Michelle and Nicole on Their Duet
Both Michelle and Nicole talked about their duet as a very moving, powerful, and emotional experience.
Michelle reflected on her experience with disability and with privilege and how she has experienced both at varying times in her life. She connected this to her "soul searching and hard and vulnerable making" experience while dancing with Nicole. She talked about she felt the weight of the responsibility for communicating through contact improvisation and movement. She described the "sense of vulnerability in every decision we made."
Nicole found her performance in the duet very challenging and emotional as well. Not only was she vulnerable in her interactions with a senior faulty member, she felt tremendous pressure in relation to representing and filling a role that she does not necessarily embody. She even experienced a physical block in doing this work.
She and Michelle put their talents in conversation through contact improvisation. Through this work, and as she reflected on her responsibility, she realized she was not representing something she does not have first hand experience with. Instead, she realized that “it was my job to perform my own relationship to disability and how it makes me feel, not to try to translate someone experience through my body.. and when i did that, it was really honest because it breaks my heart.. it was coming from my own place of truth with it…”
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