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HOW WE MAKE IT: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community

Inventory of Joy

This video trailer documents the process for Inventory of Joy, a movement and film project by Megan Moodie and Cynthia Ling Lee. Originally, Megan, a former dancer, invited Cynthia, a professional choreographer, to help shape movement for a video aimed at demonstrating L-dopa’s effectiveness in treating dystonia associated with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Megan has hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and hemispheric symptoms of dystonia – spasms, tremor, and paralysis that occur mostly on her left side. Cynthia is a COVID-19 long-hauler whose profound bodily shifts have led her to reimagine dance. Their project has evolved into the practice of exploratory duets between mover and witness, illustrating how the pursuit of “evidence” informed by dance’s embodied epistemologies provides ways to better understand – not cure – one’s disability. In foregrounding the emergent, interdependent qualities of “the body,” it stands as a crip queer feminist challenge to normative medical regimes of image-making, the elicitation of symptom etiology, and diagnosis.

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trailer__inventory_of_joy (Original).mp4 The video features Megan, a middle-aged white woman with brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses, and Cynthia, a Taiwanese American woman, with cameo appearances by Megan’s son, a smiling twelve-year old with brown hair, and Alex Juhasz, a white woman with silvery chin-length hair and glasses. The footage cuts between setting up the studio for filming, talking heads, home video of Megan exhibiting dystonic symptoms of inwardly bent clenched arms and trembling hands, studio-based movement experiments, and historical black and white images of “hysterical” women. Towards the end of the trailer, we see a dance party between Megan, Cynthia, and Megan’s son in the studio: Megan starts to dance with her dystonia, organizing it into joyful rhythms, whirls, and eventually collapsing on the floor in raucous laughter.