Tayla and her friends.

Talya is an 8 year old girl from Rhode Island. For her 8th birthday party this weekend she held a fundraiser for AXIS. She raised $400 for our company by selling delicious ice-cream sundaes!

Thank you Tayla for this wonderful gift and from all of us at AXIS: Happy Birthday!

We see a bright future for you in development!

Tell a bit about yourself?

When did you first hear about AXIS?
I first heard about AXIS Dance when I moved to San Francisco in 2011 and started researching local companies to go and see and get to know. After my first AXIS performance and meeting the company, I knew I wanted to get involved with them. It was at a similar time that AXIS was introducing the Friends of AXIS (FOA) Committee and I jumped at the invitation to be a part of the group!

What do you love about AXIS?
For me, AXIS is a constant reminder that we should keep focused on all the things we can do in life, as opposed to what we can’t do. People’s perception of disability is that it limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities; for me AXIS challenges these limits and continually pushes the boundaries. AXIS performances always leaves me inspired, totally captivated and wanting to see more.

What are you most excited about being on the Friends of AXIS Committee?
I am thrilled to be a part of developing AXIS as a company – increasing audiences and raising money and awareness. It is also a great place to make news friends and acquaintances and be a part of the dance and disability communities. I must say, I am most excited about our next performance and seeing what the company does next!

How do you think being part of AXIS has changed you?
Primarily, it has filled the hole in my life, which leaving the dance industry left behind. Being a part of AXIS makes me feel connected to the dance world that I love.
Being a part of AXIS has also opened doors for me into a welcoming new community that I have never really been a part of. It has made me feel fearless and strong and reminded me that with a positive attitude and sheer determination, we can overcome anything that life throws at us.

What is your fondest AXIS memory so far?
My fondest memory of AXIS so far has to be the 25th Anniversary event that the FOA committee organized in April of this year, honoring Judy and all of her incredible achievements. It was such a wonderful event and every member of the committee worked so hard to make it a great success! It was great too see so many people there in support of Judy and her work and to hear the fabulously entertaining tales of the company’s history!

Why should someone join the Friends of AXIS Committee?
To become an ambassador for the work of AXIS and to help us all spread the word about their dance, education and training opportunities. Being a FOA you gain privileged access to an amazing world of positivity, inclusion and warmth. The pride you feel watching the performers, and the reward you feel from being a part of it all, is more than reason in itself!

Anything else you like to share?
Thank you to AXIS and Judy for letting me be a part of their journey! Thank you also to Mollie for all her hard work in leading the committee this far. Bring on the next 25 years!

Want to learn more about the Friends of AXIS Committee? Contact Mollie McFarland, Development Director, at 510-625-0110 or mollie@axisdance.org

Were you unable to attend our April performances? No problem!! We recently asked some AXIS fans who mentioned they were interested in blogging to reflect a bit on their experience with AXIS and the 25th Anniversary Performances in April. Here are some of their thoughts and reflections:

“I first heard about AXIS through Education Director, Annika Presley. This was my first performance that I attended, and what I liked was that it featured good dance first and foremost.  Not just dance that is so sweet because it “includes” people with physical disabilities.  I feel AXIS has moved beyond that initial desire to serve all populations, and now have said, we are all equal, expressive dancers. The dancers with disabilities have strengthened other aspects of movement that those without those limitations might not be able to achieve or understand.  The one piece I enjoyed the most, caused me to look at the human body, and it’s appendages, in an entirely new way.  It was expressive dance first and foremost. Seeing AXIS in April made me want to explore movement further in my own art form.”  – Michael

—————-

“I first heard about AXIS from a Tri-Valley Times article about the recent dance

performance. I love that someone in a wheelchair can “dance”.  How do you choreograph that?

After seeing AXIS, I am much more informed about a side of a disabled person I had never seen before – dance. The April performance made me feel joyous just as a dance performance by Paul Taylor Dance Company can.

I thought about attending the Monday evening dance class, but, alas, I have not followed through.

Keep-up the good work for I don’t know of any dance company doing what you do.  I even sent a copy of the April dance performance article to a patient of mine who uses a wheelchair.  Just wanted him to know. “  – Richard

(Richard – we’d love to see you at an AXIS class soon! And thank you for helping us spread the word!)

Photos Courtesy of Ren Dodge

“Dear audience, this —” a dancer said, extending a hand, “— is an invitation.”

And it was for sophomore Juan Irizarry, who joined a member of the AXIS Dance Company on the stage at the Space Place Theater at the University of Iowa on Friday, April 26.

“I was extremely nervous,” Irizarry said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, I’m going on stage, oh my God.’ It was funny because [the dancer] said, ‘We want people to feel comfortable. We want the audience member to know the experience of being on stage.’”

This piece, which was the third and final of the evening’s show, was audience-directed from the very beginning. Dancers spoke to the audience directly, came out into the theater and finally danced with the audience members they brought on stage. 

Irizarry said that it was somewhat out of the ordinary for a professional company to interact with the audience in this way, but it may be that the company itself is somewhat out of the ordinary. AXIS practices what they call “physically integrated dance,” which integrates dancers with and without disabilities.

Associate Professor of Dance Jennifer Smith, who helped organize the excursion along with the Terpsichore Dance Collective, had been intrigued with the work of AXIS for years.

“I’m interested in them because of the whole somatic-based program that dance has really become, and recognizing the accessibility of the body in so many ways that we sometimes neglect to recognize, and how the body is an expressive tool in so many ways,” she said.

The evening’s performances, particularly the first one, explored this “accessibility of the body.” Titled “Full of Words,” it featured five dancers, two of whom were in wheelchairs.
According to the program, the dance meditated on “what it is to be human.”

“The entire piece, for me, was about human conversations and just everyday moments and everyday action, but there was so much awareness and beauty in all of it,” junior Evelyn Langley said. “Right now, I feel like I want to live in the world of this dance and I didn’t want it to end.”

Freshman Hannah Steele shared this desire.

“They all just connected so well with each other. It made me want to go and connect with them too,” she said.

The second piece offered some comedy in the evening’s show. According to the program, the piece, titled “The Narrowing,” “explores the nature of performance itself from the performer’s perspective.”

The duet was performed by two men, one of whom was in a wheelchair.

“I liked it a lot, I really did,” junior Emily Diklich said. “I just really liked how there were moments where they were doing the same movement. We saw how movement in a chair vs. in a wheelchair can be the same. And how well they moved together is just absolutely amazing.”

Overall, the excursion seemed to be a success, as the Knox students who went stayed after the performance for a brief question-and-answer session with the dancers.

Smith said that she hopes to make more opportunities like this available.

“One of the things that I’m really interested in doing … is trying to get out there and see more live performance,” she said. “I just think it’s such an important aspect of studying any kind of performing art, and we don’t do it often enough. It just kind of seemed like a win-win for everybody.”

Every touring company knows how challenging it is to take the show on the road. But the amount of creative problem-solving and contingency planning that AXIS staff and dancers have to engage in is difficult to imagine until you experience it, as I did on my first tour with AXIS in 1992.

We were headed to the Michigan Women’s Music Festival and requested to show up at the airport at least 2-1/2 hours before the flight. Having frequently traveled by air for work using my manual wheelchair, I wondered why so early? Answer: it was to allow time to break down Judy’s power chair, package up its most fragile parts, and deal with the two huge lead acid batteries that powered it. This was done inside the airport’s main check-in area, in midst of the usual throng of passengers and luggage. Well, while one of the dancers was carefully working to disconnect the cables from the battery terminals with a wrench, a man passing by felt compelled to help.

Next thing we see is an enormous shower of sparks shooting upward – 8, 9, 10 feet high. When the smoke cleared and people stopped screaming, we could see the wrench now perfectly melted and welded to the positive and negative terminals on Judy’s sole set of batteries. Sigh. All I could think was, we didn’t even make it through check-in before something exploded!

A very long, adventurous story made short: we figured out a solution, and with only moments to spare made our flight and had a very successful tour. I had discovered what would make touring with AXIS the stuff of legend. And I remember thinking after that first tour: it’s going to take a lot of wrenches, duct tape and bubble wrap to keep this company going!

And for 25 years, it has taken that, and so, so, so much more to continue making AXIS dance magic happen. A huge, heartfelt thank you to everyone who’s been part of this amazing (if in the beginning improbable) odyssey and endeavor!

Victoria Marks returns to AXIS to choreograph this new work inspired by the logic of “if/then” statements. “Creating with AXIS is always an experiment!”

Laura Hazlett, costume designer, is very honored to be working with AXIS for the first time, and brings “creativity, quality, and whimsy” to her creations in film, dance, theatre, etc. www.laurahazlett.com

Beth Custer, multi-talented musician and composer,  will be performing live on Friday and Saturday nights as The Best Custer Trio, joined by percussionist Jan Jackson and guitarist David James. www.bethcuster.com

 Writer/dramaturg Sibyl O’Malley is an LA-based playwright and is happy to be a part of the creative process. Maybe you’ve seen some of her writing exercises on Facebook, ex. “Name the Top 3 Forces in the Room!”

Bay Area’s beloved Jack Carpenter is new to the AXIS circle, but does a stunning job with the lighting design for all three pieces for the 25th Anniversary.

Jon Gourdine, production manager and master electrician, is new to the production side of dance, but is thrilled to be with AXIS for the 25th Anniversary: “It is a privilege to be able to work with this unique and remarkable company on this most momentous occasion. Bravo AXIS!”

Patricia Mahoney has been all over the country being a stage manager, but feels pleasantly at home with AXIS.

Allan Ulrich
April 7, 2013 ( originally appeared in Datebook, SF Chronicle)

How wrong can a writer be? Back in 1987, when AXIS announced its first season, the very idea of a dance company highlighting performers who were partially abled (we used another term in those days) struck me as an example of Bay Area political correctness run amok. I suspect others shared my skepticism.

Having eaten my words and devoured my thoughts long ago, I rued my folly anew as I recently watched AXIS at Oakland’s Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in rehearsal for its 25th anniversary season. On this gray afternoon, Victoria Marks, a highly respected Los Angeles choreographer and academic, was putting the five-member cast through her premiere, “what if would you,” a talking dance piece that traded in ambiguity of word and gesture. One of the dancers navigated the space in a wheelchair; a second toted a cane. The others were fully abled. The cast’s addresses to the invisible audience and the demanding use of the arms presented no problem for the performers. A phalanx of backs was imposing. Even in risky moments – a couple of times, Joel Brown’s wheelchair seemed on the verge of toppling over – everyone was in control. AXIS, you sensed, is not a dance company that needs to make excuses.

Founding artistic director Judith Smith seems happy about the new piece and the upward trajectory of the company in general. “Twenty-five years ago,” she says, “I never expected to have a regular season.” The genesis of AXIS, she recalls, was a series of workshops for women in wheelchairs held by occupational therapist Thaïs Mazur. Smith, who had fancied a career as an equestrian (“I thought I’d jump horses all my life”), until she was injured in an automobile accident when she was 17, was intrigued. She wasn’t the only one. “Those workshops drew us together,” Smith said. That was all the prompting she needed. After holding auditions, she gathered up enough of a company, including herself, to present a season at Dance Brigade’s “Furious Feet” festival. The dance community was responsive. Pioneering aerialist Terry Sendgraff invited the troupe to work out on trapezes.

A quarter-century later, Smith can boast that Axis has performed in more than 100 cities in this country and has toured as far afield as Croatia and Siberia. The troupe has also appeared twice on FOX TV’s “So You Think You Can Dance.” Smith expresses pride in the company’s annual performance regimen in public schools. (“We reach 15,000 kids a year.”)

AXIS, like its well-known English counterpart, Candoco (which opened a few years later), represent dramatic shifts in society’s perception of disabled people and the performing arts.

But what makes AXIS so appealing to general dance audiences? Credit Smith’s aesthetic policy. From the beginning, she planned to mingle disabled and abled dancers. At the moment, two of the latter include Sonsherée Giles, a diminutive firebrand, who is also the troupe’s associate director, and Sebastian Grubb, a familiar face on the local dance scene, most prominently as a member of Scott Wells’ company.

Since then, AXIS has evolved into a hotbed of urgent contemporary dance.

“I was always hooked on experimentation,” Smith says. “As our profile has grown, I have always looked for emerging choreographers. This has been a fun thing for me.”

AXIS’ upcoming concert bears out the claim. The all-female roster, in addition to Marks, includes Sonya Delwaide. She was the first outside choreographer commissioned by Smith, and her new Schubert-inspired duet will be her eighth piece for the company. Then, Amy Seiwert, one of the area’s more prominent classicists, will make her Axis debut with “The Reflective Surface.”

Over the years, Margaret Jenkins, Joanna Haigood, Joe Goode and Alex Ketley have also accepted Smith’s invitation to deliver a dance. Among the roster of nationally recognized choreographers who have made work for AXIS, the names of Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petronio, Ann Carlson and David Dorfman loom highest.

Dorfman, who prepared “Light Shelter” for AXIS in 2009, recalls seeing the company at booking conferences in the mid-1990s and later encountered them in Minneapolis.”Life is full of new experiences,” Dorfman said in a conversation from New York. “You watch disabled dancers perform and you don’t want to work with the able-bodied anymore. I learned so much. We improvised vocabularies, and after a while you lose any sense of who’s disabled or what ‘disabled’ even means. The way they give themselves to each other is extraordinary.”

Marks also believes that working with AXIS prompts mental readjustment.
“I have loved, fallen out of love and found myself in love again with dance. It is conventionally about virtuosity, but I make dances for specific people. With Axis, I am forced to rethink what I mean by ability and disability.”

AXIS has experienced a financial shortfall this season. Smith has been forced to reduce the number of dancers to five on tour and “seven and a half” at home. A planned engagement at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fell through because of a shortage of funds, “a nightmare,” she calls it.
But Smith, now in her early 50s, still looks ahead to Axis’ second quarter-century. She is pushing for a job-training program: “Not enough disabled people know that they can dance,” she says. And she is seeking a more daring repertoire: a pet project is a restaging of Trisha Brown’s classic “Set and Reset.”
Smith has not yet investigated Brown’s distinctive postmodernism, which has only whetted her appetite for a new adventure. “I love a wide range of physicality,” she says. “I want to redefine it. This,” she declares with a wave of her hand, “is not a job for the meek.”

AXIS Dance Company: Premieres by Sonya Delwaide, Victoria Marks, Amy Seiwert. 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. April 14, Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1425 Alice St., Oakland. $10-$25. (800) 838-3006.  www.brownpapertickets.org
Allan Ulrich is The San Francisco Chronicle’s dance correspondent. E-mail: adolphson@sfchronicle.com
Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/performance/article/Axis-Dance-Company-marks-25th-anniversary-4412606.php#ixzz2Poaon5nb

For the first time in 25 years of its existence, AXIS Dance Company offers an accessible, age appropriate intensive called Get inMotion!.

Mark Travis Rivera is the artistic director of marked dance project, a modern company for disabled and non-disabled dancers in New Jersey. He is a company dancer for Band of Artists in Philadelphia,  PA. Mark began his dance training under the direction of Erin Pride and attends William Paterson University where he studies communication and women’s & gender studies.

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