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HOW WE MAKE IT: Disability Justice, Autoimmunity, Community

An 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.

[Visual Description of the Video: Two women in an empty apartment. Megan, a middle-aged white woman with brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses, is standing and does a series of simple movements – holding the kitchen counter for support while brushing one leg forward, balancing on one leg, twisting her body into eagle pose from yoga. She alternates between right and left sides of the body: generally the right side executes movement smoothly, while the left side clenches, trembles, bends her at the waist, and sometimes triggers gasping. Cynthia, a Taiwanese American woman, sits with her back to the camera, holding an open notebook. A friendly witness and support, she reminds Megan of the next movement and makes interested observations about her embodiment, often leading to short dialogues between the two of them. The two often laugh loudly and make jokes, illustrating a warmth, intimacy, and trust between them.]

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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.