Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World by Nyama McCarthy-Brown

Author:Nyama McCarthy-Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

Nick’s World: Falling and Mermaids

Nick lost his balance and fell often. Going from the floor to standing was challenging for him and involved levering himself up at acute angles in contrast to more central spiraling in and out of gravity that dancers and people with fully mobile spines can achieve. I took cues from the way he interacted with gravity to prompt the dancers to make phrase material. Falling by extreme shifting and reaching through unexpected pathways in the body were explored and utilized to make movement sequences.

Nick shared that as a child he had identified with Disney’s The Little Mermaid. He wanted to be, as the title song states, “a part of their world,” the world of people who moved on land. The image and metaphor of the mermaid was seeded into the piece. Rolling, dragging, and crawling became ways of locomoting in our process. The mermaid became a talisman image for us as we built the dance. She has exclusive agency in water and at the same time is disabled and excluded on land.

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