Writer Chloé Cooper Jones has sacral agenesis, a congenital disability that affects the lower spine. In this beautiful essay—in which she describes her participation in a dance work choreographed by her boyfriend, Matty Davis—she writes about fear and disgust as forms of self-protection, opening up to and trusting a partner, and expanding the definition of “movement.”
I asked him how limited he would be if the partner in the rehearsal room had a body like mine. I was shocked to hear my own question, and I felt as though someone else had asked it. “Easy Beauty,” the book I’d spent the last year promoting, was in part about my reluctance to acknowledge my disability, preferring to abandon the notion of a body altogether and lead instead with my ideas, words or accomplishments in conversations with others. I had charted my attempts to do this less, to be more in tune with my identity as a disabled woman. But the lessons of self-acceptance that I had learned and written about felt puny and distant in the face of this hypothetical — me in a room, dancing.
“Do you ever watch the New York City Marathon?” he asked. I did not. “I cry watching the runners,” he told me. It was not the ones who won or broke records that moved him so deeply, but the ones who were, regardless of their position in the pack, simply reaching for and ascending to their own personal physical pinnacle. This was the kind of movement he was interested in. Less compelling to him was a history of dance traditions that, like ballet, imposed a set of movements onto bodies — the movements themselves being the pinnacle to be attained, and attainment possible for a tiny sliver of existing human bodies, and even then, only briefly. That common practice, what I associated with dance, was not interesting to him and could not be further from the center of his approach.
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