is
expected to be lean, and slim. Others expect voluptuous bodies. In some
contexts, a dancer’s eyes are the topic of interest. Whatever the situation is,
the ideal dancing body is strong, symmetrical and ‘abled’. Watching a disabled
person perform a dance is, for many people, an awkward and unaesthetic experience, for a
disabled body is not considered ‘sexy’.
This is because the idea of the ‘perfect dancing body’ has been challenged. But
like many things, the idea of the perfect dancing body is worth questioning. It
has been questioned by famous dancers and choreographers before, when dancers
broke away from classical forms to find new movement vocabularies and new
definitions of aesthetic dance. Dancers like Albright are taking this
questioning a little further through ‘disabled dancing bodies’.
It is also worth investigating
into what capability and disability is in dance. It is arrogant and presumptuous
to assume that a physically disabled person is less capable of being creative
and creating movement than a physically able person. The combination of a
physically disabled and mentally able dancer can be a truly exciting one –
resulting in new ways of constructing movement and fresh movement vocabularies.
Albright explains how watching a disabled body in dance forces us to “see with
a double vision, and helps us to recognize that while a dance performance is
grounded in the physical capacities of a dancer, it is not limited by them”.
Moreover, to identify being
disabled with the famous ‘wheelchair’ symbol is viewing disability in a
dangerously narrow manner, overlooking severe disabilities that physically able
dancers suffer from. For instance, a common but almost acceptable disability
that ails several dancers all over the world is eating disorders. Preventing
nourishment from reaching the body and the brain in order to sustain the
‘perfect dancing body’, ironically enough, results
in a disabled dancer. This disability – the obsession with being slim and
slender bodied – leads to anorexia, bulimia, stress, hairfall and in extreme
cases – severe psychological damage. Further, unhealthy competition amongst
peers, and emotional strain and sometimes abuse by a teacher or mentor towards
his or her student also severely disables dancers. Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black
Swan’ illustrated these disabilities in a brutally honest manner.
So maybe dance and disability are
not quite as polarized in reality as they are made out to be. For one, a
physically disabled body is by no means incapable of generating interesting and
exciting movement. And secondly, disability is not always visually
identifiable. Visually non-disabled dancers suffer other kinds of disabilities
everyday. In many senses, disability and dance go hand in hand. Clearly, this
contradiction between dance and disability is largely imagined. Then, is this
contradiction just about the spectator’s discomfort in aesthetically
appreciating a body that is differently abled?
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