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 Dancing
Without Brakes
By Nancy
Wozny
Kitty Lunn's remarkable journey
Snow falls
on a dark stage. A glistening, wheeled object moves under and
over a floor-bound dancer in a delicate partnership. The
flame-haired dancer, Kitty Lunn, appears to be engaged in a romantic
pas de deux with her wheelchair. In Time Like Air, a
solo choreographed for her by former Pilobolus member Peter
Pucci, challenges just about every belief we have held about
dance. Both poignant and intriguing, it reveals Lunn’s
extraordinary qualities as a dancer and her ability to
integrate her constant companion, her dance chair, into the
fabric of the piece.
Lunn is a
dancer-turned-paraplegic-turned-dancer, choreographer, master
teacher, artistic director, and inspiration to all. Her
company, Infinity Dance Theater, has redefined the rules of
who gets to dance. Her dancing questions what it takes to be a
dancer, and her activism has resulted in increased visibility
and acceptance of disabled individuals in the performing arts.
Lunn proves that you need not have a working set of legs to be
an exquisite mover, that a chair can be a suitable and
supportive partner, and that dance is larger and deeper than
the pursuit of physical perfection.
A slip down
an icy set of steps on a snowy night changed the course of
Lunn’s life. She had danced professionally for decades,
studying with such modern dance luminaries as José Limón and
Martha Graham and ballet icon Agnes de Mille. At 15, she
danced the role of Swanilda in Coppélia with the New
Orleans Civic Ballet and later was a soloist with The
Washington Ballet. In 1987 Lunn was 36 and in rehearsal for
Sherlock’s Last Case, a Broadway show. Since dancers in
their mid-30s are considered middle-aged in terms of their
career’s lifespan, she was already considering a shift to
acting. The fall halted all her plans; a shattered spine left
her a paraplegic. With bone fragments piercing her spinal
cord, Lunn faced a questionable prognosis. After five
surgeries, many complications, and nearly three years of
confinement to a hospital bed, the future looked grim.
Excruciating pain as a result of her fifth surgery led to a
dependency on narcotics. After Lunn attempted suicide several
times her doctor suggested that he re-break her spine further
up, leaving her with less pain and considerably less mobility.
Lunn chose the more difficult path, gradually weaning off
narcotics and giving the rehab process her full attention. She
began working with Shaw Bronner, a gifted physical therapist
and former dancer. “We had an instant connection,” remembers
Lunn. “We shared a dance vocabulary.” Bronner worked with Lunn
five hours a day, six days a week, for five years. The former
dancer re-learned everything from how to take a shower to how
to maneuver the elevator down to the street. “[Shaw] had
taught me that I had a life and that I wasn’t the sum total of
my limitations,” says Lunn. “The day that I transferred from
my bed to the chair and took the elevator down to get the mail
by myself, I knew I would be rejoining the world.”
This
intrepid dancer’s remarkable journey has not been a solo one.
She met her husband, Andrew Macmillan, just before her
accident in 1985. Their courtship continued through her
rehabilitation and they married in 1989. In addition to his
work as an actor, Macmillan also serves as production stage
manager and technical director for the company. As if that
weren’t enough, he also designs dance chairs for disabled
dancers.
Lunn faced
a turning point when she looked at Bronner and asked, “I am
not going to get any better, am I?” Bronner ad mitted
that she would probably never walk again. But who said she
wouldn’t dance? Lunn began to realize that being a dancer has
nothing to do with being in a wheelchair, and she longed to
return to class. Fear was in the way, she admits. “My accident
took away my identity as a dancer. If I wasn’t a dancer, I
didn’t know who I was. The dancer inside me doesn’t care about
the wheelchair; she just wanted to keep dancing.” Lunn also
attributes a moving performance of The Sleeping Beauty
at American Ballet Theatre to reopening her heart to dance.
At first,
teachers were reluctant to include Lunn in class, thinking she
would disrupt the other students. It took enormous courage to
hand over her money at Steps on Broadway in 1994. Armed with
the American Disability Act, Lunn knew they had to let her in.
She recalls ABT principals Paloma Herrera and Vladimir
Malakhov making room for her at the barre. “From that moment
on I knew I was going to be OK,” she says. “I was returning to
my familiar world.”
Today, Lunn
begins her day by zipping through the streets of Manhattan on
her electric wheelchair on her way to Nancy Bielski’s
11:30a.m. ballet class at Steps. “I toddle at such a clip that
I scare small animals and children along the way,” jokes Lunn.
When she arrives, she switches to her dance chair (graciously
stored for her by Steps), a sleek, ultra-mobile, 17-pound,
carbon-fiber chair designed especially for her by her husband.
(An electric wheelchair weighs about 225 pounds.) The chair
has no brakes and allows her to move in any direction with the
subtlest push. It is balanced to her body weight and fitted
for the length of her thighbones. The low back invites
movement throughout her torso and its light weight allows her
to spin with ease or blast through space at a mighty speed.
One push and she’s flying. “I make it across the stage faster
than any dancer can bourrée,” Lunn boasts in a mischievous
tone. Don’t expect any wheelies here, though. Instead, Lunn
asks her audience to consider her chair as part of her moving
body. “When I’m dancing in my little manual wheelchair, the
chair becomes an object of motion and movement that has
nothing whatsoever to do with a medical accommodation,” she
said in Breaking the Code, her keynote address to
theater professionals, written for the New Jersey Arts Access
Task Force of the New Jersey Theater Alliance. She even
integrates the pushing motion into the choreography.
So how do
you take ballet class without the use of your legs? “I started
to think about the construction of a ballet class and began
transposing it to my body,” Lunn says. She considers the
function of each exercise and creates an equivalent for her
body. For example, traditional pliés are impossible. Instead,
she creates a deep contraction, warming the major torso
muscles that will support her. Lunn uses her arms for all the
leg work; at times her right arm plays the role of a leg while
her left arm sweeps through the port de bras. Without being
able to rely on her lower abdominal muscles, the dancer uses
tremendous breath control to execute large movements like
transferring from the floor to her chair and back. “I had to
find out what I could use that could compensate for what I
didn’t have,” she says. Kitty Lunn and Dario Vaccaro in
Genesis Photo by Dan Demetriad; In
1995 Lunn
formed Infinity Dance Theater, along with founding members
Robert Koval and Christopher Nelson, to
 “expand
the boundaries of dance.” The name refers to the idea of
never-ending motion. Infinity has a cooperative relationship
with the Roxey Ballet in New Jersey; they share 14 dancers,
some with disabilities and some beyond the age traditionally
associated with concert dance. The company boasts a repertory
of 18 works and engagements at New York’s Joyce SoHo and
Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center. Lunn has gathered an
impressive roster of choreographers, including Pucci, Dario
Vaccaro, and Gabriela Poler.
Lunn almost
always needs to translate the choreographers’ ideas into
movements that work for her, but Pucci experimented with a
wheelchair prior to working on In Time Like Air. “Kitty
has such a unique relationship to her chair; I tried to tap
into that in making a dance for her,” he says. “The dance
became a metaphor for her life. She had one life as a dancer,
and now has another one, a rather extraordinary one at that.”
In Roxanna Young’s Dreambody, Lunn dances in the
opening section without her chair. Fearlessly she hangs upside
down supported by the other dancers. The piece took nine
months to make. “We had to create a technique for the piece,”
says Lunn. “The headstand took a huge amount of time to
master.” Lunn’s dancing has not gone unnoticed. Jennifer
Dunning of The New York Times wrote, “Kitty Lunn is
radiant,” while Phyllis Goldman of Back Stage called
her “a marvelous creature with an upper body of seamless
fluidity.”
In 1997,
Jacques D’Amboise invited Lunn to serve on the faculty of the
National Dance Institute and develop a dance curriculum for
students who use wheelchairs. Eventually Lunn codified her
transpositions into a wheelchair dance technique, which she
now teaches all over the world. In 2001 she released a video,
Ballet Technique Transposed for Students Using Wheelchairs.
Lunn has regular commitments at the Matheny School in New
Jersey, Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in New York,
and Crotched Mountain School in New Hampshire, where she
teaches a combination of ballet and modern techniques and
often uses nondisabled dancers to partner the students who use
wheelchairs. Every spring she organizes a recital. “The
[students] have taught me about artistry and dancing, about
life and courage,” remarks Lunn. “It’s a hugely humbling
experience.”
Dancers who
use wheelchairs travel from all over the country to work with
Lunn. Full-time dance student Alice Sheppard, frustrated that
her dancing was not improving and that her teachers didn’t
know how to include her, travels from California for monthly
sessions with this gifted teacher. “I have a much better sense
of my body and my dancing has improved immensely,” says
Sheppard. “She’s a truly gifted teacher; she’s demanding,
challenging, and supportive all at the same time. I feel
lifted into grace by her teaching.” Sheppard’s difficulty in
fitting into regular classes is not uncommon, so Lunn conducts
teacher trainings throughout the United States to pass on her
technique.
Lunn has
worked tirelessly on behalf of disabled people to educate
society about this condition that affects 54 million
Americans—and humanize it in the process. She has been a vocal
advocate of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which
guarantees persons with disabilities the right to inclusion in
the economic and cultural mainstreams open to other Americans.
In 1990, she was elected to chair the Tri-Union Performers
With Disabilities Committee. She has lectured on disability
issues and the performing arts all over the country, and, in
2004, she received the Loretta Lenoir Award for Lifetime
Achievement from Actors’ Equity, for outstanding achievement
in the area of human rights and advancing the goal of
nontraditional casting. Lunn made herself an example by
playing the role of Sally Horton on the soap opera As the
World Turns from 1990 to 2000. She is famous for saying,
“I am not a wheelchair! I use a wheelchair —there’s a
difference.”
Lunn is
considering many possibilities in order to get her story out
into the world. Warner Bros. wanted to make a movie about her
life, but she turned it down because of control concerns. She
has also been asked to write an autobiography. Recently a
journalist asked her what she was trying to accomplish by
dancing. Lunn replied, “I would like to command the same
respect sitting down as I did standing up.”
This dancer
commands attention whether she is wheeling at high speeds
across the stage or speaking out for artists with
disabilities. “I have learned that my ability has nothing to
do with my disability or the fact that I now use a
wheelchair,” Lunn says. “My soul and my talent don’t know that
I fell down those stairs and broke my back. The dancer inside
me doesn’t know or care that I use a wheelchair.”
Today Lunn
remains steadfast that dance should be an art form that is
open to all and is deeply concerned about the funding for
companies that include dancers with disabilities. Being an
able-bodied dancer is not an easy life choice. Lunn’s
determination to continue striving for excellence in her field
inspires dancers of all abilities. “All things considered, of
course I wish I had never fallen,” she says. “But that was an
accident and dancing is a choice. I celebrate every day that I
get to do what I love.”
All Photos
by Dan Demetriad
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