Manifesting DanceAbility
Interview with ALITO ALESSI
by Carol Horwitz

DANCEABILITY is a workshop for physically disabled (including visually and hearing impaired) and non-disabled people who want to explore personal movement language as artistic expression. The movement workshops are rooted in Contact Improvisation, a dance form based on two or more people moving together, sharing weight and balancing by following a point of contact that flows between them. A spontaneous dance emerges as people with a diverse range of movement capabilities discover a common ground for self-expression. The workshops are taught by a staff of movement artists, some who are disabled and some who are not.
The DanceAbility Project was founded in 1987 by Alito Alessi and Karen Nelson, artistic directors of Joint Forces Dance Company. Since 1989, Alessi has been the sole director and the project has continued to grow, with annual workshops and performances in Eugene, Oregon, and programs in many other countries including Greece, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Argentina and Brazil. DanceAbility Workshop facilitators, performers and staff have included Emery Blackwel, Steve Paxton, Bonnie Dunn, Carolyn Stuart, Karen Daly, Libby Witzel, Tom Giebink, and others.
This interview was conducted with DanceAbility Project director, Alito Alessi, following the DanceAbility Workshop held in Eugene, Oregon in March of 1997. I asked Alito to speak about the workshop specifically, his experiences conducting DanceAbility workshops throughout the world, and his philosophy about dance and movement. He generously shared with me his thoughts and feelings.

Special thanks to Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, for funding this research project. [C. H.]
Eugene, Oregon, March 3, 1997
Waking the Intuition; Working with People with Severe Physical Disabilities
(Pete and Nellie were limited in their movement options. Neither could communicate verbally. Pete is an adult, Nellie,a 13 year-old.)

Alito Alessi: When working with Nellie, the goal is to find an element of communication that is happening and then follow her into that way and let her lead into some kind of dancing, some kind of relationship, some kind of communication. The goal is not one of understanding. You really need to wake up your intuition. You have to be in the sensory awareness of that. You have to meet her. With her, there are not so many decisions as there is just going for a bit of an exploration. Later you can somehow figure out some of the explanations and how you can use them as tools.
With Nellie, I just let that thing take over where I would just not know, and I involved her and explored. What is communicating? I don't think you always have to know. Some thing was happening. Telepathy is not too far-fetched. Sometimes when you can't really "find" the person, I'm wondering if they can access your intuition and give you information. You think you are being creative, but really they've just "told" you what to do to find them. I believe in that process. If I listen enough, between the two of us an idea will arise. I don't have to say that it's my idea. Information will arise between any two people who come together, I believe, who pursue some form of openness. I don't understand it, but I don't believe I need to. I just believe that it happens, something happens.
Pete is interesting to work with. Pete can give an impulse. So if he moves his head, I move my head in response to him. The value of that is independence: "I made something in the world happen by an action that I did." So that is the technique: give an impulse, let someone respond to it. Let someone give you an impulse; now you respond to it. Like yesterday, when I waited for him to respond to me, it took a while to get there. But if you're willing to wait, he'll work it out. And when he succeeds to get his elbow one inch up off the ground leaning into my body, that's independence. For me, that's profound, just to have the opportunity to do that. Maybe he always goes through the same movement patterns in order to get there. So, he's not changing the way he moves. Of course it would be nice if he did, because then immediately you know that other neurological pathways are opening, it's guaranteed. But if he doesn't do that, how can you get that to eventually happen? That's the importance of memory, that's the importance of imagining into the future, that's the importance of imagining a sensation in a part of your body that you cannot even feel; the mind has to set up those pathways prior to the manifestation of the movement.
Another person in the workshop, less disabled than Nellie, but still not moving much, was Carolyn. I couldn't tell what she could do. She wasn't moving her body at all. Finally, when I was dancing with her, I realized that she was tensing and relaxing her left hand. So there was something happening. I asked her, if she could understand me would she stop tensing and relaxing her hand, and she did. Everybody had been moving her all around the room all the time. She wasn't really doing anything herself. So I stuck my finger in her hand and I said, "Carolyn, when you want me to move you in the wheelchair, you squeeze my hand." She squeezed my hand and we would move. "When you want to stop, relax your hand.; For me that was enough. As long as she would empower herself to make a choice about her movement, that was a breakthrough for me. Then we could do something where she felt she was making her choice.
Nellie's was an unusual situation because we never got information on who she is or what her disabilities are. I love those challenges. When I can take the time to try to find a way in, to find any kind of response, I can discern if a response is just her nervous system clicking off or if it's the mind in that body reaching out to make some kind of contact with me. Those people become my teachers.
How are you going to find a way to find out what they know? How do you find a way in? How can I have one single real instance of communicating? That's what I look for, any sign.
With a little boy who was deaf, blind and autistic, the way in was sounding on the body. That was enough. Let's just get this imprint of communicating. I make a sound, you make a sound. Things like that. Any way in so that there is some recognition of two people meeting. From that point, you can create theater and life and art.
In another situation, I was sitting with this little girl and her mother and the little girl was all over the place. There was a bird in the house and every few minutes it would sing. I am sitting there talking to the mother and I'm observing and every time the bird sings, the little girl's attention is there. I said, "Do you have a tape recorder? Tape record the bird singing." We continue our conversation and I put the tape recorder a little distance away. The bird would sing and the girl would turn toward the sound and then I would hit the tape recorder and the little girl would turn to it. In that situation, that was the way in.
That's what all the methods of the work are. They are ways that I have found my way in, and I said, "That worked; I'll remember that. That's a skill for the next time I meet a similar person." Now I've done so many workshops, it is rare that I find a situation I haven't already been in. Now I don't only have to rely on intuition to guide me, which I do anyway, but I also have support material that I can teach other people as tools to help them find their intuition, so it doesn't take so long.
Here's a letter I received from one of the DanceAbility Workshop participants. This guy has only about a hundred words that he can say or sign, and he came up with this poem about his dancing:

My feel about the night,
all people dance,
fun more,
we have a fun,
because we are deaf want to tell people name,
but like your name,
nice and pretty face,
dancer and me move,
experience my feel good dance,
people like people for deaf
scared,
how the people about my feel good,
the dance more fun.

About This Year's DanceAbility Workshop
I thought the event went incredibly well but I wasn't sure whether I had been able to do what I really believe in doing, that is, to teach in a way that didn't isolate anybody; that every person who came had access to their own personal dance. There were so many mentally disabled people at the workshop that I had to modify my teaching. There were people present who had no cognitive abilities so, in a way, I didn't really access those people through the teaching process directly. But somehow, on a more esoteric level, the information that was put out was transmitted.
The methods of the work have a very clear intention and a very developed direction. They insure that anybody with physical disabilities can follow the directions and manifest their dance. I have done more than a hundred of these workshops and I know that it works. But in a group with mental disabilities, it is another thing, and I can't rely on my methods anymore. Perhaps the information and the attitude just cooks the space, to allow that which is ultimately the truth about the method--to wake up the intuition of the body and let its expression speak clearly--even without understanding, is doing its work anyway. Even when the mentally disabled people didn't understand, the consciousness and intuitive awareness was strong enough in the room to lead people into dancing with each other.
I've always defined DanceAbility as being for the physically disabled and for visually- and hearing-impaired people. Now that there is a possibility that mentally disabled people can come into it, how do we define it?Dancers and their Wheelchairs
Carol: I had the sense during the workshops that some of the wheelchairs actually were appendages, invested with sensation.
Some can be. Some people see their bodies very distinctly from their chairs and they like to keep it that way. Some people don't. It's a question again about perception. It's very valuable to formulate as many different scenarios of those perceptions as you can and probably you will find people who will feel all of them.
When you've been somewhat disabled yourself at periods of time, you develop a certain sensitivity. In performance now, I throw crutches around, but when I was actually on crutches, I set them down very gently. If I'm just loading someone's wheelchair into the back of a van, I might just throw it around, but if I begin to dance with it I realize that you don't throw a wheelchair around just because it's a piece of metal. One, it has a spirit of its own. Two, it has a little bit of the embodiment of the person who rides in it. Chairs have character. It's kind of like the way your dog looks like you.
One woman in the workshop, Lark, said she doesn't like people to move her chair when she's in it, she wants them to move her and let the chair move as a result. That's a reality. Other people feel so connected to their chair that when they're in it and you move it they feel you are touching them. There are a lot of different perspectives on it. Definitely, I feel these things are spirited. They're in the aura of the person all the time. And metal is in your body, all the elements are. What happens to you when you get in someone else's chair? Is it like putting on someone else's shoes?Physical Change through Dance
Carol: I have seen enormous changes in the way that Emery Blackwell ( a member of Joint Forces Dance Company and teacher of DanceAbility with cerebral palsy) is moving just since I met him at Breitenbush three or four years ago.
Absolutely, without that being the goal or an intention. It's actually created some problems. It's kind of a joke, but it's a little bit true. For example, in Emery's solo, From There and Back Again, I suggested he play with certain movements for this solo several years ago when he couldn't do them so well. As with any choreography, he would have to learn to do the movements. Finally he got it, he mastered it, and it was quite beautiful. Now the dance has become a little bit contrived because he is so good at doing it that he has to slow down, which is quite a good thing to learn too. But it's no longer the front edge of his challenge. Now he gets out of the chair by himself and he's very skillful. He can knock the chair over and lay down and roll and stand up and spin around and get to the other chair, and if he did it in a speed that's normal for him now, the music would only be half over.
In our last piece, Tango, Tangle, he is up and walking by himself for the first time. He's holding on to the wheelchair, but he's walking. That was a change, that was a great thing. A couple of times in the studio we'd be dancing and something would happen where I wouldn't be supporting him and he'd be standing by himself. He'd never before done that in his life. A couple of times we just burst out laughing and crashed to the floor. Suddenly, there he is, up on his own two feet. Finding the Source
The circle has a reason. A circle is the beginning. It is saying to each other we have chosen to be here. We are here. Lying down on the floor and starting with breath and attention to sensation has its reason.
For me, the recipe of the workshops is a replica of my spiritual practice. I go through the same stages in my own practice, in my own life. It's a Tibetan Buddhist practice. I just looked at the system and said, "Oh, what are they having me do? They are having me first bring my attention to my breath? What's next? Some kind of prayer: 'From this moment on...' " That's the present, that's the sensation. "From this moment on I will be awake." You say it every day one hundred million times and then you go to sleep, but then you say, "From this moment on I will be awake!" again.
So the first thing I do is find my breath. Then the next thing is that I am going to try to be conscious. Find your sensation. If your attention is in your sensation, that's enough consciousness for me.
Imagine a movement. Why do spiritual practices work with the imagination and imagery so much? Why do affirmations work with images? Why does Skinner Releasing Technique work with images? There must be some power there. So maybe I should work with people to do imaging. Let's have them imagine their bodies.
Then there are these quiet spaces where you are still, standing still, sitting still, and sensing movement. More like an emptiness practice, emptiness meditation, which has to do with not visualizing anything, another part of Tibetan Buddhist practice. You do visualizing, you do chanting, you also have an emptiness. All of these recipes have what I believe are essential elements that I reformulate in different orders. It's really not new information.

The DanceAbility Framework
I'm not so concerned about dancing. I'm not concerned about art. I'm not a dancer. I'm not an artist. I don't really see myself that way. I'm concerned with transformation and what is it that we can really learn to do in our lives. What can we do to deal with the complexities of our relationships with each other that have inhibited our ability to experience pleasure, joy, happiness, tranquility. I believe that my most motivating factor is wanting to take to others the work that I do to heal myself. I try every day to practice transformation and out of those practices I design little movement metaphor games that I teach in my workshops. I don't know how, but I believe they work.
The basic framework of the teaching is to simplify, to be totally inclusive, and at the same time challenge the most professionally trained mover as well as the sophisticated improviser, choreographer, or theater director. In any workshop, anybody can access their own dance. That is important to me. This has received a lot of criticism because professional dancers and other professional companies of integrated work say that if you do that, you can't challenge everybody to excellence. If you're creating art on a stage you need to pursue excellence in a certain physical orientation. I think excellence is something different than how precise a shape a form you can manifest, although I believe in that being a part of it. I don't believe in isolating out people who can't get there.
What I am most interested in is realizing that the intuition speaks in the body and that it can guide you very clearly, guide you to making choices in your life. I'm talking about people who are cognitively able. I am interested in working with past, present, and future; memory, sensation and imagination. That's one way of working with the mind, in relationship to movement, that wakes up and stimulates intuition.
I believe in little games, like: imagine a movement. Now do it. Imagine a movement. Now do a different movement. Now repeat the same movement you just did. Those little games call on different parts of your mind. Very simple little games tie the things together that create the sensations--sensations that speak to you personally, that guide you into shapes that your body makes, movements that reveal to you the information that you need to be accessing. That is basically what the work is about.
I believe in destiny and I believe I am doing what I am supposed to do. That's where I get my happiness. I feel that I am fulfilling my purpose.

The DanceAbility Warm-Up
The warm-up I use goes as follows: Allow your body to breathe. Call for your attention. Now place your attention on the sensation of your body breathing, research your breath. Release. Let gravity have you. Imagine a movement, any movement that you can do in any part of your body. Sometimes I say, "Imagine moving a part of your body that you cannot move," if there are participants that are paralyzed. Then I say, "Imagine any part of your body. Feel a sensation in your imagination." This is the groundwork.
Where is your imagination? What does it feel like? If I say to you, "Think about the heat you are feeling on your hand," you think about it. If I say, "Sense it," that's a different thing. If I say, "Imagine it getting hotter," that's a different thing, and works a different part of your brain. You begin to research your brain through a different process than thinking. That's some of my reasoning. Then, "Feel a sensation in your imagination. Act on that sensation and feel the sensation and feel the difference when you are acting on it and when you are not acting on it." That's another consideration from your mind about your body. If you just think those two things, you have created another pathway, I believe.
Then I say, "Follow your own interest, follow your own desire to move, keeping your attention at all times on one or many of the sensations in your body as you move." Now, I believe that intuition is going to guide your attention to where you need to be feeling sensation. And it will travel. It's free association. I believe that the body speaks clearly enough to you that as the mind free-associates, it chooses where it places its attention. That's where the body needs you to be listening.
"Move however you want. Let your attention be in one place or let it travel through your body from your hand to the bottom of your foot." Now, if I feel my hand and then my foot, the space in between creates a pattern of consciousness traveling through the body. By the time you've done this one part of the warm-up for thirty or forty minutes, which is what I usually do if I have mentally able people in the room, you have covered the bases of meridians in the body. Circle here, circle there, straight line here, straight line there, crossing energy right/left, unilateral, contralateral, you name it, you've gotten there. I'm sure of that. Forty minutes of your mind traveling through your body, your mind is going to call your attention to wake up those pathways. Even in the case of paralysis. During the extended warm-up, if you can't move a part of your body, imagine moving it. If you don't have a leg, somewhere during your warm-up imagine your leg there. The meridians of the body also have an intuitive nature. It's not cognitive at that level.
You've been doing this imagination and sensation work with yourself. That's not enough. Now take this into the world. How do you get your internal environment and all of that awareness stimulated inside of you to work outside of you also? Not only outside of you into the environment, which is the next step, but outside of you to another person, and from another person to a community of people and from the community of people to the alchemy of the space that you are in. The warm-up is designed to do all of that.
"Now, continue to move as you desire, following your own interests, keeping your attention anchored at all times in sensation. While you are doing this and you are hearing my voice telling you to do this, recognize that my voice is coming from outside your body and entering your body. Use your hearing ability, use your perception of sound as a reminder to return your attention to sensation." Now we are using my voice not only as information, but using it to remind you to keep your attention on sensation. Any reach with the senses out from the body also sends awareness inside the body. So if I see you and I do what you are doing, I'm not only imitating you, but I'm actually generating an ability to empathize with you because I am sensing more of what this action really means in my own body. I perceive and at the same time I anchor my attention in the sensation of my own movement.
I always do the hearing exercise first because movers have been listening to my voice. Then I say, "If your eyes have been closed, open them. Notice what attracts your attention and use that as a sign to anchor your attention in sensation."
"See an empty space in the room. As you notice that empty space and you have the desire to begin to move toward it, anchor your attention in sensation." So it is always this process of externalizing and internalizing, making perception go internal and external at the same time. I go through each of the senses with that.
Then we go to touch. "Notice someone you want to make contact with. When you make contact, feel the sensation of the contact." Both people are going toward each other and to themselves simultaneously which is, I believe, dancing. "Now, continue with that same awareness, attention anchored in sensation, connected to your partner. With your mind, be aware of the whole room at the same time without giving up any part of your awareness." Suddenly the movement of the whole room changes. Awareness fills the room. That, for me, is the building of the atmosphere, taking people into a concentrated space in which to do the work. It's not enough to warm people up. They have to give themselves to the space. Their consciousness has to fill it. Then it's concentrated. I don't want people to talk, because I want them to hold the charge, not to release it, lose it.
Sometimes I will ask people to do things even if they can't, like notice things that you see in the space. You might think that I am talking about your eyes. It is possible to see without using your eyes, I believe. It is possible to hear, even if you are deaf. But you hear in different ways. I'm still experimenting with that, but basically I believe that one sense can do the work of the others. I think many of us learned that from Steve Paxton. Synesthesia, it is called. I am interested in developing new patterns; hearing with your eyes, seeing with your ears, smelling with your taste. I like to play with the different senses even when people don't have all of them, because they might try.
The design of the warm-up is a microcosm of everything you are going to learn in the workshop. If you only learn the warm-up, it is plenty. To go through that process is a very profound practice. The design of it is very particular, the stages, the steps, and the time. From the moment we come together in the circle there is a recipe as well as a method and a process; what is introduced when and why. The participants don't need to understand, but I, for the most part, do understand why I am doing what I am doing. And when I don't, I trust anyway. For example, this weekend I couldn't do what I had designed to do but somehow things kept evolving and it was fine. I taught several things I had never done before because they had to happen in that group.
I think if you train in using your intuition and trust, then it will be available to you when you need it. Most people have moments of it arising and it works for them. For me, I work too much, I need it too often to wait for the moments. I need the training as well.
The training is really about waking the intuition, an integration of all the senses, all your movement, all that mixing of the internal world with the external environment. When those things communicate with each other, that is all that is needed to generate a rhythm. It is not that I need to know how to do this, I just need to try to do this. That desire creates some kind of function. Through function and use, the rhythm and harmony generate themselves. This is also the reality of the body. If the tailbone is locked, then it is not going to stimulate the cerebrospinal fluid because it is not moving, it is not functioning. You make the tailbone move, then the cerebrospinal fluid will flow. This seems like a universal truth; function creates balance. If you use something, it will find some way to work better.
The warm-up, as it is designed, is a whole practice. When you are finished, you've communicated with your inner self and your outer self and with other people and you've had good thoughts about the community. Then you come back to the circle and the particular methods are taught--such as, the development of movement as language, the introduction of Contact Improvisation, and the building of performance orientation--which are the various stages of development depending upon the length of the workshop. But, any workshop, whether it is one hour long or one month long, will always have each of those elements, even if for just one moment. If you imagine just one thing, and you remember just one thing and you have one moment of attention to your sensation then you've considered your past, present and future. All workshops have all of those elements. That's important to me.

Rolling
One of the things about rolling is that it is your own body weight on your own body. It's like a sensory reflection of the truth about yourself. About your own weight, about how things move around inside of you when you roll, I think it is really important that your eyes see upside down and they see things at angles, that they see things from as many different vantage points as possible. When you reorient the way that you see, it can reorient the way that you think, and the way that you feel. The same thing is true about sound entering at different angles, different places. It changes the way that that sense works.
The whole system of equilibrium and balance is strengthened by rolling. Our eyes get strengthened by rolling. You realize you can "ground" in space. You can ground in time. You can ground in your hands. You can ground in all directions imultaneously. Rolling can make that evident to you. There is a certain energetic magnetism that gets built inside the body that comes through rolling, from the contact on many different parts of the body.
If you have a hinge that hasn't been used very much, you bend it several times and it gets loosened up and this cleans out the insides. I think rolling does that to the joints. It happens in the spine with all its torquing and twisting. Rolling also stretches and relaxes the muscles. You get into positions where some muscles are taut and some are released and that constant feedback, that stretch and releasing, is a cleansing process.
All the systems of the body, the adrenals, the blood, are affected. You keep getting information from all different parts of the body simultaneously, a sensory awakening for the brain. When I'm standing up it's coming from my feet--my proprioception is set: there is down. But all of a sudden when you get all this cross-wiring, cross-vibration, cross-stimulation coming from so many different places in a nonlinear order, it opens new neurological pathways, laying the foundation for other possible combinations to come later.
But I don't want to believe that you have to be able to roll, because I know people who can't. That hurts me. What if you can't get on the floor? One more place that I can't get to. When people are afraid to get out of their chair, when people have never been on the floor and you talk about the value and the need for rolling, I'm not sure how good that is. I know the floor is good but I also don't believe it is essential. I don't want to believe anymore that you need the floor like that. I want to believe that you just need a certain openness in your mind and a sensitivity to developing your imagination. I've worked with many people who are totally paralyzed, people who can't roll. Getting on the floor is good for them, and other people rolling them around is another thing, but it is not essential.

Nuts and Bolts
I lost money on this weekend's workshop. But here, in my home community, I don't mind. Some money comes from individuals. Some comes from a few other foundations and some from the City of Eugene. The biggest problem of the DanceAbility Project in America is that I don't have a good infrastructure, a good support system. I have all of the materials, all of the credentials: good video tapes, good press materials, international recognition; it's all there. In other parts of the world, these are 70 to 80,000-dollar projects. In Cyprus, the government funded it and several other support groups, insurance companies. Everybody else pays for it. But here in the U.S., I still have to produce it myself, I do it all. That's the sorest spot in the Project.

Present and Future
We're really trying to clarify the name "DanceAbility"--who uses it, and is it just a catch-all term? I don't want it to be a catch-all term because it's not, it's a very specific way of working, a specific orientation. It's not just "Let's get together with disabled people and dance." And I also don't believe what I am doing can be called Contact Improvisation per se, although I couldn't do what I do without knowing it.
After ten years, the DanceAbility Project includes entrance level workshops, laboratory exploration (a setting where interested people can go further), performance orientation, and teacher training. It's a philosophy and a method and an application so that anybody who wants to can access this work and be stimulated and motivated to whichever level is appropriate for their desire and development.
At present there is a book project in process with Steve Paxton which is essentially a photo journal. There is a teacher training manual that is a transcription by Beth Ann MacNamara of a seven-week teacher training. A month-long training was videotaped by Tom Giebink. There is an idea to turn the video into a teacher-training video manual. There is a performance-oriented video which draws from several pieces. There are documents in several different languages from several countries about the work.

(Published in Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 98, Volume 23, Number 2)
Manifesting DanceAbility
Interview with ALITO ALESSI
by Carol Horwitz
DANCEABILITY is a workshop for physically disabled (including visually and hearing impaired) and non-disabled people.