Maggie Bridger: Responding to Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities #6

The Choreography of Rehabilitation: Disability and Race in Balanchine’s Agon

Artist and scholar Maggie Bridger shares her response and questions in the face of Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities #6: The Choreography of Rehabilitation: Disability and Race in Balanchine’s Agon.

So many themes and questions came up for me as I watched this installment of Paramodernities, entitled The Choreography of Rehabilitation: Disability and Race in Balanchine’s Agon and performed by Gerald Casel, Magdalena Jarkowiec, Georgina Kleege, and Mara Mills, with exciting and thought-provoking text by Mills and Kleege. The piece uses Agon to examine Balanchine’s working and personal relationship with Tanaquil LeClercq, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who contracted polio while on tour in Europe. Critically examining the relationship between disability and dance through its use of disability theory and audio description, it poses embodied questions around the ways that dance is, or might be, reframed through the experience of disabled bodies. Though the work introduces several themes ripe for further reflection, I organize my responses here around the three themes that especially caught my attention and imagination; crip time, disability aesthetics, and illness/pandemics.

Crip Time

As I watch and listen, I am thinking of the ways that disabled people experience time differently, or are even thought of as out of time. As having no possible future. In the disability community, we often talk and joke about “crip time.” We often think of this as the ways that disabled bodies move through time and space at a slower pace, either due to bodily realities — the need for more rest, for instance — or because of societal barriers that take more time to navigate. We see this happening toward the end of the work, for instance, when Kleege joins Casel and Jarkowiec. The movement slows and becomes smoother in order to allow Georgina Kleege to track the movement and touch of her fellow dancers.

Feminist disability studies scholar Alison Kafer expands upon this definition of crip time to argue that it is, in fact, “flex time not just expanded but exploded” (27). That is, crip time actively works against a conception of time in which bodies must conform to any predetermined way of being, but instead flexes to make room for bodies that, as I describe above, need to move slowly, but also those that move quickly, shake, twitch, or stop altogether. Crip time understands the precarity of the human body and makes time for those bodies to move as their body and mind dictate.

My experience of dance has often been one of ignoring the pace at which my body moves in order to conform to the pace that dance demands. I have written about how this experience feels deeply connected to what Kafer calls “curative time,” which she proposes as a contrast to crip time (27). Curative time insists that bodies be constantly moving toward cure or some kind of fix. For me, dance can feel (in its most limited iterations) curative in the way that it insists on constant improvement. Curative time is regimented and demands that bodies constantly move toward cure or rehabilitation. There is no future for disabled bodies in curative time, at least not one where they might resist or exist outside of rehabilitation. I understand this critique of curative time as in many ways related to the progress narrative as promised by modernity. It is precisely the failure to adhere to curative time that results in the disabled body being understood as out of time – as having no present or future value as mandated by modernity. Curative time may illuminate not only Balanchine’s aesthetic choices in Agon and his relationship to the modern, but also the way that dance (performance, at least) became an impossibility for LeClercq as soon as it became clear that she would be disabled and in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

Disability Aesthetics

One question that Mills poses in the work continues to puzzle: “Can we understand Agon not as a juxtaposition between two contradictory terms—in this case, disability and virtuosic performance—but instead as a ballet constituted from disability, the two being partners or twins rather than adversaries?” Mills, citing Disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers, discusses disability aesthetics, saying “different bodies require and create new modes of representation.”

I am interested in the tension between naming Agon as emerging from disability and the proclamation of early disability rights activists, whose words are still often invoked by disabled activists and artists today to fight the sort of disability representations that often garner praise for non-disabled people while causing active harm to the disability community, saying, “Nothing about us, without us.” The most common, tangible example of art made about and without us being actors winning awards for playing disabled characters, but this certainly appears in less obvious spaces. In dance, this might be a ballet choreographed around and about mental illness or disabled gestures taken from their original context and used as choreographic tools.

What does it mean to make work through experiences of disability (or, perhaps more accurately, experiences of rehabilitation), without the actual subject of that experience? What does it mean that Balanchine’s choreographic envisioning of this experience involves treating the stand-in for the disabled body largely as a puppet? And what might this tell us about power dynamics in dance and rehabilitation settings alike? I am interested in thinking of disability as expansive and experienced through relationship with others, a concept also proposed by Kafer, but have questions about where the limits of such representation can, should, or may currently exist.

Illness/Pandemics: COVID-19

Of course, as I watched, I could not help but reflect on the connections between the time and circumstances in which Balanchine choreographed Agon and our current times. We are still living through a pandemic, and we do not yet know the full extent of the long-term effects that the illness as well as how the trauma of living through such times will have on the global population. What we know now is that disabled people, Black people, indigenous people and other people of color were inordinately impacted by COVID. They were more likely to contract the disease, and more likely to die from it, either due to what the medical industrial complex frames as “preexisting conditions” or due to medical negligence and systemic barriers to effective care. In addition, one study shows that about one-third of people who survive the disease will have long term symptoms ranging from muscle aches to permanent damage to their organs.

How will we address this worldwide disabling event in dance? Certainly, this is not the first time dance will have had to reckon with the impact of widespread, chronic illness. The HIV epidemic of the 1980s and 90s has left and continues to leave unmistakable traces on the aesthetics and values of the field of dance. But this instance does pose some valuable questions. Will we make dances about illness and rehabilitation, like Balanchine, from the perspective of a non-disabled caregiver? This is certainly a powerful perspective, but not one that by default involves actual disabled people or addresses the potential for disabled bodies themselves to generate movement. What will be the role of rehabilitation in dance moving forward? Mara Mills positions rehabilitation in this piece as an inherently capitalist undertaking, calling it “the means for returning impaired bodies to the workplace.” Will dancers – even the field of dance itself – need to be rehabilitated in order to return to their workplaces? What might that mean for the economic, aesthetic, and political commitments of the field moving forward? Or, using impairment as an analytic, a way of understanding and moving through the world, might we together envision a field that cares for and about disabled dancing bodies? Might the bodily differences brought on by the pandemic “require and create new modes of representation?”

Maggie Bridger (MS) is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. As a sick and disabled dance artist, her research and artistic interests center around disabled bodyminds in dance, with a focus on reimagining pain through the creative process. Maggie is a co-founder of the Inclusive Dance Workshop Series at Access Living, for which she and her project partner received a 2021 Chicago Area Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. She was part of the inaugural cohort of the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA, serves on the committee to organize Chicago's integrated dance concert, CounterBalance, and was one of Synapse Arts' 2021 New Works artists. Most recently, her work has been commissioned by MOMENTA Dance Company, a physically integrated dance company in Oak Park, IL.