AXIS Dance: A Still Point and a Turning Wheel
One pushes, the other pulls; weight is distributed between them. Interdependence is a dance basic that takes on new meaning in the companies performing Remy Charlip’s choreography at Montalvo’s April 4 celebration, A Perfect Day. The partnering of humans and machinery allows both to cover new ground—physical, artistic, and emotional.
To the vocabulary of movement, AXIS Dance Company adds a Sixth Position: torso upright, arms held loosely at the side, legs and feet immobilized in a wheelchair. The sequences that flow from this starting point can be as classically simple—and as emotionally laden—as a reach toward an outstretched hand. Others, daring and formally elegant, expand our notion of the shapes a dance can take. A chair and its occupant, moving as one, flips to a sideways position on the floor, where the dancer—his arms his propulsion and his torso a fulcrum—becomes another wheel.
From its beginning in 1987, AXIS has used a combination of disabled and able-bodied members to explore both the possibilities of and our assumptions about restricted motion. Charlip, whose performances in his later years included ones in which he simply stood on the stage and imagined dancing, is a natural choreographer for the company. In Faces, their opening work at Montalvo, Rodney Bell used only his head, neck, and hands to map a terrain as dramatic as his native New Zealand’s.
Airmail Dances, Charlip’s choreographic invention, provide a series of sketches representing the positions of one or more dancers, which companies then interpret and link in their own way. The process of embodying an idea offers its own revelations. Looking over the sketches for Dance with Three Steps reproduced in Montalvo’s program, the two able bodied dancers in the piece, Shansharee Giles and Janet Das, said with surprise that these looked more like their actual dance than the drawings they’d been following in rehearsals. Using two sets of stairs, Axis’s version of Charlip’s dance placed the women’s meditative almost floating gymnastic explorations of one set next to Bell’s dogged yet sometimes breath-taking chairbound attempts to mount the other. What resulted was a complex dialog between earth and air, desire and actuality, stasis and flight.
The latitude that the Airmail Dances allow individuals came into special focus at the second performance of Dance in a Wing Chair. At Montalvo Alice Sheppard left her wheelchair for a vintage sofa in order to gracefully and humorously embody Charlip’s drawings of a reader taken on a journey, pushed to the edge of her seat—even sent head over heels—by a book. In the audience was Megan Schirle who performed the dance in AXIS’s 2003 production. Physically unable to do the movements as sketched, Schirle’s version had her literally carried away—her limbs moved gently into various positions, her pages turned, by a second dancer acting as her chair.
It was startling, too, to realize that Axis’s final dance Alone Some and Twosome, was the same one Navarrette and Kajiyama had performed earlier. The aggressive push and pull movements, formalized in tango, took on a more disturbing quality when they occurred between Judy Smith in a wheelchair and the free-moving Giles. Gradually the same movements performed both separately and in tandem seemed less about the tug between their visible differences—standing versus sitting, older versus younger—and more about the shifting dynamics, shared weight, and negotiated balance necessary to change any two “I”s into a “We.” At the end, with Giles folded peacefully above Smith, the chair was able to hold them both.
