Karen Peterson and Dancers reflect on pandemic, loss in new show
Choreographer Karen Peterson talks about wheelchairs like some people talk about horses.
As artistic director of Florida’s leading physically integrated dance company — Karen Peterson and Dancers (KPD) — Peterson finds that the greatest challenge to choreographing wheelchair-bound dance is not the physical limitations of her performers but rather the “personalities” of their chairs.
“One of the most difficult things in dance practice or performance is to get wheelchairs to move in unison. The chairs have a mind of their own,” she says. “One has a battery that reacts this way, one’s wheels stick a little bit.
The wheelchairs engage my imagination — from the speed of the chairs to their unique features to how fast they go.”
Peterson’s sensitivity for the intricate motions of wheelchairs as a building block for artistic meaning will be on full display when KPD presents “Lost and Found” at 4 p.m. April 11 in the Pinecrest Gardens Banyan Bowl, 11000 SW 57th Ave., Miami. The show will feature five duets — three mixed-ability dances and two ablebodied dances — that push the envelope of how dance can create meaning out of the pandemic. The losses it has left behind, she says, inspired her to tackle new ideas.
“What is it like to crumble?” she says. “What is it like for the body to crumble and the bones to crumble? I can support your weight and you can support mine, but what happens when that support is not there?”
The duets experiment by setting up sympathetic relays between audience and performers through weight displacements and games with negative space.
“In the duets, I was focused on conveying physical empathy through the movements I developed,” Peterson says. “Physical empathy is having your arms full and having your arms empty, or having your chest open with someone there or the same chest open with no one there. There is a lot of coming together and pulling apart and filling and vacating space for one another.”
All seven company members will perform in the program. Asked about safety protocols and precautions, Peterson says: “The three wheelchair dancers were very mindful of what the virus could do to them if they got a severe case of the virus. They faced the difficulty of many live performers during this time, of the need to be masked while performing and exerting energy and feeling trapped within the mask.”
Still, in discussing mixed-ability dance, Peterson returns to the quirks of her performers’ wheelchairs.
“My mother had a stroke three years ago. I know from her experience that ordinary wheelchairs are very heavy and not very elegant. Some chairs just lend themselves to being more athletic,” she says. “In our company, one dancer is totally strapped into the chair so that he can balance on one wheel, and that’s unique to his chair and body. Whereas another’s chair is more like a solid piece of furniture.”
Specific types of chairs are so critical to a performance that if a chair changes, the choreography has to be adapted or dropped.
KPD dancer Jesus Vidal’s duet with Penelope Huerta pushes his current chair beyond its operational limits. His chair from Ki Mobility “is portable and compact and very responsive,” he says.
“My favorite part is when I tilt all the weight of my chair and my body back with her behind me,” Vidal says. “I really allow myself to be vulnerable when I do that. She presses me back into place and then we separate, and when we meet up again,