Title and Author: “So. Not. Broken” by Alice Sheppard, from Disability Visibility
Objective Summary:
Alice Sheppard begins her short autobiographical piece “So. Not. Broken” from Disability Visibility by sharing a joke with her physical therapist as she arrives at an appointment. “I’m broken”, she says, but it has nothing to do with her disability (182). As a choreographer and dancer, Alice is used to living with a degree of physical brokenness, but not in the way her nondisabled audiences may immediately assume. “Many nondisabled people attribute a degree of brokenness to disability”, she writes, adding “it arises from the medicalization of our bodyminds” (182). For Alice, learning how to dance involved figuring out her body through the mechanics of her crutches, and her chair, as well as without them, leading her to new capabilities in performance. To Alice, the chair is a part of her body, because it becomes part of her embodied space, in dance and in daily life. She shares that her perspectives in dance were not just those of a disabled person; but also of a woman, and of a black woman; and she believes all of these intersections of identity impact embodied experiences in real ways. The “expressive capacity of bodies”, Alice writes, is surely enhanced by a variety of embodied forms, and she admits her new approach to the body as a whole gives her hope for a bright career future.
Quotations:
- “My very first problem as a dancer was figuring out my chair. I had to learn how to move in it, of course, but I also had to understand what it meant as a black woman to use a chair onstage, in the studio, and in the world”. (page 183)
- “When I discovered the concept of embodiment—a word I use to describe the way in which my body takes shape and form—I made another breakthrough: My chair is my body.” (page 183)
- “My crutches and chair are not tools that compensate for my impairment. Nor are they simply devices that I use for traveling across the studio. I understand these starting points as embodiments, each of which has different movement possibilities.” (pages 183-184)
Takeaways and Reflection:
Clearly, Alice is speaking as someone with lived experience in multiple marginalized identities, and she centralizes the way those intersect in her life through her dance and stage performance career. The narrative does meander a little to fill in the details of her personal life, but one main claim she makes is that although brokenness and disability are affiliated through the medicalization of the American bodymind, this is both a harmful and inaccurate connotation which should be abandoned. It’s evident through Alice’s experience as a choreographer that mobility assistance devices are also a part of embodied selves, and can absolutely participate in the dance. In fact, she proposes that these devices can even expand the creative experience of dancers once integrated into routines. Alice’s narrative of her journey towards a greater self-understanding could be useful to many disabled and nondisabled in her audience, especially to those that might feel drawn towards athletic pursuits. At the end of the day, everyone must accept their body as it comes, because looking at the self as a lesser version of another person just seeds feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing.