Choreographer designs dance for people with disabilities

From The Miami Herald. In the picture, Enid Harum-Alvarez and Marjorie Burnett perform.

Choreographer Karen Peterson has been making pieces for disabled dancers, people whose ability to move has been changed by muscular dystrophy or other ailments, for 20 years. But when she met visual and video artist Maria Lino, Peterson discovered a collaborator who brought a new vision into her dancemaking -- insight that stemmed from the many years Lino lived with her quadriplegic brother, who had cerebral palsy.

``My brother was very much part of my family,`` Lino says. ``He was never institutionalized. I learned a certain level of compassion that I don't think I would have if he had not been part of my life. You really appreciate how life wants to survive, regardless. His mind was clear, the problem was motor. We had to do everything for him. But it was really a joy to be with him. He had these health problems but he loved joking and talking.''

Lino found her brother, who died 12 years ago at age 41, physically beautiful, and she frequently drew and photographed him. She was particularly fascinated by his delicate hands, finding ability and grace in their frozen, twisted positions. ``His hands were completely bent in, he could not open them completely,'' Lino says. ``That's something we cannot do.''

When Lino met Peterson at an artists' workshop two years ago, the choreographer's dances brought back powerful memories of her brother. And Peterson was compelled by Lino's drawings of her brother and sensitivity to the expressive possibilities in people most see as limited.

``We had a commonality -- my work with disabled dancers and my interest in the beauty of her brother who was severely disabled,'' Peterson says. ``Maria and I started to look at how do you look at the intimacy of two dancers, one disabled, one not, the connection of skin and bone.''

The result was Mano a Mano (Hand to Hand), which Karen Peterson and Dancers will perform Saturday at the Byron Carlyle Theater in Miami Beach. Also on the program is Future Memories, which uses Peterson's home videos to evoke the passage of time, a phenomenon brought home to her when her two sons recently left for college.

Mano a Mano starts with a literal dance of hands. Four dancers sit around a table as Lino videotapes their twining hands, in close-up and overhead, so that the audience sees details and angles in a way that would be impossible just looking from the theater seats.

Mano a Mano frequently shows multiple images -- dancers onstage, their shadows on the screen, and live or recorded video of the dance from various angles -- a metaphor for the different ways one can look at bodies and their abilities and the images they create, an underlying theme in Peterson's work.

In a duet with Marjorie Burnett, a longtime performer with Peterson's troupe who is severely disabled, and Enid Harum-Alvarez, Lino moves in close with her camera to capture the peculiar connection between these two very different dancers.

``She was able to zoom in on incredibly sensitive, intimate moments that you would not necessarily see [from] the back of the theater,'' Peterson says. ``So it was her eye, her sensitivity to disability that was able to capture something I'd been working on for 20 years.''

For Lino, the piece brought back memories of how her mother and grandmother cared for her brother, carrying and bathing him, a particularly close relationship she captured in a series of drawings.

``You see [Harum-Alvarez] carrying another grown human being on her back, and at that point it doesn't look like Marjorie has cerebral palsy at all,'' Lino says. ``They seem equal in strength, Marjorie to hold on and Enid to carry her. And I just thought in general as human beings we help to carry each other along the way. Especially two women -- we think women are weaker, but they are not, because we have to put up with so much. So that piece shows the strength of how we carry each other regardless of each other's physical condition.''