Never Walked In High Heels

Ever had an opportunity stalk you? The ones that follow along and clip at your heels are never the ones which you are ready to welcome with open arms. And there are the ones which you’re ready to reject as soon as you hear about them. But those that you feel ambivalent about that keep popping up in the most annoying places… such as my inbox.  

It all started a month ago while battling (what else) a flat tire in the centre of London. A former choreographer I worked with was passing by and stopped to make small talk. He asked for my number to give someone at the BBC who was looking for wheelchair dancers. I admit now that I was only half listening as, ironically, I was thinking of how ungraceful I was going to look while limping home with a flat tire. I gave him my card and told him to pass it along to whomever he pleased. 

I didn’t hear another thing about it for three weeks. ‘Must’ve been another thing to come around which wasn’t meant to be’ I thought to myself. There are so many of those when you’re in the arts.

The next day I received four new emails, from four entirely unconnected people mind you, which included a casting call from the BBC. Apparently “Dancing with the Stars” had become such a hit that now the network wanted to do a spin-off about people in wheelchairs. Even though I couldn’t place why, my insides were squirming. The next day, two more emails came, then a note from a producer on my social networking site, then a call from another former teacher of mine, then a Google Ad.

It was utterly counter intuitive. Here I am waiting to break into the world of performance and I wasn’t leaping at this opportunity.  What was wrong with me? This would probably expand my network. I grew up wanting to be a ballerina more that anything in the world. As I was bombarded with it, the less sure I was of anything. Did this mean that I, perhaps, didn’t want to become a performer at all? If I wasn’t excited about this opportunity was this proof that I lacked drive, didn’t have ‘it,’ and was unwilling to run the race for the long haul?  Professional panic was ensuing at full force. 

Here’s the thing. I dislike disability art. I really do. I hate that we live in a world where I get to be defined by what I can’t do, and what I can do seems to fall by the wayside. The fact is, there’s a whole disability culture out there which, I think, seems to separate rather than include. “Disability Art,” “Wheelchair Dance,” what does it mean in these phrases that we put the artist’s weakness first in the title, thereby qualifying it while at the same time lowering our standards. Don’t expect this to be fantastic, it is after all disability art. What if we classified Monet as “that artist who couldn’t see very well?” 

I wasn’t raised to be disabled even though I have been diagnosed since birth. The teachers whom I respected never took the fact that I was in a wheelchair as any sort of excuse. My best friends never think about it. Asking me to fit in with the disability culture is like taking a girl with Japanese heritage out of Greenwich, dropping her into Tokyo, and expecting her to act like a native. It won’t happen, and the expectation is absurd if not prejudicial. 

I have had requests, much like this one, where I could choose to be defined by my disability. And I can never bring myself to take them. I refuse to believe that my weakness, my disability, is the most interesting thing about me. And for someone who is trying to get the world to see past her disability, such opportunities seem more than counter productive. They seem deceptive.