MERRY LYNN MORRIS: There's something very
freeing about basically having thoughts and ideas
and human experiences that you can
express through the physicality of your body.
Freedom of expression, creating new movement possibilities,
you know, that's what we're always
sort of exploring in dance.
My creativity has always blossomed
when I begin to work with physical objects
outside the body.
It's something about the relationship
between the human person and the objects outside
of that human body, especially working, obviously,
with disability.
My name is Merry Lynn Morris, and I'm
the Assistant Director of the dance program at the University
of South Florida.
You know, there's a tendency, with disability,
for folks to think of the tragedy or the challenge.
And that's not where the emphasis should be.
But to also recognize that there's
a lot of innovative potential and there's
a lot of opportunity.
From a personal experience, my dad
had a disability-- pretty severe disability.
He had a brain injury.
And so that kind of brought me into more the world
of disability.
So then that experience has been layered
with my work in the art world.
In 2001, I started working with dancers,
with and without disabilities, integrated.
That's when I really started thinking of the wheelchair
as a creative instrument, because the individuals I
was working with had a lot of upper body mobility,
and yet they were using manual wheelchair propulsion
or they were using the joystick controlled wheelchair.
So it's been kind of a long evolution.
Started with exploring seat adaptations on segways.
Then later evolutions, as I worked
with some other collaborators, moved into different places.
And I began to figure out for myself
what the aesthetic of what I was trying to create was and why.
I wanted the emphasis to be on the person and their movement.
And you know, a little different,
a little unusual than your eye would typically
identify as a wheelchair.
My chair is different in two particular ways.
One is the omnidirectionality.
So the chair moves forward, backward,
side, and diagonal directions, and it rotates and turns.
The other thing is that the seat actually rotates independently
from the base.
So that's helpful for accessibility,
if we're talking about daily living.
But also from dance, again, being
able to actually spin the seat.
It does have height change.
And that, again, allows the individual to be at eye level,
or in terms of dancing, allows more change in the verticality.
The other significant difference is the actual control system.
So rather than it just being a joystick that's
attached to the chair, my control system
is a mobile control.
So it's controlled through the smartphone,
and so it can be held by the person in the chair,
it can be worn by the person in the chair.
So if you wear it, when you lean forward,
the chair moves forward.
If you lean back, the chair moves back.
If you lean to the side, the chair will move to the side.
If you rotate this way, the chair will rotate.
And the degree of the movement-- how far forward
or how far back you lean or turn or twist can all be programmed.
The interesting thing though about this controller,
which makes it just very different as offering
another kind of possibility, is that you
can have someone that's not physically engaged, not
actually touching the person, and they can yet
be still controlling the chair through their movements,
potentially-- their own movements.
They could be dancing over here and controlling
the movement of the person over here at a distance.
There's this kind of empathy.
There's an empathetic connection there.
And so in some ways, it kind of embodies this idea
that even though we're apart, we're
actually still really affecting each other.
I'm in dance.
I'm a dancer, and I'm a dance creator.
So the chair, I hope to use it in a dance context.
But I also have always kind of had my eye
on the pedestrian aspect too, the sort of daily life aspect
as well.
So in the manual chair, you can't really
talk to someone who's behind you.
So in the case of my chair, wouldn't
necessarily, for instance, have to be behind the chair,
pushing.
People want to hold hands or connect physically a little bit
with their bodies.
You can connect hand-to-hand and simply walk together.
So the chair is, therefore, sort of a blend
of the aesthetic, creative, and this kind of more functional
daily life aspect as well.
I think that if it's more conducive for people
to come together, to physically connect,
and if it encourages that in some way--
and certainly to dance together--
that it heightens emotional connectivity,
that's very exciting.
I mean, that's very joyful.
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