Dead Deer and Pierced Hearts

Change of Plans grew out of an invitation: Platform-K – ‘a dance company for dancers and dance-makers with and without disabilities’ – asked GRIP dancer and choreographer Femke Gyselinck to create a choreography with two of their dancers. After Moving Ballads and Letters 2 Dance, Femke once again opted for a trio. This time she created and dances with Zanne Boon and Oskar Stalpaert. But the trio is in fact a quintet: pianist Hendrik Lasure and saxophonist Adia Vanheerentals perform a live score that interacts with the dance, and conversely. Plans are also constantly being made and adjusted between music and dance.

‘Oskar is down’

‘And Oskar is down’, says Femke, as dancer Oskar Stalpaert executes his phrase on the floor during their duet. ‘I also have Down’, says Oskar. ‘Oh, sorry’, says Femke, ‘I didn’t mean that. I just forget that you have Down syndrome when I dance with you’. ‘I also forget that I have Down syndrome when I dance’, says Oskar, before he continues to dance. 

Firstly, full disclosure: I’m not writing as an outsider, but as the dramaturge of the performance – someone who helps to think things through and structure things. Whether in a choreography or in a text, how you start matters. So why start with this anecdote? Because it strikes me as an illuminating counterpoint to the way the performance itself deals with the notion of disability. (I write ‘disability’ and notice that I delete and replace the word several times).

Indeed, the anecdote raises a question that the performance asks at most silently. In what follows, I want to explore the answer that the performance formulates in dance to the question: what does it mean – or rather, what happens – when you enrol dancers with disabilities in a choreography created and performed by ‘dancers with and without disabilities’ (again, a hesitation: disability, as in ‘a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses or activities’? ‘limited’ in relation to what norm?).

I try to make a dramaturgical negotiation explicit: do you make the otherness of the bodies the subject of the performance, or do you deal with the performers above all as dancers? How do you negotiate between showing the uniqueness of each body and, on the other hand, showing what all those bodies have in common – after all, isn’t a 40-year-old dancer ‘limited’ by her age? How do you deal with the risk of reducing bodies that challenge the norm to that difference? At the same time, how do you handle the risk of erasing that difference, erasing in the process the actual thresholds that dancers with disabilities come up against and the pain that this entails? 

The difficult balancing act outlined here doesn’t only apply to Change of Plans, for that matter. Every attempt within the arts to make people with disabilities visible and to involve them in the ‘mainstream’ has to deal with this issue. What’s more, this is precisely the mission that Platform-K has set itself: to open up doors between previously distinct circuits. That mission aims for a dual emancipation: the dancers (through visibility and artistic ‘agency’ – capacity to act, ownership and control), but also the field itself. And then pre-eminently the dance field which, after all, has traditionally been about training bodies with an explicit or implicit ideal of perfection in mind. 

Choreography as attunement

The casting for Change of Plans happened intuitively. Zanne Boon – a dancer with autism – has a way of moving and performing that fits nicely with how Femke dances: performance as moving in a here-and-now that is as transparent and casual as possible, in which the spectator has the feeling of dancing along through the performer’s gaze, is invited to explore through the dancer’s body what it means to move, to harmonize movements, to attune the body to the space and the other bodies through movement. Steering clear of an emphatic performance of emotions, steering clear also of an obvious aestheticization of movements, in the hope precisely of moving spectators through the pure concentration required for, or resulting from, the act of dancing itself. 

In turn, Zanne’s tall stature and her talent for lengthening movements – and therefore for expanding space – provide an interesting counterpoint to Femke’s more compact stature and movement language. 

Oskar’s way of dancing and thinking forms an interesting counterpoint to this: Oskar dances in a physically explosive way, radiating enormous power and potential energy even at rest. Nor does he shy away from lyricism and expression – every dancer is shaped by his training, and with Oskar the ballet training is still evident. In his own words, he shares with Femke ‘boundless imagination’. 

Every performance always requires a process of attunement. In performances by Femke, that attunement of backgrounds, expectations, ideas about dance, habitual movement patterns, bodies and temperaments always becomes, in part, the performance itself. That attunement is there with dancers who have had regular dance training, and it is there also between Oskar, Zanne and Femke. How that process of attunement happens is itself the object of attunement: it is in part determined by who the dancers are. I deliberately use ‘attunement’ and not ‘agreement’ because the choreographic meeting often benefits precisely from letting difference exist, the quest being how to use the theatricality or musicality of that difference. 

Some dancers need conversation, need conceptual and dramaturgical clarity, need discourse. During Change of Plans, attunement was mainly sought and found in dance. When language was used, it often stayed within the sphere of imagination of the performance. With his powerful energetic style, for instance, Oskar often reverts to dance patterns in which he cleaves the air with a clenched fist or moves his arms as if shooting an arrow with a bow. That type of reference to or representation of violence is something Femke doesn’t like. Every time Oskar used his bow-and-arrow move, Femke said something like ‘another dead deer’ – to which Oskar answered: ‘or a pierced heart’. 

Dance plans and how to change them

The first phase involved mapping the comfort zones in dance, the movement language that felt familiar and effective for each of the dancers. The three dancers then also started to explore the fringes of those comfort zones, to see where the challenges lay, where differences begin in terms of style and the way ‘expressiveness’ is danced. How you move and how you like to move also determines how you think about movement, what you find beautiful. It is through training, among others, that the trained bodies of dancers become the carriers of an aesthetic agenda, which simultaneously feeds and limits what we imagine to be possible. When you bring different embodied ‘aesthetic agendas’ together, at best you get an enlargement of that ‘sphere of imagination’ and it becomes possible for dancers to invite each other to their respective territories and thus to leave their own comfort zone. But this still happens on safe ground, because ‘as a guest’ in the comfort zone of a dancer with who a practice of attunement – and therefore trust – has been built.

Femke’s role as choreographer consisted in conceiving assignments with the dancers – in outlining dance plans – that help each dancer to navigate in and out of their comfort zone. For example, Zanne dances a solo of her letters in which she has to remember her letters in the moment. In doing so, she can draw on her strengths – height, a mastery of her limbs that strongly affects our perception of space – and at the same time, as a viewer, you can read the concentration Zanne has to muster to choose timing and adaptation of her material in the moment itself, giving you the feeling as a viewer that you are dancing along. Zanne also indicated that she does not find eye contact easy. That is why moments were built into the performance when she directs her gaze at the audience as part of her movement material. That challenge is not gratuitous: it yields moments of heightened concentration, of performative intensity that are shared with the spectators in all their vulnerability.

The same lines of concentration are drawn between pianist Hendrik Lasure and saxophonist Adia Vanheerentals. Like the dancers, both have a transparent stage presence, with an almost contagious level of concentration. Because of their position on either side of the stage and the extent to which their soundtrack depends on interplay and decisions made in the moment, they are in permanent conversation with each other through lines of sight that cross the stage. What’s more, the interplay between music and dance is deployed in such a way that the dancers often change the musical plans via physical cues: the dancers as a moving score.

In a key scene of Change of Plans, this delicate negotiation between individuality and collectivity forms the point of departure – the title of the performance becomes the task (dance language for ‘dance assignment’). A dancer conceives and dances a dance plan (often the plan is conceived in dance), the other dancers being tasked with changing that plan’s direction. Not by thwarting or blocking it (that is also part of the task: changing, without blocking), but by making counterproposals while dancing that are so irresistible that the dance plan changes. For example, as a dancer you can suggest other qualities – in response to something fluid you can dance something angular, in response to curved lines you can dance straight lines, in response to verticality (upright dancing) you can suggest horizontality (work on the floor), or you can enlarge the dance plan of the ‘lead’ dancer, the emphasis then shifting to other aspects of the dance plan, as a result of which it can evolve into something else. 

Any definition of choreography is temporary. Here is another: choreography as a series of agreements that dancers make among themselves about how and in what order you dance with each other. This is what Change of Plans is about: about how you make plans and agreements together in dance and what happens when one of those agreements is that you can invite each other to adjust your plans. The essence in this is that this always happens together, with your own and each other’s body as your guiding principle. Conversely, the music works equally well as a score for the dancers. When Zanne slowly steps backwards in silence, Hendrik keeps a close eye on her and starts playing just before she reaches the edge to tell Zanne that she is at the edge of the raised stage (and so to keep her from falling off).

Expressiveness 

The choreographic refrain of the performance is formed by the dancers each dancing their version of the letters in the title. Here you see Femke’s writing – but therefore also the dancers’ writing – almost literally at work. You see how dancers dance together, execute the same plan, but how the individual bodies work as differently calibrated prisms through which ideas, plans, ‘tasks’ are refracted in a body-specific way or how they find an individualized translation. Those specific translations were then attuned to each other according to choreographic principles such as counterpoint – a downward movement and an upward movement – and musical phrasing (different timings, differentiating pauses and dynamic moments in the three letter phrases).

Dancing (the same) letters – an idea at the heart of Letters 2 Dance, Femke’s previous performance – does several things at once. Not only does it show how dancers get ‘on the same page’ – their task is the same –, without losing their own ‘handwriting’. By using typography as a starting point, dancers are also challenged to dance forms that lie outside their embodied vocabulary, and so to deviate from more typically ‘dance-like’ forms of physicality. It yields movement that refers to the formalism of someone like Merce Cunningham, but then danced with a disarming and anti-spectacular, not emphatically expressive everydayness, reminiscent in turn of Yvonne Rainer (Rainer’s 1978 Trio A was one of the films Femke shared with her dancers as a point of reference, alongside Rihanna’s performance at the 2023 Superbowl, choreographed by Parris Goebel). 

Dancing letters also yields something else: it makes the dance phrases flirt with a rhetorical expressiveness which, just before the literal portrayal and representation, moves towards abstraction, or rather towards the concretely physical: knee up, elbow perpendicular to spine. This expressiveness-without-transfer-of-meanings is above all a gesture to the spectator to read, not as the recovery of danced meanings but simply: to watch attentively, and in this way to connect with the dancers.

Limitations and disabilities

There are roughly two conceivable ways of dealing with ‘dancers with disabilities’ in a professional dance performance. The first is based on the premise that Oskar, Femke and Zanne are dancers first and foremost, qualified and well-trained dancers moreover. The second aims precisely to thematize the disability and the difference in order to then deconstruct validist norms. 

There are risks associated with both strategies. For instance, the latter approach risks reducing the dancer with a disability to his or her disability precisely, to a symbol that challenges norms. In that reduction of individual dancer to ‘representative of a community’, you can begin to erase the individuality of the dancer – which thus makes Oskar and Zanne’s dancing not ‘typical’ of their disability, but an expression of who Oskar and Zanne are, beyond their disability.

You could stretch the idea of ‘disability’ to ‘basically everyone limited in some way’ – Femke, a 40-year-old dancer, is being pushed to the limit when she dances the movement patterns that Oskar manages effortlessly. 

But Zanne sees things differently. When someone tells her that ‘she is also a bit autistic’, Zanne comes up against a limitation – in the other, that is – to properly understand that her autism is not the same ‘as liking things to be in order’. For Zanne, invoking autism as a limitation is precisely a way of protecting herself from the expectations of others. Contrary to Oskar, it is actually not apparent from Zanne that she experiences the world differently, that gazes and faces are exhausting, that a conversation always requires constant translation. Other dancers within Platform-K find talking about disabilities a disturbing label, something that reduces them to that point where they deviate from an unspoken norm. Speaking and writing about and for ‘dancers with disabilities’ thus requires a great sense of specificity, of multilingualism and context.

Choreography and freedom

Back to my opening anecdote, about ‘forgetting’ Oskar’s disability. This dramaturgy of ‘forgetting’ the disability also has unwanted side effects. Despite the emancipating intention, this handling of the dancers can also look rather like charity work (mirrored by a forgiving, ‘how charming they are’ gaze from the audience), of paternalism even. Especially in a performance that relies heavily on choreography. After all, choreography often implies a power relation. The choreographer sets out the lines, writes (read: prescribes) the movements, and the dancers dance them. 

So everything depends on how you interpret and make use of ‘choreography’, what the relations of authority and ownership are. 

But choreography – making plans together in advance – can also be liberating. In A Choreographer’s Handbook, dancer-choreographer Jonathan Burrows gives numerous definitions, of which I pick one: ‘Choreography is a way to set up a performance that takes care of some of the responsibility for what happens, enough that the performer is free to perform.’ The definition shows how writing – prescribing movement and use of space, deciding a large number of parameters in advance – can actually provide freedom for performers to dance as well as they can, to be themselves without limits within the very limits of the framework. To dance ‘as well as they can’ does not mean: to strive for an ideal standard, as implied by dance training. Dance training – that is, the disciplining of a body – often implies that a movement can be performed a ‘right’ way. The form par excellence for demonstrating that standard is the dance in unison: all the performers dance the same material, and when things go well, they look exactly the same – bodies brought into line. Femke also experiences dance in unison as something that conveys a somewhat dated pursuit of perfection, validates a physical norm and de-individualizes dancers. But in Change of Plans, Femke and Oskar dance in unison, with material by Oskar, and with Oskar setting the timing. Oskar’s energetic dance style very much challenges Femke to leave her comfort zone as well. So here, dancing together is not used to validate a standard of perfect synchronicity and physicality, but rather to show the ‘together’ in ‘dancing together’ while maintaining individual differences. Virtuosity is not the issue here, although that does not mean that the performers do not work hard to do what the three bodies can do (together) in as nuanced, sensitive and ‘skilful’ a manner as possible. Burrows again: ‘The audience enjoys skill, but anybody doing what they want to do, and doing it well, appears skilful.’ 

The liberating effect of choreography that Burrows mentions does not erase disabilities, but shifts the attention from the dancers to the dance itself. In doing so, Femke’s choreographic approach does not aim for erasure, but takes these dancers seriously as performers by integrating them in a performative tradition and becoming as good as possible at it together. The choreography – the writing of movements – is therefore here also the inscribing in a history. 

Wannes Gyselinck

28 March 2023

Translation: Patrick Lennon