Wawaweewa! AXIS Dance company featured in the New York Times!!!
Written by admin2 on November 2nd, 2009Filed under: Themes, Wheelchairman of the Board
On IrkedMagazine.com, we’ve highlighted the extraordinary work of AXIS Dance Company multiple times over the past few years (hopefully driving a steady trickle of curious readers to their website).
But now, finally, AXIS has hit the mother lode…
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Quoting Bruce Weber, writing for the New York Times:
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.”
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Continue reading this wonderful article >>
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