Breaking barriers

Originality shines in company of mixed-ability dancers.

After a fall from a stilthouse porch left him paralyzed, John Beauregard couldn’t bare the looks he received from people when he was confined to his wheelchair. For the first 17 years after his spinal cord injury, Beauregard constantly felt embarrassed.

Then he joined Karen Peterson and Dancers in 2000, and began performing contemporary dance.

“I was literally embarrassed to be seen in my wheelchair. It just puts you in that place that everybody feels sorry for you,” says Beauregard, 70, who has limited arm movement. “Now I can’t get enough of it. There’s no stage big enough, no audience big enough.”

Since then, Beauregard, of Miami, has traveled the world dancing with the mixed-ability company, which currently features three wheelchair and four able-bodied performers.

The company will perform for public school students at “A New Definition of Dance,” an event Tuesday-Wednesday featuring mixed-ability dance workshops and shows by dancers with disabilities.

The dancers often work together in duos, in which able-bodied dancers perform acrobatic movements such as handstands atop the wheelchair danc- ers, who slide freely through the stage.

Wheelchair dancers also partner with each other, holding hands and spinning the wheels to form a moving circle.

“Dancers develop their own movement vocabulary. What we’re looking for is originality and their physicality,” Peterson, 60, says. “They find their own unique way of moving. All that partner work in the chair, I didn’t teach them to do it, they learned it on their own.”

Katrina Weaver, 33, an able-bodied dancer and choreographer from Coral Springs, has been partnering with Beauregard for seven years. She says creating new movements is a constant challenge, but she’s learned to take more risks through the years.

“In the beginning, you kind of approach it as a chair, but the more you dance with them, you think of them as part of their body,” Weaver says. “It provides a platform to take more weight on because they have that extension of their body. So it definitely provides another element to work with, and it gives you a sense of risk and a sense of speed.”

For Peterson, it all started in 1990, when a woman with multiple sclerosis asked her to create a choreography in which she could participate.

In her works, wheelchair dancers aren’t always limited to their chairs. At times, they perform without them doing floor work. Besides paralysis, Peterson has also worked with other disabilities, such as blindness and cerebral palsy.

BARBARA CORBELLINI DUARTE/STAFF Dancers Katrina Weaver and John Beauregard practice their choreography during a rehearsal.