(gentle music)
I love performing because it's a way to share
ultimately who you are, a perspective you have.
The building of a dance is extraordinary
and so different every time.
When I'm creating my own work,
it's the way in which I'm trying to find that phrase
that would communicate that idea that I'm thinking about.
I feel many things when I dance.
I often feel limitless.
I often feel abandoned, not in the sense of I am,
someone has abandoned me, but I feel abandonment.
I feel like I can release a lot of things.
Other disabled artists have different practices
when it comes to diagnosis.
That term itself has wild connotations
for the way in which I can understand movement
and understand spatiality.
I was three months old when I was diagnosed,
and for at least, like, 20 years,
it was taught to me to be erased.
So I am doing this revisionist history thing
by including it.
Well, you're catching me at 10 years into a dance career.
I was 20 when I started dancing,
and largely a maverick
from the rest of my disability community
or the disability community.
There was a way in which I didn't even think
that my own body would exhibit the rigor
that I was endeavoring to exhibit.
Now that I'm like 30, closer to injury, (laughing)
you know, I find myself really dipping
into a typical version of a dancer.
I find similar stories of body awareness,
of moving into one's body.
My time in this industry has lent itself
for me to experience it typically and atypically.
The euphemisms of differently-abled,
or I don't know, handicapped, obviously, which is defunct,
but other euphemisms are said
because that person thinks that disability is a dirty word
or somehow negates a agency
from the body.
The term disabled, it's not a dirty word.
It has never been a dirty word to me.
There's wild, fantastic examples and legacies
of product that has come from a disabled body,
from a disabled body mind.
How I reckon with this like accelerated inclusion
that I'm experiencing with some grace,
because at the end of it and at the core of it,
I do know that
At least to some extent,
I'm really encouraged by its authenticity.
I'm really encouraged by like,
oh, someone had the imagination
to think of me in this space,
and so that really allows me to dream with them.
Ultimately, what I get most pleasure out of from dance
is that it is not a typical nine to five.
I revel in the ways in which my life
is not set in a box.
There are so many ways in which I flow
through a different plane as it comes to productivity
that I absolutely love and want to continue
until these brittle bones (chuckling) turn into dust.
(laughing) Ain't brittle now, ain't brittle now.