Thoughts on Performance

             On the day of my first featured dance performance I was more nervous than I have ever been.  When I told my mom this she replied, "I didn't think you ever got nervous," and she was right.  I love to perform.  I always have.  Any opportunity I was presented with to get up on stage I'd gladly accept, from the school chorus to band, musicals, puppets, even elected office.  Few highs I've come across in life can hold up to an enraptured audience under the spell of a well-told story.  So when I suddenly found myself overcome with this tangible sense of dread hours before my grand dance debut I couldn't for the life of me understand where it was coming from.  This wasn't like me at all.
              After conceding that sleeping it off wasn't an option I began to think about what made dancing a waltz in front of the dance studio community I'd been a part of for a year so different from any of my other many performances.  With some thought I decided that the pure physicality of dance must have something to do with it.  For all of those other things I listed before, speaking, singing, playing the clarinet, the fact that I use a wheelchair to get around isn't really a factor in my ability to perform.  I'll always remember how upset I was when, in middle school, a school bus driver gave me the advice that I'd have to do very well in class because I wouldn't be able to get just any kind of job like a construction worker like my friends could.  I'd have to use my brains to work around my disability.
              At the time I was hurt that someone would place such limits on me.  I'd watched Sesame Street growing up; I knew that I could be whatever I wanted to be.  This wasn't th e first time my egalitarian ideals would brush against reality, of course, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.  The truth is I was pretty talented in school, in art as well.  Playing clarinet came easily to me, as did telling stories, running for class office, and most anything else I put my mind to.  While I wouldn't think of it this way for some time yet, I had grown like that frank old man said I should: my strengths worked around my physicality.
              It wasn't until high school that I got into wheelchair sports.  With first basketball and then tennis that primal, testosterone-fueled need for aggression was met in a way that being handled with kid gloves in a mainstreamed gym class couldn't equal.  While I didn't work at it as hard as I would have needed to become a truly great player, with my strength, speed, and intelligence I was capable of holding my own comfortably enough.  I was one of the strongest players on my team, the starting point guard.  After attending a premier wheelchair basketball camp at the national level I was able to verbalize why doing well in sports was gratifying on a different level than doing well in school.  I had always been under the impression that the physical realm of things wasn't for me, that my arena was that of learning, of art.  I would work around my disability.  To develop this kind of physical aptitude that was supposedly forbidden to me was defying what everyone else had expected.  That felt good.
              However I wouldn't put dance on the same plane as wheelchair sports.  For one thing I never got more than a rush of adrenaline before a game, no consuming anxiety.  There is a unique element in performing a waltz that separates it from the usual "wheelchair insert-physical-activity-here."  I realized that as much as I enjoy the physicality present in wheelchair basketball it is very much a qualified physicality.  I am not able to sprint as fast, dribble as well, or navigate as nimbly as someone who doesn't need to use a wheelchair.  When the worth of a player is the sum total of his physical ability stacked up against another's I can't compete with someone who doesn't have a disability.  That is where dance is different, for as much as speed and agility and the rest play into dance the bottom line is not one person's ability to physically dominate another but rather one person's ability to emotionally connect to an audience through her body.  This is something that, in theory, anyone can do.
              Yet it's not quite in line with giving a speech or singing a song either.  The relationship I have with my body does not affect either of these skills.  To be a good dancer on the other hand requires nothing less than the most absolute awareness of what I physically can, and in conjunction cannot, do.  Dance demands me to become master of my own body, just as it does anybody else.  Dance also establishes that my body is the only tool I have to communicate to my audience, just the same as anybody else.  I'm not sure if there's another activity that puts someone on a level playing field by making him focus on and embrace what makes him so different in the first pl ace, i.e. my own body.
              The reason I was so nervous that night was because I was aware of all this.  Before I had thought that I was about as comfortable with my body and myself as a 24 year-old could be..  I'm no longer so sure this is the case though, because once the thought entered my mind that my body would be the sole means of expression available to me I panicked.  My only instrument to connect with people would be the same body that is so often used to separate me in the first place.  What they claim makes it immaterial for me to be able to enter the same doors, use the same bathrooms, live in the same buildings, lead the same life; THIS is what I would have to use to inspire them?  These weren't doctors or rehab specialists or people with disabilities of their own.  These were dancers who simply wanted to see dance, no qualifiers necessary.  I was always told that I have to work around my body, what was I trying to pull?  As I said, I was more nervous than I have ever been.
              What are my personal goals for wheelchair dancing?  In many ways I imagine they're not much different than anyone else's: become a better dancer, develop more control over my body and myself, be able to move well when I come across women at a club, and look sexy doing it.  While competition is not a driving focus for me now, I can see how later in my development it could come to help me keep growing and stretching myself.  As for global goals I'd say those are a bit more complicated.  I want "wheelchair dancing" to become a phrase that isn't so far removed from average, everyday life.  I'd like everyone to know that they can dance, and anyone who'd like to learn a syllabus to have those opportunities available.  I would also like for them to be just as likely to pick it up from seeing it in music videos on MTV.  I would like for anyone's pre-dance jitters to be about butterflies and not anything heavier than that.  And of course, I'd like to look sexy while doing it.