After many of our performances, the dancers of our company come back on stage for a Q and A or talkback or something. It’s my least favourite part of the job. I like the protection of the stage and the lights. I will do anything on stage because the firm line of the proscenium protects me. Even when what we are doing is risky, physically and or emotionally, even when I am feel most stripped and vulnerable, I take refuge in the knowledge that I am safe behind the light, the curtains, and the edge of the stage. In that limited, bordered place, I will give you my all. When the lights and curtain are taken away and we reappear (usually soaked in sweat, dressed in half in street clothes and half in costume, water bottles, scarves and jackets tightly in hand), we are no longer the wild, fierce beautiful things on stage; we are human.
Revealing our humanity is, of course, part of the point. Too often, despite the sweat and the breath, dancers seem untouchable, ethereal, and surreal. As I sit before the audience, though, I usually just feel vulnerable and clunky. I’m not so worried that someone will say something negative about the performance — but now I think of it, that would be awful — I find that I am afraid of what people will say about disability and art and that I am unwilling to keep explaining my physicality for consumption by a medically fascinated/intrigued/uncertain audience. It’s one thing to be in control of your self-presentation as a dancer; it’s another to have to explain why you are the way you are; and still another to have to welcome commentary that, in other spaces, you would write off without a second thought.
Here’s what I mean. A choreographer recently changed the ending to one of his pieces. The first version slowed carefully. A voice calls to the dancers on stage; we move; it calls again; we move, this time for a shorter duration; and again; we freeze, recognizing our concluding shapes as the end of a thirty minute journey. We’re here; our time has come to an end. The lights come down slowly; we look at each other intensely and acknowledge the power of the experience we have shared. In the new version, the voice calls to us in the same way; we mark out the seconds to the end of our journey together. But on the final call, instead of finding a quiet stillness, the movement takes us out of ourselves. Time cannot stop; this cannot be the end. We move. And we move. And we just keep moving as the lights come down into black forcing us to stop. I love both endings. They resonate deeply within me; I find myself wanting to cry sometimes, so deeply do I feel the end of time.
After that moment, I want people to talk about the journey they’ve shared with us. And they do. It’s just that all too often, we aren’t on the same pathway at all. Two recent comments have got me thinking. In the first, an audience member is pleased and excited that we’ve “earned” our applause: that people aren’t just clapping because some of us are disabled and we’ve managed to lift a finger. The speaker is exaggerating, of course, but we have encountered situations where reviewers have given positive reviews simply because being disabled and being on stage is so “inspirational.” In these situations, people aren’t engaging with the work; they are reaffirming (for their own safety) a set of useless societal stereotypes about disability, artistry, and virtuosity. I don’t know how to react to such comments. I DESPISE any form of the word inspiration that isn’t being used to describe an intake of breath (link is to my site and a post about it). If seeing almost two hours of fierce dance and intense art cannot break people out of this mode, nothing will.
At the same time, however, I think of this comment as having a nasty, nasty edge. We “earned” our applause, (damn right we did), but we earned it by executing a series of movements that are recognizably extraordinary. When we dive, roll, cartwheel, wheelie, lift, run, jump, balance, …., we are doing things that almost anyone can recognize as needing skill. It’s physically, technically hard. But what if, as a disabled dancer, lifting my finger and bowing my head were as technically complicated for me, in my body, as any of the daredevil things a colleague and I currently do. The work and the skill would be the same, but who in the audience would recognize that I had earned my applause as deservedly? If we continue to push for extreme movement as somewhat definitional, the dance world will remain exclusive. And that isn’t right. Dance belongs to the moving body, not the institution.
A second audience member expresses delight at our work; it’s a particularly sweet delight since this person was concerned about cringing. The comment stings me deeply. It comes from a well-meaning place — that, I gather — it bites nonetheless. I’ve seen “cringe-worthy dance.” If you go to a lot of performances, you will sooner or later hit a couple of “bad” ones. But this audience member made an association between the cringe-worthiness of the performance and the presence of disabled performers. Such is the state of disability-awareness that it is still possible to say this, aloud, in front of other people without an apparent sense of shame. There’s a kind of assumption that a fear of cringing is a shared feeling, and I suppose it probably is.
To my mind, cringe-worthy performances by disabled people come from denying disability, from attempting to overcome it (in a saccharine, inspirational way), or from playing it for sympathy or good will. When disabled performers render themselves abject before your very eyes because that’s what our society expects, it is indeed cringe-worthy. But only because we should cringe at a society that so devalues the humanity of some of its people. We should cringe before a culture that insists on building an understanding of its physicality by casting out the physicality of others. It’s not about cringing because there are disabled performers on stage doing what looks like, well, dance.
It’s kind of like going to a freak-show. If we can be sure that the disabled performers control and manipulate the gaze of a non-disabled eye, that’s one thing. But if the performers are unable to maintain a sense of, I dunno, irony, distance, control; if they seem only to play to societal expectations and to lose themselves, that is cringe-worthy. It is cringeworthy because you, the audience member, participate in the unthinking consumption of another human being as they reiterate for your entertainment a set of demeaning social stereotypes. Neither the performers themselves nor the performance are worthy of your cringe.
On the way home, the bitterness burning inside my stomach, I wonder at the history of “cringe” as a word. A quick check of the Online Etymology Dictionary confirms for me a thought that has been gnawing at my gut. Cringe and crinkle share an etymological history: they are both connected to the Old English word, crincan. “Cringing,” as the commenter used it, contains a sense of shrinking away in fear. It’s a very physical word; you can see a cringe in the mind’s eye and experience it in your body. The twisted, bentness of cringe has a softer dimension, though, in the branch of words that is connected to our current crinkle. Crinkle has a sense of “yielding.”
I hit the accelerator as I swing into the curve that takes me up the hill to where I currently live. I feel my body bend and twist with the steering wheel as the car, the steering wheel and my torso join in a driving dance. What if, unbeknownst to the commenter, “cringe” actually was the right word? What if our performance actually was cringe-worthy — in the sense that our power evoked a kind of yielding and softness in the audience’s bodies? What if, as they softened and let go of prejudice, the passion in our movement transported them to a different place? The car parks itself (thank god); I open the door and bend forward experimenting with a cringing, crinkly softness.
If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc.
