If I had been told twenty years ago that I would have given a keynote speech at a dance conference about dance, I would not have believed it. I would have found it even more far-fetched to think that I could have a film-dance piece included in a national touring exhibition - which I have with 'Fight', currently touring as part of the Adorn, Equip exhibition. I would not have believed it, because it goes against everything that I was taught to believe about dance when I was growing up and attending dance classes.
Dance, as I learned it, was about striving to make your body and its movements as close to an ideal as possible. This ideal was, of course, something that every dancer fell short of. But if you got close enough, you could go ahead and become a dancer, and if not, you failed.
Like many dancers, I started learning to dance when I was three years old, at classes in the local community hall. Later I studied ballet, modern and tap dancing at a variety of local classes, and when I was in my early teens I moved to a more professional school a few miles away. Many of the students there went into full-time training at the age of 16, and I had great hopes of joining them. However, I always had physical difficulties: my health was 'poor', and I was very short-sighted, which was compounded by the fact that we were not encouraged to wear glasses in class, perhaps because they were visible signs that we were not 'ideal'.
I stopped attending the school at the age of 16, when my spinal curvature had developed and my spine had become too stiff to achieve the required positions for ballet and modern dancing. In a way this was my own decision, because I was encouraged to stay and train to teach. However, I knew that I still wanted to do my own creative work, and the many downsides of life in a dancing school had already become apparent to me.
Perhaps if the effect of my spinal condition on my dancing had been explained to me I would not have seen this as a personal artistic failure, but as it was, I felt that I had been mistaken in thinking I would ever be 'good' enough to dance professionally. This had a profound effect on my self-confidence, which had not been high to begin with, and when I later failed my Art A level, I turned instead to writing and to film, leaving everything to do with dance, music and painting, as I thought, behind me.
To some extent, though, I was always aware of how my dance training had shaped my psyche. For example, when people asked me how I managed to find the self-discipline to work as a freelance artist, I replied that it was my ballet training. However, I thought no more about it than that. I never considered, for example, that my habit of wearing baggy clothing had anything to do with my feelings of failure around dancing. Nor did I think about why I concentrated on areas of creative work where I was always in some way behind the scenes, feeling unfit to come out into view.
It was only at the end of 1996, when I had been disabled for six years, that I thought again about the extent to which I was indeed still a dancer. I was prescribed a spinal brace to wear for six months to begin with and then as and when I needed it, and this unlikely event turned out to be the starting point for my journey back to dancing.
One effect of being prescribed the brace was to render all of my previous baggy clothing unwearable, since it was still not baggy enough to fit over the brace. The first decision I had to make was whether to buy even baggier clothing and wear it over the brace, so hiding my body shape completely, or whether to buy tight clothing, which would expose the brace and reveal my body in its entirety.
I decided on the latter course of action, which was also the starting point for a piece of work called 'My Not-So-Secret Life as a Cyborg', which has since become internationally known. 'My Not-So-Secret Life as a Cyborg' is a website which describes how I decided to decorate the brace, and then to explore social constructions of disability by 'doing disability' as performance art.(1)
Although I had stopped dancing completely by the age of nineteen, in the early 1990s I had begun to learn Tai Chi, initially as part of an effort to find a 'cure' for my spinal problems.
I was never fit enough to practice more than sporadically, but I enjoyed it, when I was first fitted with the brace, I began a new class at Falmouth College of Arts, where I was teaching whilst finishing my PhD. What I found was that wearing the brace made me much more able to cope with the demands of Tai Chi, because it protected my spine and prevented me from making movements which aggravated my condition. So while the brace inevitably restricted my range of movements, at the same time it extended my overall mobility considerably.
Looking at my body in its tight black clothing and practising Tai Chi made me acknowledge that dancing still made up more of my personality than being self disciplined enough to work on my own. Around the same time I met Petra Kuppers, a disabled dancer and choreographer who introduced me to the concept of disability dance.
I remember having a very vivid dream about taking part in a disabled dancing class, which may or may not have been inspired by Petra and/or by catching something in the media about Candoco. However, I still had no real thoughts about taking part in disability dance, although I was keen to find out more. It was only in 1999, when I had finished my PhD and was beginning to practise as a professional artist, that I decided I would like to develop my doing disability as performance art work and produce a movement piece with a non-disabled dancer.
Perhaps I should explain at this point that I do not really believe in the concepts of disabled and non-disabled bodies outside of a social model of disability. Every body is a unique mixture of strengths and weaknesses - emotional, physical and intellectual - and these vary over time. There is no such thing as the ideal body: we are all imperfect: or, to put it another way, we are all perfect. However, for this very reason I was interested in working with a dancer who was defined as non-disabled.
I started work on the movement piece in July 1999, doing a day's improvisation work with a performance artist called Helen Paris, directed by Petra Kuppers. Following this, I was overwhelmed by all of the unresolved feelings about my dancing ability and my body that had been hanging around, unrecognised, since my teens. In order to continue with the project I finally had to deal with these feelings, although I still felt uncomfortable about believing that I could really produce a movement piece (at this stage I was still careful not to refer to it as dance).
Then, in September 1999, I went to Finland to take part in a disability arts week at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. I was very surprised - and embarrassed - when I began to be questioned about how I coped with no longer being able to dance. Initially I thought that there was a misunderstanding with the translation of my biography, since although I had said I had originally trained as a dancer, to my mind I had never actually been a dancer. However, it seemed to be more that people perceived - recognised - me as a dancer from the way in which I presented myself.
I had been in demand as a photographers' model (another surprising development for me since getting the brace) and upon my return to London I was contacted by a photographer called Ashley, who wanted to produce a series of portraits around my memories of dance training for a college project. Very revealingly, I discovered that I still had all of my old dance clothes and shoes in my attic, and I found the resulting photo session very cathartic. Ashley then produced a triptych called Dancing With Darkness. (2) It is possible, though, that I would not have gone any further on this journey if it was not for London Arts. In April 2000 I became very ill, and my movement had never been more restricted. I could not see or hear properly, which meant that I lost my balance very easily. I had neurological problems, which meant that I became very easily confused. My poor health, together with the effects of this on my spinal impairment, meant that I had difficulty in even getting from the front door to a taxi to attend regular hospital appointments.
However, in August 2000 I received funding from the London Arts' Combined Arts Fund to research and develop my movement piece 'Fight', as a result of an application that I had put in before I was ill, and obviously I had no intention of returning the money! Also, while, from a personal point of view, the continuing effects of my illness on my mobility made it a poignant and challenging time for me to produce a movement piece, from an artistic point of view the timing was perfect. Helen Paris is normally based in Paris so, in terms of the movement, in the late autumn I began working with a dancer and movement analyst called Layla Smith. Layla and I spent about a week working together in all, and this culminated in another day's improvisation directed by Petra Kuppers, which we recorded on video.
The reason that we used video was not simply to document the work, but also because I knew that I could not produce work for a live audience, since I could never guarantee that I would be fit enough to perform. So, as I'm also very interested in film making, I decided instead to choreograph for the camera.
Alongside this work in dance, I returned to music-making for the first time since I had 'failed' to become a dancer. The grant from London Arts allowed me to buy a mini-disc recorder, keyboard and software, and I began composition and sound engineering workshops at the Drake Music Project in South East London, which trains disabled people to use music technology. I later produced the sound track for 'Fight' with the help of the Drake tutors, and am continuing to attend regular workshops there with the aim of taking my music further.
Anyway, once the research and development stage was completed, I began to talk to Mark Prest, the crafts curator of Leicester City Gallery, about completing the work for inclusion in his forthcoming exhibition 'Adorn, Equip'. 'Adorn, Equip' is a touring exhibition, which brought together disabled people with artists and makers to create a 'couture' show of decorated and personalised disability aids and equipment.
'My Not-So-Secret Life as a Cyborg' was included in the Adorn Equip work-in-progress exhibition in 1999, and Mark had been keen for a long time to commission sculptor Andrew Logan to decorate a new brace for me for the main exhibition. Mark was also keen to include my movement piece - partly because it would show me wearing the new brace, and partly because he wanted to include some conceptual and fine art pieces within the exhibition.
'Fight' was eventually shot in August 2001, with the support of London Disability Arts Forum. Because the budget was very limited, it had to be shot in one day rather than the two or more that were needed, and I was also unable to afford to produce it to broadcast-quality standard, so technically it is not quite at the standard that I would have liked. However, as is so often with these things, I think the restrictions that the budget placed on the production also gave it an edge that it would not otherwise have had. In particular, the pressure that Layla and I were under to complete the piece before we were thrown out of the theatre meant that the tension in the piece was real rather than acted!
Moving on to a more focussed discussion about artistic vision and aesthetics the conventional aesthetics of professional dance have always involved beautiful, 'ideal' bodies performing an extreme range of movement with extreme athleticism, and within this there is of course no place for disabled dancers.
The founders of Candoco challenged this, discarding the ideal and showing that all bodies can be beautiful and that people can move and be athletic in different ways to the norm, often including disability aids as an extension of the body. However, within this vision there was also no place for dancers like myself, whose health and fitness cannot allow us to participate in this way.
So, can people like me still produce professional dance? People whose range of movement differs widely from day to day, and people who can never practise regularly because their condition does not allow it. Somewhat to my amazement, yes, I now believe that we can. First, because dancing is characterised by infinite variety, and there is a place within it for all forms.
A good analogy is painting. A painting can be highly detailed, or totally minimal. It can incorporate a wide range of colours, or be monochrome. It can be very realistic, or highly abstract. It can require a high range of technical skills to produce, or very few. Yet all of these forms are recognised as being valid.
When I tried to define the aesthetics of a professional dance piece, I thought about the concept and ideas that underpin it, the spectacle it creates - whether live or onscreen - the quality of the movement, its execution, and the emotional responses that it produces from its audience. Of course, athleticism may be central to a piece, but then again, it may be totally irrelevant. Likewise, range of movement may be important, but then again it may not be. Whereas I think that the other things I have described are always crucial to whether a piece works aesthetically or does not.
So, where do we go from here? Candoco's vision has developed, and when I participated in a workshop last autumn that was organised jointly by Candoco and the Drake Music Project, I realised that 'Fight' would not be my only professional dance piece, but my first. If someone had told me 20 years ago, that my dance career would be beginning when I was disabled and rapidly approaching 40, I would have assumed that the Martians had landed.
But in other ways, nothing has changed. My eldest niece, who is nearly nine, is now training as a dancer in virtually the same way that I did - in some cases even with the same teachers as I did - and is loving it as much as I did. But I am very sad that the vision of success that is being offered to her - ballet dancing as the pinnacle of success, but a more likely future in shows or on television - is as restricted as the one that was offered to me. I have no idea whether the same can be said of children who study other forms of dance, such as Irish or Indian dancing, but I suspect that the same insistence on conforming to a narrow creative ideal still applies, whether or not there is any thought of them dancing professionally when they are older.
So why, when contemporary dance has changed so completely, are we only offering aspiring professional dancers visions of traditional musicals and Top of the Pops? Why, when community dance has come such a long way, do those same children and teenagers cease to dance completely if, for whatever reason, they stop attending traditional dance classes, and are left either with no confidence in their ability to dance at all, and/or no respect for community dance? Why is it still only a minority of dancing schools who take disabled pupils? And why do so few disabled children and young people - never mind the nearly forty year olds! - believe that dance is something which includes them? Because, ultimately dance is about energy, about a celebration of life. When I was at my weakest during my illness, I sometimes found myself moved, almost automatically, to get out of bed and dance besides it, sometimes with music, and sometimes without. I nearly died, but I came back dancing, and perhaps I came back by dancing. And when we can convey that life energy to others through our performance - whether in community dance or professional practice - that above all, is a test of vision and aesthetics.
To find out more about My Not-So Secret life as a Cyborg and Dancing with Darkness visit www.ju90.co.uk