AXIS dancing with and without wheels: when AXIS dance company was approached about performing during the olympic arts festival in Salt Lake City this month, they were given an option. Did they want to appear during the olympics or the paralympics? For AXIS, a fifteen-year-old Oakland-based company of ten, some of whom have disabilities, this type of question is a subject of ongoing discussion.

"WE WENT BACK AND FORTH ON IT," Judy Smith, AXIS's artistic director, explains. "It was a hard choice because it's very nice for us to be in the mainstream, but we finally went with a date [March 10] during the Paralympics." While it may welcome general audiences, AXIS also has a special commitment to what has been called "the disability culture."

Whether its members like it or not, AXIS straddles two worlds. The question the dancers are asked and also ask of themselves all the time, is this: Is their work about disability? The answer is both yes and no. As political activists, they challenge notions of normalcy and champion social inclusiveness. As artists, they want to be seen and evaluated as dancers first and foremost. While the two aims are not contradictory, the primary perception when seeing a dancer in a wheelchair partnering one standing on her own legs is of the familiar encountering the outsider, and not simply two dancers engaged in a partnership.

It's a dilemma that AXIS has had to live with from the beginning. "I remember our very first performance, in 1988, at the Dance Brigade's `Furious Feet: Festival of Social Change III,'" Smith recalls. "We received a standing ovation, and I wondered: Are they applauding because of our art or because we are in wheelchairs?" Even today, when AXIS has become an established part of San Francisco Bay Area dance and has toured as far away as Siberia, it still happens that backstage after a performance, well-meaning audience members will make a point of complimenting the dancers with disabilities, ignoring their colleagues who are not disabled. A major thrust of the company's work is to eliminate such distinctions.

But AXIS's decision to perform at the Paralympics was also based on practicality. The company's biggest ongoing challenge is finding dancers--more than building infrastructure, meeting financial demands, and creating a repertoire, all issues that are common to most small arts organizations. "Other companies," explains Nicole Richter, AXIS's education director and a former member of CandoCo Dance Company in England, "have dozens if not hundreds of people who apply when there is an ripening. Our pool [of dancers with disability] is limited." A couple of years ago, the crisis was so severe that they thought of throwing in the towel. But with the arrival of Nadia Adame from Spain and Jacques Poulin-Denis from Canada, "the wolf," as Richter puts it, "has been kept from the door."

Still, the ensemble was at a loss when it became clear that longtime company member Uli Schmitz would not be able to perform in Salt Lake City this month. AXIS choreography makes a point of featuring its dancers to the fullest of their individual abilities. Schmitz is a hefty dancer with a strong upper body and atrophied legs. Bill T. Jones had set a prominent part on him for the programmed Fantasy in C Major. Schmitz's abilities are so distinctive that the company even considered replacing him with a dancer without disabilities, "though I knew we would get slammed for that politically," Smith comments. Fortunately, with some adjustments, the slightly built Poulin-Denis was worked into the role.

Searching for dancers, Smith maintains, is more difficult, at least in part, because so few people with a physical disability have been exposed to dance. "We used to take just about anybody," she explains. "But no longer. We look for stage presence and musicality; we look at how they are inside their body--how do they use their chair, how do they relate to it?"

And then, adds Richter, "there is that fiery stuff which makes us want to watch anybody."

AXIS'S SIX DANCERS WITH DISABILITIES (HALF of them survivors of automobile accidents) all had physical training, either in sports or dance, before joining the company. Smith was an equestrian; Megan Schirle was a competitive swimmer and ballroom dancer. Schmitz had been involved in competitive wheelchair sports since his teens; Adame was a flamenco dancer, and Poulin-Denis and AXIS co-founder Bonnie Lewkowicz both had studied a variety of dance idioms before their accidents. Each of the other four dancers also brings a specific dance perspective--Christine Chen is an experienced aerialist (AXIS has a number of aerial works in its repertoire); Stephanie McGlynn studied Authentic Movement (a movement discipline based on responding to internal body impulses); Alisa Rasera, who is also a choreographer, teaches children and is coordinating the AXIS Dance Access/KIDS! program for children with and without disabilities. Richter, a relative latecomer to dance, joined AXIS because she had been so impressed with CandoCo. "It was the most exciting performance I had ever been to," she recalls.

Presenter Jeremy Alliger, former artistic director of the now-defunct Dance Umbrella in Boston, thinks AXIS is one of the most impressive companies working in the country today. "They are not trying to imitate ballet but are pushing movement forms into a new direction," Alliger says. "Instead of thinking in terms of limitations, they are adding to the palette." If he had his way, he says, he would like them to push choreographic limits even further with "crashing, clashing metal and things only they can do."

Alliger gave AXIS its first national exposure during the 1992 Aerial Dance Festival. He was so taken with the possibilities of mixed-ability companies that in 1996 he organized the First International Festival of Wheelchair Dance, which included fourteen companies from around the world. Smith was co-artistic advisor to the 1996 festival and remembers lengthy discussions before and during the event about what this form of dance should be called and whether its performers wanted to be identified with a wheelchair, particularly if they did not use one themselves.

To outsiders such discussions may seem trivial. But for Smith and others in marginalized groups, the right and the ability to define themselves is essential. Companies like AXIS--and there are about a dozen of them in the country--have dealt with the nomenclature issue in several ways. At various times they have described themselves as "mixed ability," "able/disabled," and "disabled/non-disabled." Borrowing their language from civil rights, because they see disability as a civil rights issue, AXIS members call themselves an "integrated" dance company.

Alliger also facilitated the Bill T. Jones commission. The decision to bring in outside choreographers had not come easily. For the first ten years, all choreography had been created in-house. During that time AXIS had established a clear identity, with a solid following within the disability community and growing attention from mainstream audiences. Smith, however, also remembers a sense of stagnation. What AXIS had was good, but by the mid-'90s it was no longer good enough. The company needed to stretch its wings. Bringing in first-rate choreographers might not guarantee first-rate work, but without them it would be impossible.

Besides, "it's fun to bring in people from the outside," Smith explains. "They don't know about disability politics, and they don't care." Eventually the disagreements about artistic direction led to a painful rift, and co-founding director Thais Mazur and some other dancers departed in 1997.

Jones's Fantasy--an intricately structured bravura piece, both lyrical and amusing--was the first of what has become a series of commissions, including works by Sonya Delwaide, Joanna Haigood, Joe Goode, and Stephen Petronio. Not all of them have been equally well received. One longtime supporter of AXIS was upset at Goode's Jane Eyre, a sardonic look at women who love too much. "I have never been so insulted in all my life," she told Smith, who is aware that in striving to professionalize, AXIS may have lost some of its traditional audiences even as it has gained others.

Another piece that will travel to Utah is Petronio's Secret Ponies, a sensually rhythmic quintet about strong women, including a hip-rolling solo for Adame and her rhinestone-encrusted crutch. In the after-performance discussion during the company's San Francisco season in June 2000, Petronio admitted to unease about accepting the commission. "I didn't know whether I could work with them," he said,

It's a reaction that Smith and Richter know only too well, and not only on the part of choreographers. Company class is difficult for AXIS. "We have ten dancers and ten different ideas about what it should be," Richter says, laughing. So AXIS regularly invites outside teachers for master classes. When the teachers express reservations about working with dancers with such mixed abilities, Richter tells them to do what they always do and that the dancers will follow and adapt. The results not only strengthen bodies, but also open the minds of dancers and teachers alike.

SOME OF THE LINGERING RESERVATIONS ABOUT mixed-ability companies--from the public, critics, and presenters--can be traced to lack of exposure. But the experience is not unlike encountering for the first time dances from different racial or ethnic groups. "What people miss all the time is that there is a culture called `disability culture' and that we are part of the multicultural milieu," Smith said in 1998 at a National Performance Network discussion on presenting artists with disabilities. Even now that the AXIS repertoire features works by recognized artists, she says, "presenters don't know what to do with us." The reasons are partly practical. A theater may have complied with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and installed the ramps, elevators, wider aisles, and other features needed by people with disabilities, Smith notes, but it still "may have room for five or six wheelchairs, but not necessarily for thirty or forty." At the 1996 festival, Alliger rented a large hall and built a series of ramps and flexible seating arrangements in order not to segregate wheelchair patrons in one section of the theater. Not every presenter is willing or able to go to such lengths.

But besides logistics, there is also patrons' unwillingness to look at artists whom they might feel sorry for. Dancers with disability--even if they soar--remind us of our own human frailty. And yet that process in itself can be most satisfying. Listen to Jorge Luis Borges, the late Argentine writer who dealt with growing blindness. In his poem The Hourglass, he writes: "Pleasure there is in watching how the sand / Slowly slithers up and makes a slope / Then, just about to fall, piles up again / With an insistence that appears quite human."

That's why Smith can say about AXIS: "We are about disability, and we are not."

Rita Felciano is dance critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and a California critic for Dance Magazine.

AXIS Dance Company
1428 Alice Street, Suite 201
Oakland, CA 94612
510/625-0110
www.axisdance.org

Olympic Arts Festival
801/212-2002
www.saltlake2002.com