Register Guard article
When Dance Defies Barriers
by Karen McCowan

YOU'VE HEARD OF thinking outside the box. This is dancing outside the box. It stops me in my tracks as I approach the Eugene Ballet Co. on a dark, wet afternoon and notice two dancers rehearsing inside a large, bright studio along Charnelton Street.
At first, I think I know what I see: A pas de deux between a disabled dancer in a wheelchair and an able-bodied dancer on roller skates.
At first, I see mainly evidence of Emery Blackwell's cerebral palsy - stubbornly angular hands, stiff limbs, jerky movements.
At first, I notice only what I don't expect to see on a dance floor.
But then I begin to see outside the box.
I see Blackwell press his toes to the floor and tip back on the wheels of his chair, arching back, back, back...until his head rests against the chest of DanceAbility artistic director Alito Alessi and the two wheeled dancers execute a backward spin.
I see the muscled rub-board of Blackwell's torso as he undulates out of the chair and onto the floor between its wheels as Alessi slides into its seat and passes over him.
I see a dancer's strength and discipline as Blackwell pulls himself up -- first to his knees, then to his feet -- and begins pushing Alessi in staggering but measured steps.
Dancing outside the box.
My view of disability -- like a wheelchair in one of this duo's classic performance pieces -- is turned on its head.
Who carries whom? What involves more grace -- the effortless sweep of compliant limb, or the consuming challenge of moving resistant muscle?
Amazingly, Alessi doesn't believe he was even thinking outside the box when he began to explore choreographing pieces that incorporated dancers with disabilities.
"My mother used a wheelchair," he said. "So I guess I never got in the box as far as my thinking about disabilities. I went to the disabled community as a professional dancer interested in learning new ways to move in my work."
But soon he became intrigued with the idea of weaving disabled people and their ways of moving into performances with able-bodied dancers.
With co-founder Karen Nelson, he launched the DanceAbility Project 12 years ago.
DANCE PERFORMANCE certainly seemed an outrageously outside-the-box idea to Blackwell when Alessi first tried to recruit him.
It was a chance encounter in downtown Eugene. Alessi was distributing DanceAbility fliers; Blackwell was riding his custom designed three-wheeler.
"I thought, 'This looks like a pioneering kind of guy! and offered him a flier," the dark, ponytailed Alessi recalled, grinning. "He said no.”
Blackwell, a 1977 Sheldon High School graduate, grinned back above a brown goatee.
"I was involved in politics then," he explained, patiently repeating words I was unable to understand because of his disability. A former president of Oregonians for Independent Living, he was lobbying in Salem. But legislators also had a difficult time understanding his words.
Only after watching a DanceAbility workshop did he recognize the eloquence of dance. He joined the project's Joint Forces Dance Company, and has since performed as far away as Germany and Argentina.
"I learned that my body actually communicates very well," Blackwell said. "I gave up politics to do this work, but this work involves a lot of politics."
With other members of the company, he and Alessi have been featured in publications ranging from the dance magazine Kickline to the German arts journal Kultur. They've performed in 13 countries and have been on the road as much as six months a year.
Too much, Alessi said. So much that Blackwell, Slauded as a "pionere" in Kultur, is relatively unknown in his hometown.
The troupe recently received a grant to film its work so the inclusive approach can continue to get wide dissemination without so much travel.
"Now our goal is to do more work here in the local community," Alessi said.
Part of that effort will be the project's first-ever children's DanceAbility workshops, to be offered as part of the University of Oregon's New Dance Festival in March.
Alessi also hopes to draw more audience members outside local disability and dance circles to a free DanceAbility performance Feb. 28 at the Hult Center.
"As an audience member, you will see things you've never seen," he promised. "Your mind will begin to change about limitations."
You'll think -- if not dance -- outside the box.

Published in The Register-Guard, January 26, 1999