Axis Dance Company in The New York Times

From The New York Times:

Axis Dance Company, founded in 1987, currently has seven dancers, four of whom are physically disabled and perform in wheelchairs. The initial impact of this on an audience is vexing. It’s a visual mixed metaphor, and you can’t help feeling, well, sympathy for dancers without legs. Like much that is surprising in art, however, Axis’s work instructs the viewer in how to appreciate it, and the lesson is delivered with cogent force: Sympathy is irrelevant. Forget what isn’t here, and pay attention to what is. Recognize the chairs for what they are and not as substitutes for what they are not.

See that? The lap of a seated dancer is a body part, as exploitable as a shoulder. Or that? A chair on its side, a wheel spinning in the air with a dancer lying across it, rotating slowly and elegantly, a lovely movement impossible without the chair. Or that? As dancers pair off, the partners aren’t simply men or women. Two chaired dancers in a pas de deux, or one in a chair and one on her feet: as if a whole new gender had emerged, these are unfamiliar kinds of flirtation but flirtation absolutely.

“We don’t look at being disabled as an obstacle or a limitation,” said Judith Smith, 49, a company founder who dances in a motorized chair. “We look at the possibilities. There is a potential for movement that is radically expanded from what another dance company would have.”

Next weekend the company, which travels frequently, is presenting its home season at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in Oakland, in a program that includes a new work by the choreographer David Dorfman. One recent afternoon in a studio upstairs from the theater, Mr. Dorfman was putting five company members, two in chairs, through a rigorous rehearsal of the new work, an extended riff on the theme of protection tentatively titled “A Light Shelter for a Storm.” As the choreography unfolded, even in a run-through, the different physical capabilities of the dancers unified into the collaborative message of bodies in motion. The wheelchairs, it was readily clear, are part and parcel of the dancers’ moving bodies, integral as limbs.

This was most evident in the pyrotechnics of Rodney Bell, 39, who, paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle accident when he was 19, became a dancer after several years of playing wheelchair basketball. His use of the chair makes that athleticism clear. In any given sequence he may rise up on his back wheels, rearing like a bronco and spinning in a tight, furious circle, a wheelchair pirouette; or tilt forward to balance on the tiny front wheels as if en pointe; or spill the chair sideways and overboard, balancing on one rim with a hand on the floor. He’ll even pull the chair over on top of him and climb back into it.

Mr. Bell, who is Maori from New Zealand, said he began developing his chair acrobatics in the hospital shortly after he was injured, when a nurse punished him for being difficult by “putting me in the hallway upside down.”

If the other chair dancers are not as virtuosic, they are musical and fluid, moving on wheels in syncopated or even hip-hop rhythms and performing waist-up choreography within their chairs, appearing as bodies fully in motion.

“It’s not so much a thing as a real body part,” Alice Sheppard, 40, said of her chair. “It’s not like dancing with a chair,” she said. “It’s like dancing.”

Ms. Sheppard, born in Britain, is a former professor of medieval studies who has a disorder that causes involuntary muscle movements. She joined Axis three years ago after she attended classes offered by the company and became enthralled by the art of movement. Asked if she took to dancing because it helped her physically, she said no.

“It was an artistic choice, not a therapeutic one,” she said.

Sonsherée Giles, who dances without a chair, was asked what it’s like to perform with someone in one. It’s second nature, she said. “I don’t really think about it anymore,” she added. “When I first joined the company, I was more aware of the chairs. Mostly you think about your toes.”

Another company member, Janet Das, said the ability to create ensemble work with disabled dancers was a talent, a gift that some have more than others. The hardware, she said, takes some getting used to, but she likened it to learning to work with the floor, another unyielding barrier that is nonetheless, at times, a foil.

“It’s not without trial and error, and we do have accidents,” she said.

Mr. Dorfman, who had never before worked with a physically integrated company, as Axis prefers to be known, said the ensemble appealed to his aesthetic.

“I love virtuosity,” he said. “But dance is about humanity, too; it’s a mix. And with this company you have a whole new range of those things to explore.”

He paused and addressed the new work.

“On a soulful level I see them all as the same folks, but on a body level they work differently,” he said. “This piece is not about that, but it’s not not about that.”

As if on cue, the company began a run-through of a segment of “Light Shelter.” Mr. Bell, in a wheelchair meander across the floor, called to Ms. Giles: “Hey, you want to go for a walk? You can walk, and I can roll. ’Cause you can’t roll.”

“I can roll,” Ms. Giles replied insouciantly — and proceeded to cross the stage in slow somersaults.