Dance and Performance Projects
I am a sick and disabled dance artist whose work emerges out of my embodied experience of chronic illness and pain. My creative practice is deeply connected to and informed by the disability arts and culture movement and the development of “disability aesthetics,” a term used by disabled artists to articulate the particular ways that disability appears in the content, form and process of our work. I am invested in the value of disabled bodyminds in dance, and particularly the ways that disability demands a rethinking of traditional, western dancemaking practices. Due to this commitment to disability culture and aesthetics, I consider access part of the creative process and work to make features like audio description, captioning and other access tools an essential, aesthetic part of every piece.
Choreography
A long room with black marley floor and white walls. Colorful mats and pillows are scattered around the edges of the space along with lamps. Captions and a video of Maggie knitting are projected on the far wall of the space. Three dancers, Alex, Joán Joel, Robby, move in a line down the middle of the space, each wearing a different solid color costume. Maggie and Jordan stand to the left reading from journals that match their costumes.
Scale (2023)
Featuring Maggie Bridger, Jordan Brown, Joán Joel, Alex Neil-Sevier, and Robby Lee Williams. Sound Design by Shireen Hamza. Costumes and Visual Art by Reveca Torres. Pillows, Blankets and Other Craft Objects by Maggie Bridger, Margaret Fink, Sandy Guttman, Alison Kopit, Ashley Miller. Audio Description by the dancers. ASL consultation by Joán Joel.
Using the pain scale as a primary source material, Scale places medicalized methods of quantifying pain in conversation with alternative ways of reading and attending to pain emerging from the disability community, ultimately proposing new ways of caring for the bodymind in dance. These complex interactions between medicalization, care, and community are explored through movement, video, and the use of access tools for both performers and audience members. Scale invites audience members to attend to their own embodied experience of the piece, offering pillows, blankets, and other care objects as tools for curating the way they engage with and experience the work. Scale poses questions around the ways that we perceive pain, ultimately reaching toward a more compassionate and disability-informed way of creating and performing dance.
Read Lauren Sheely's response to Scale, "Curating a Space of Care" published in the Performance Response Journal.
Close Across (2021)
Shown as part of Unfolding Disability Futures event in Chicago, IL. Featuring Maggie Bridger, Mia Coulter, Shireen Hamza, Alexandria Neil-Sevier, Lauren Sheely and Vincent Tufano.
Close Across was an experiment in access, flexibility and care, enacting a disability-informed, covid-safe method of dancemaking and imagining a future where disabled knowledges guide the practice of creating dance. We engaged in a movement generation practice that used improvisational scores to reflect on the physical experience of receiving and giving care across various distances. The movement began as solos, was transformed into duets performed in close proximity with our partners and was finally split apart to be performed as a distant duet. The text acts as audio description for the movement of our partners, but also documents our own felt experience of moving with our partners across these different distances. Audiences are encouraged to move around the space, curating their own experience of the movement, text and sound, reflecting on how distance and closeness to the performers influence their own physical, sonic and emotional experience of the work.
A large, industrial room with tall, bright windows and plants growing on the walls. Mia, a black dancer in a wheelchair, reaches her arm out to the side facing away from the camera in the foreground. Audience members and other dancers are scattered across the rest of the space, directing their attention to Mia.
Pending (2021)
Commissioned by MOMENTA Dance Company and shown during CounterBalance 2021, featuring Sam Crouch (left) and Robby Williams (right)
Pending explores the anticipatory moment before the onset of pain through a combination of improvisational scores and set movement. This piece was developed in collaboration with the dancers and Chicago area blind and disabled sound artist, Andy Slater.
Two dancers in bright blue jumpsuits with shiny, orange spots on the joints. Both lift their right arm in a long diagonal and look up toward that hand. Sam, slightly in front on the left, is a tall, Black dancer. Robby, slightly behind on the right, is a Black and Chicano wheelchair dancer.
Radiate (2021)
Developed as part of Synapse Arts' 2021 New Works Program.
Radiate poses embodied questions about the nature of pain and illness through the mediums of film and movement. Contrasting dominant understandings of pain that situate it as solely personal and tragic, the film draws on the tools, movements and practices I use to calm my pain, offering alternate visions for what pain is and does. Radiate invites the viewer into my home and studio practice, engaging with themes of intimacy, time and care as it depicts the frustration, humor and mundanity of pain as I experience it.
Read Maya Odim's response to Radiate and other dance films show as part of the 2022 Elevate Chicago Dance Festival on the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Blog.
Maggie, a fat, white woman, lays on her side in front of an ornate, brown radiator in a dance studio. She wears a long, black nightgown and light gray socks. A blue heating pad sits on top of the radiator.
Community Dance
Three dancers against a bright red brick wall with peace signs, words, hearts and other symbols painted in bright colors. Sydney, a young Black woman in a powerchair rolls into the left side of the frame facing Lauren and Stefanie, who lunge side by side with their arms outstretched toward Sydney.
Inclusive Dance Workshops at Access Living
Co-Founded with Sydney Erlikh in 2019 after we received a Chicago Area Albert Schweitzer Fellowship and supported by Chicago's Independent Living Center, Access Living, this series of workshops focuses each week on key components of inclusive dance, often featuring guest facilitators from around the country. Together, we explore various dancemaking tools & concepts, dance techniques, and improvisation.
Performance
Am I My Pain? (2021)
Choreographed by 3Arts/Bodies of Work Residency Fellow, Robby Williams and performed as part of CounterBalance 2021, Chicago's annual integrated dance concert.
Three dancers in various shades of purple, grey and blue on a stage arranged in a triangle. Maggie sits center front on a wooden stool, head turned side, one hand on her stomach and the other on her back. Two dancers, Robby and Sydney sit behind on either side of her holding their head and hip, respectively.