Transcript of “The Art of Movement”
Judith Smith: Describing physically integrated dance is a little difficult.
Rodney Bell: AXIS is definitely a cutting edge dance company in the mixed ability arena, probably in the contemporary dance arena throughout the USA.
Alice Shepherd: Each of the four pieces that we’re currently taking on tour has, is kind of an extreme, and they all really challenge the notions of what is and what isn’t dance.
Judith Smith: We’re not a company that has a single choreographer, so our work tends to be really diverse.
Alice Shepherd: There’s going of partnering, and you’re going to see stuff where, you The wheelchairs come alive and dance, you know, are part of the dance.
Judith Smith: It’s all of the things that dance is, except that It’s unique to the people that are doing the dance. We’re all in very different bodies and in very different equipment.
Bonnie Lewkowicz: I don’t know what draws people to come see our performances necessarily, other than that I think it is a more accessible form of dance for people. But I think everyone comes away with something different.
Judith Smith: When we started AXIS back in 1987, you know, it really was an experiment. We did one performance and we just got so excited by the innovation of it and by doing something that we didn’t know anyone else was doing.
Alice Shepherd: What you’re going to see is going to vary on the piece.
Judith Smith: In this particular repertory that we’re doing now, we have a dance theater piece.
It’s a piece by Joe Goode and he’s, you know, internationally known for his dance theatre work.
Rodney Bell: The show looks beautiful and it’s shaped and sculpted beautifully.
Judith Smith: Power wheelchairs are powerful. You know, we use the wheelchair as a way to lift people.
Rodney Bell: I suppose you could call it a prop. It’s a tool that I use. which is an able bodied person can use or not use, you know. So there’s so many variable concepts around what I bring into dance. To be a cutting edge company, we have to put in the groundwork and that’s what AXIS does. Behind the scenes, we work hard.
When I’m dancing, I don’t look at it as I’m a disabled man dancing in an able bodied sort of environment. I look at it as, I bring these different qualities.
Judith Smith: And then we have a piece by Kate Weare, who’s an emerging choreographer from New York, that is really dynamic physically. It’s very, very quirky movement, movement vocabulary.
In general, motorized wheelchairs can carry people longer than most people carrying a body.
Alice Shepherd: When you have a company like ours, one of the questions the dance world has is, is what we are doing dance? And when I show up to a mainstream dance class, there’s this kind of frozen moment where the other dancers are like, what are you doing here?
Judith Smith: The dancers that are drawn to this form of work who are not disabled tend to be dancers who are very experimental, very improvisational. want to involve themselves in dance that is somewhat outside the box.
We work with really, really wonderful artists, both composers and choreographers.
Alice Shepherd: What happens when we go on stage? What do people think they’re seeing when they’re looking at us?
Bonnie Lewkowicz: Us as a company and the makeup of who we are, we’re telling people, here we are, you can look at us, go ahead and stare. This is what you do when you’re an audience member.
Alice Shepherd: It is dance and the movement speaks.
Judith Smith: And we have another piece by Victoria Marks, Dancing to Music.
Alice Shepherd: It’s even more intense when you look at these people and you’re like, they’re only moving their heads.
And one question is, can just head movement be dance? And the answer to that, I think you’ll see, is yes.
Judith Smith: It’s mostly a very simple but a very technically difficult piece, and the music is beautiful.
And then our last piece is Waypoint by Margaret Jenkins.
Alice Shepherd: There’s going to be some wild physical stuff.
Judith Smith: And it’s, you know, a very contemporary piece. It’s very difficult.
The music is by Fred Frith, and he used some of my wheelchair noise in the actual soundtrack.
Alice Shepherd: You know, that dance is 14 minutes of full out, flat on physicality.
I think people say is, first of all, they look and they see the prosthetics, the wheelchairs, and they look at the disability.
Then it just works on them, because it is dance. \
Judith Smith: You know, when people talk about ballet, they have a language to speak about ballet that’s, you know. A hundred years old. But when you start talking about people with and without disabilities, especially people with disabilities, dancing, the mind kind of goes blank. People really have to see our work to believe it.
Bonnie Lewkowicz: I know when we first started, we even had this question where people responding to us because they thought, Oh, aren’t they brave? And this is therapy and how good of them. I think it’s gone beyond that. And I think it. It’s really gotten recognized.
Rodney Bell: It’s a very professional environment where I’m dancing with some top dancers, you know, with and without disabilities. We’re dancing with a passion as well.
Alice Shepherd: We capture people, we open their minds, we change their minds, because it’s not really imaginable. I mean, how do you imagine that and what we do unless you’ve seen it?
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