DCASE's 'SpinOff' series takes on disability in dance

Oct. 25--For Chicago artist Barak ade Soleil, the term "disability" describes a "social model," he says, "the construct of oppression brought on by society -- not referring to my body per se, but to the world I live in," governed by everything from inaccessible buildings to the tropes projected on the disabled. In his upcoming "What the Body Knows," however, he's aiming for something universal.

Ade Soleil has thought long and hard about what he calls the "racialized disabled body," which some would see as a double whammy, compounding disadvantages. "And, oh my gosh!" he says. "You don't want to be compounded. But there's also a certain power that comes from those people who are black and disabled." To access that requires "tuning into our bodies -- and tuning into the world, and asking the world to tune into these things. In looking at race and disability, I'm searching for that kind of humanity."

Disability isn't a common subject for dance artists, most of whom naturally pride themselves on their physical prowess. But territory beyond the status quo is what the city's free contemporary dance series, "SpinOff," explores.

This year, its fourth, "SpinOff" focuses on Midwestern artists. "What the Body Knows" is happening the first weekend, Friday and Saturday at the Stony Island Arts Bank (technically sold out, though the "SpinOff" shows are often overbooked and waitlists are available online). Also this weekend, Ayako Kato and Megan Young present works in progress, and the Minneapolis-based BodyCartography Project performs "Closer (Solo)": 15-minute performances by one dancer for one audience member. The final weekend, Nov. 4-5, BodyCartography performs the group version of "Closer," and Deeply Rooted Productions dances Joshua L. Ishmon's new hip-hop inflected "Colors."

Ade Soleil doesn't generally name his disability, which wasn't apparent or diagnosed when he was a child, saying that the "medicalization" of disability doesn't interest him. More, he considers diagnosis a form of labeling that diminishes the broad range of disability. "It's plural: disabilities," he says. "There are multiple ways in which people move with disabilities." By not discussing his diagnosis, he hopes to remove one variable in how people see the disabled. "And that does come up in my work: how I'm read."

Though ade Soleil now relies on crutches or a wheelchair in his daily life, he won't be using either when he performs a solo and duet on this program, challenging himself to "remove the devices. This goes back to the notion of how one might read a disabled body when there are no signifiers. Instead of using these extensions of my body, I'm looking to explore how the body moves without them."

Accordingly, ade Soleil's solo, "Ele'fant," consists entirely of floor work: exploring his strengths, the "places where I can move." His duet, "Carry," is "about the interdependent relationship between myself and Jerron Herman," he says. "How do we carry each other through these places? Because we have distinct disabilities."

Herman, a disabled member of Heidi Latsky's mixed-ability troupe, also dances a solo, "MakeWay," that ade Soleil created. But rather than "imposing my body," the choreographer says, "I wanted to reveal how his body moves, making way for the articulation and discovery of his body in all its ways." Noting that Herman must negotiate between his left and right hemispheres, ade Soleil adds that sometimes the disabled "invisibilize, erase, the parts of our body that are disabled." Not in "MakeWay," he hopes. DJ Sadie Woods performs the evening's score live.

Now in his mid-40s, Chicago native ade Soleil has been performing for 25 years, first African and African diasporic dance, then contemporary and postmodern dance, initially in Minneapolis and later in New York. He considers himself a performer-choreographer very much within the continuum of the dance world.

"Even before I was thinking about disability, when I was thinking about being a dance artist, pain was in the room!" he says. "And it was about moving through it." But at some point he began to acknowledge the pain, "not feeling I had to move through it but really attending to it, listening to my body in ways I did not do earlier. I try to breathe into it and ask, 'How do I continue to explore the movement, with or without that sensation?' I'm working on a different way of relating to it."

And, like other choreographers, ade Soleil must create from his own body, mind, experience: "Every choreographer, they're moving from some individual space, they're moving from the idiosyncratic or from some strength, or maybe from some condition of their environment." To work well as a dance-maker, he says, requires "being in tune with your body: this body, as it is."

Of course personal history, often in the form of a significant dance mentor, is also part of every choreographer's bag of tricks. Ade Soleil credits his mother as his earliest and best teacher. "She was just open and happy in the moment. I search for that kind of liberation as well: a liberation not confined by technique or a way of moving but that is just kind of joy. That's what I look for, or hold onto sometimes. That joy."

Laura Molzahn is a freelance critic.

ctc-arts@chicagotribune.com

Barak ade Soleil's 'What the Body Knows'

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Where: Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave.

Tickets: Free, RSVP at www.whatthebodyknows.eventbrite.com. For other "SpinOff" events, go to www.cityofchicago.org/dcase.

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