Daily Archives: 19 July, 2010

Interview: Ingrid Voorendt, Dance Theatre Director

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Ingrid Voorendt is a choreographer and director as well as the former Artistic Director of Restless Dance Theatre. Restless is an integrated dance company based in Adelaide, Australia, featuring young disabled and abled dancers. Their latest show, Beauty, has just finished its run at the Adelaide Festival Centre. You can visit the Restless Dance website for more.

I spoke to Ingrid about her thoughts on disability and dance, creativity and the nature of beauty.

Please tell our readers about what you do and about Beauty. Can you tell us about your creative process in dreaming up and putting the show together, working with the dancers and those behind the scenes?

Ingrid: It’s a collaborative process, so I come up with questions and tasks to get the dancers creating movement material. I don’t choreograph ‘on’ them, we work together to devise the movement that’s in the show. In Beauty some of the movement came from interpreting the shapes, postures and gestures we found in images of women in classical visual art. The dancers responded to the images, creating movement material. We also developed material through improvisation. My job is to initiate the process and then edit, shape and compose the developing material to create a show, and to work in collaboration with the set and costume designer, sound designer and lighting designer through dialogue and decision making.

Why was it important for you to explore the notion of beauty? What do you think it is, and how to explore it in a world in which disabled people aren’t often thought of as beautiful?

Ingrid: I was interested in exploring the notion of beauty for a range of reasons, one being simply that I’d rebelled against ‘the beautiful’ in a couple of previous Restless shows I’d directed, in terms of content and aesthetic. Beauty was inspired by some of the dancers themselves, in particular Dana Nance, who is a stunning young woman with physical and intellectual impairments. I was interested in the oscillation audience may perceive or experience between Dana’s beauty and her impairment. With Beauty, I wanted to make a work in which the disabled performers would be viewed as beautiful first and foremost. My favourite moment in the show was when Dana stepped into a projection of the Venus de Milo (a classic image of beauty), in which she fits perfectly.

I think beauty is much more than surface, as I believe we all do, but we live in a culture increasingly driven by the visual, by a world of images. It’s true that in our society disabled people aren’t often thought of as beautiful, and I hope Beauty questions this in a subtle way. Beauty is also linked to sexuality, which is also often denied in disabled people.

How do representations of women’s bodies tie in with disability in Beauty?

Ingrid: I found it interesting to discover during our research that (unsurprisingly) many of the poses found in images of women in classical visual art are echoed in contemporary fashion photography and advertising. So in a subtle way in the show we were playing with these images which reference both the past and the present, but disabled women were the ‘bodies’ being looked at, and on their own terms. The opening of the show was a solo by Jianna Georgiou, a gorgeous young woman with Down Syndrome, who is a beautiful, quite voluptuous dancer. I loved watching this solo, because the movement within it is so evocative of classic images of ‘beautiful’ women – and Jianna is very beautiful, and is also a proud disabled woman. I liked the fact that Jianna was representing herself, yet referencing the bodies of others. I hoped that the audience would question their perceptions around who is/whose bodies are beautiful.

Now that the run is over, do you have any thoughts you’d care to share looking back on the experience?

Ingrid: It’s always such a fast and intense process making a show, and there’s so much I’d like to change and develop further. I think Beauty could have gone a lot further and deeper than it did. Hopefully there’ll be a chance to revisit it in the future.

From Sea to Shining Sea: Bad Ass Disabled Vets Refocus Their Military Training

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Military personnel learn to apply their earliest military training to many parts of their lives. From the first moments of boot camp our lives are broken down and that training is ingrained into our very being. We take that training with us long after the uniform hangs unworn in the closet and the neckerchiefs lie in the drawers. Even today, I can write a business email in all acronyms, because it is still the most formal and proper way I know. One time we “tossed racks” because Kid couldn’t find something and insisted it wasn’t in her room. I can fit many t-shirts in a drawer or suitcase, thanks to a certain Chief, who, incidentally was not my division chief, but who seemed to think the sun shone from my arse nonetheless.

For some, it helps to pull us through the unexpected twists that life hands us. I am sure I am not the only person who will endure more pain than is required before complaining because I believe it is expected.

For Marc Esposito, a 26 year-old Air Force Sergeant and member of a special tactics squadron until his humvee hit a roadside bomb, his training helped him focus trough the year of rehab at two separate medical facilities, including the Walter Reed Medical Center, where he re-learned how to walk.

Now he is using that focus — that training — to ride with Sea to Shining Sea, to raise awareness for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation for wounded veterans, and in his own words,”[T]o hopefully show any kind of disabled American you are still capable of doing amazing things […] and hopefully change the perception of what it means to be an athlete.”

Sea to Shining Sea is a group of 17 cyclists, most of them disabled veterans, who started the journey of some 4,000 miles from San Francisco on 22 May, by dipping their wheels in the Pacific Ocean, and plan to end it by dipping their wheels in the Atlantic in Virginia Beach on 24 July. They have averaged about 50 miles a day.

Some people don’t understand that the training doesn’t leave you. It isn’t something you take off, and in some cases, this is a very good thing. The drive it takes to recover, the intensity it takes to stare illness and injury head on, the nerve it takes to accept that your career may be forever ended or changed … all of that comes from the part of you that is broken down and rebuilt ahead of time. All those weeks, months, years ago when you step off the bus and dress to that line for the first time. They rebuild you up, and it becomes a life skill that you use to accept, use, and build upon.

And it allows you to meet any task head on, using whatever you have left.

Sometimes all you have left is enough and you have no other desire but to give it.

Because that is all we know.

We know to take what we have left, and give something back.

Sea to Shining Sea is nothing short of Bad Ass, and I am not doing them justice, because I have struggled over days to write this post. I have wept a little at what these people have done with what they have kept and done. I am so proud of them, and so humbled to know that they, through their hardest, darkest times, have pulled through because of a common link and have spun it around to something positive, and to something healing, and are finding a way to use it to raise a positive message for disabled veterans everywhere.

Thank you to s.e. smith for the link, because ou is always looking out for me.

Recommended Reading for 19 July 2010

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Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest and exploration only. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Hope Is Real: Fibromyalgia Is Not Caused By Men

I remember the invite said that the speaker thinks women have fibromyalgia, because of the stress of men not providing enough for women. This statement offends me to the core and it is just another example of patriarchial bullshit. It is not that I do not think we need each other, we do. People need people in order to survive, but I do not believe that there is one group of people who needs to care for womyn more than another. There are all kinds of communities of people who care for each other. What I take the most offense is it is the language of domination. It is not men who need to take care of womyn, but rather it is people that need to take care of people. I am not interested in someone solely taking care of me, but in being in a relationship where people take care of each other. I am interested in reciprocity

CTV News: Counsellors cite Afghan war for military domestic abuse [trigger warning for descriptions of violence]

“Our anecdotal evidence is that there is an increase in the amount of domestic violence, and in the amount of children who are seeing violence in the home.”

Many military members are now shouldering the residual stress of two, three or four tours in Afghanistan or more, Lubimiv said.

“When a soldier returns home, many have talked about feeling like strangers, not knowing where they fit. And it takes time to close that particular gap. And if there are, on top of that, mental health issues — or if there is already an issue of conflict or discontent in the couple’s relationship — then all of that gets magnified by the new experiences that they each have faced.”

Most troops will work through their issues on their own and gradually reintegrate, Lubimiv said. “But many don’t respond in that way, need additional help or haven’t been identified.”

Wisconsin State Journal: Vets cheer change on PTSD claim

The rule change will have its greatest effect on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans because so many non-combat personnel encounter roadside bombs, and because there are few places not in danger of mortar attacks or suicide bombs.

Even Wisconsin National Guard troops performing administrative jobs in Baghdad’s Green Zone were within range of mortar rounds that insurgents occasionally lobbed in blindly, said Bob Evans, the state Guard’s director of psychological health.

Most of the 3,200 members of the state Guard who had duties as prison guards or support personnel in Iraq last year underwent stress that could lead to PTSD, Evans said.

“I’ve seen people who weren’t even close to the battlefield who came down with PTSD and anxiety disorders,” Evans said.

Anishinaabekwe: We Are a Generation of Healers

We are a generation of healers because we can choose to turn the intergenerational trauma to intergenerational healing. We can start with ourselves and our families. I have been really blessed to have a family that is open and committed to healing. I know many people who have had to completely cut themselves off from their family and do healing on their own. In my healing work I have been able to reflect the inner work I have done on my family. In turn, each individual in my family can reflect the healing that they have done onto each other. I have worked in the Native community and will continue to do so. I can reflect and send the healing I have experienced in myself and in my family into the community. Healing happens in a circle.

Deeply Problematic: Wendy Garland dies after abuse and neglect from family

The death of Wendy Garland is horrific. Her abuse went unnoticed, unchecked because of ableism: societal devaluation of people with disabilities and misplaced trust in abled family members. Garland’s death is a direct result of abuse on the part of her caregivers, the people in her life that some want to canonize and position as her selfless saviors. Parents, partners, siblings and other folks taking care of persons with disabilities can be wonderful, but they are not necessarily helpful: they can hinder, they can neglect, they can abuse, they can hurt, they can kill.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading[@]disabledfeminists[.]com