This work is a clip of one of our recent videos “A Provocation on Wheels I.” This work is intended to explore the variety of ways that wheelchair users relate to their chairs, and the world around them through their wheelchairs, both as individuals and community members. This except focuses on the first movement of the piece which is intended to capture the getting to know you phase when wheelchair users first get their chairs. Exploring them from a state of open curiosity and exploration about how this new arrival in their life can fit into it in such an intimate fashion. The tone of the work is explorational, and curious. Exploring all the ways that one can come to know a wheelchair without exploring that relationship through a conventional manner of sitting in the wheelchair.
Jen & Shay – A Provocation on Wheels 1
Descriptions
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Jen & Shay
The audio description for this piece is embedded in the video. If a transcription is desired, please let us know and we can provide this to the group as well.
Hi Jen and Shay,
I wanted to share the ways in which I think “A provocation on wheels” contributes to our understandings of the body. Firstly, I see this dance as double duets. I find myself thinking that bodies are both flesh and steel. The chair, studied, explored, not as a chair, but as an extension of the body. Not a singular body with a prosthetic extension, but more like a relationship between a person and a home, that can be turned, balanced, spun. Gentle, fluid, moving architectures. And then, between the two of you, there is another duet: each with your chair, and through the near simultaneity of your actions, the body is not singular, but twinned. To me, you are joined together through temporal, energetic and spatial agreements in relationship to each of your chairs. You remind me that a “body” is always in a relationship. As Rosemarie said, between flesh and world.
Jen and Shay, Since there was audio description in the video, I listened to that first and then felt affirmed when I read the written statement about how this movement of the piece narrates a “getting to know you” phase between the two bodies and the two chairs. The pace of the video felt tentative and exploratory, and the movements described were experimental. The two dancers were trying out and trying on the chairs, testing the different ways they fit their bodies. I’m also struck by the element that it is a duet. The dancers are performing the same choreography simultaneously, though I gather that the video does not show them dancing together until the very end. To me this suggests a bond between the two dancers which is perhaps only revealed after the fact.
As I ask what is the body, I also ask about the distinctions between the prepositions with and in. I am responding to everyone’s contributions to the site in order from top to bottom of the page. As I move down the site, the more present the question about bodies and wheelchairs becomes. Of course, that’s an artifact of presentation, but it is something in me that I am noticing. Prepositions place us in relationship to things: place, space, and time. And I am primed to notice prepositions because they stand out to me in your title And also in the preceding (frontloading) or a description which asks me to notice how the video editing-as opposed to watching the performance in person-becomes an expression of the preposition itself. I feel very drawn to the inquiry that is happening in this investigation of flesh body and chair body-I ask myself of the nature of the relationship that is being created here. Can I look for power dynamics in the relationship between body and chair? I am looking at the questions of sweetness and softness and control. And I wonder about the relationship (which will probably come in a section of the work that I am not seeing) being created between Jen and Shay as performers. Is this a duet or a quartet, and how did these connections play out? When I think about the intimacy of body and chair I bring with me a finding of interdependence and care, so When I respond to this work I find myself asking about the life of a wheelchair as some thing other than a thing that lives in service or entirely in relationship to its user. (Actually, even that word user begins to ring as problematic …) Is there a way in which the examination of chair feeling and chair architecture and flesh architecture lead us into productive understandings of this provocation? I think about the chosen site and wonder about the open concrete as surface and as background it kind of unyielding that is in sharp contrast to the yielding of the bodies. I wonder about this space that suggests urban life as opposed To say a park which might suggest a more active relationship with nature and in this exploration of the implied city I begin to ask about the conceptualization of body and city architecture.
The aesthetic feel of this dance conveys clearly the phrase “open curiosity” in the description of the dance. I don’t know how to analyze this through the skill of close reading that I transfer from my work as a literary scholar to the dance, but I feel strongly the presence of “open curiosity.” That seems like an important accomplishment in aligning language and movement in our aim to make multiple formats of our/your work.
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