From the intro to a story in The Kansas City Star:
For JoAnne Fluke (pictured right), it is all about the freedom … the movement … the feeling. Oh, the feeling of ballroom dancing in a wheelchair.
The cha-cha. The salsa. The “downright sexy rumba,” she said. Then there is the Viennese waltz.
“It makes me feel beautiful, elegant, like a lady,” Fluke said.
Ebullient and auburn-haired, the Ottawa, Kan., resident was born with a condition called caudal regression. Her legs, with no feeling, are tiny, the size of baby legs, webbed at the knees and all but nothing. They lie tucked beneath her so that when seated, her body looks like half a body, a torso in a chair.
But on the dance floor, when she hears the swell of the waltz, she’s transported — lifted into the air by her teacher and able-bodied partner, Chris Pruitt, and swept into his arms. They dance face to face, body to body. Fluke’s right arm extends straight. Her back arches in elegant repose. Her head tilts regally.
“I don’t see my disability when I’m dancing,” Fluke said. “I see me.”
At 32, Fluke is spirited, bold, a former Miss Wheelchair Kansas, who from middle school through college at Baker University never shied away from the spotlight or had a single qualm about lowering herself from her chair to dance on her hands.
Loath to allow her disability to limit her, she tried out for the ABC program “The Bachelor” in 2002 when its producers rolled through Kansas City.
“You’re talking to a girl who, when she was 4 or 5 years old, wanted to be the first disabled Little Orphan Annie on Broadway,” she said.
Still, the idea that she would help create what, in the last 17 months, has become a small yet growing group of wheelchair ballroom dancers in Kansas City never occurred to her.
But it’s happened nonetheless.
In the last year, Pruitt, Fluke and others formed a nonprofit alternative dance organization called Groovability (as opposed to “disability”).
“I didn’t want to be the only one to have this opportunity,” Fluke said. “It’s too wonderful.”
