romham’s piece

Photo of romham gallacher © K.Ho

by romham pàdraig gallacher

When Rianne Švelnis and i began this residency, i wanted to explore my current embodiment which has recently come to include costochondritis - or what i call “fire-ribs”. i feel dance viscerally, and have struggled with this additional thoracic pain and immobility; so, i wanted to see the ribcage exposed, manipulated, transformed by and into other body parts (eg, Rianne brilliantly proposed ribs as gills), and see what remained, what could only be realized through fire-ribs’ existence.

We experimented with that for a while, and with the ribcage now outside the body, we were able to dig down, and suddenly i was watching my past, present and future body dancing right in front of me, despite our very different embodiments. Rianne is an incredible, curious, intuitive dancer, and joy was everpresent in this challenging work. That opened space to explore joy and possibility in what i'd been experiencing as intensely limiting.

i thought we were creating a piece loosely about fire-ribs, but that shifted and - like the chest-cracking-open movements we began with - things necessarily peeled away, and a new exploration opened up.

i experience my wheelchair and crutches as integral parts of my body (flesh, chair, crutches, all forming one body), which sometimes feels like I'm in more than one place at a time when any of these elements are apart. Each has a body memory that influences the whole: how i use crutches informs how i use chair, informs how i use flesh. Threeness. Triality.

In the studio, a poly-rhythmic, multidimensional, multi-limbed, and multilocational organism emerged, and these are the central questions we asked: What’s the language this creature is speaking? Can we break that language down to its constituent parts? And ultimately, how do we dance this?

We recognized that the fantastical is a kind of knowledge, that a lack of language is part of language, and that of course language is evolving, with gaps, uncertainties and glitches. So, we put all of that into the dance: Each movement became another building block for this language. Can we put it all together? How exactly do we dance its syntax? Context?

Each movement became another building block for this language. Can we put it all together? How exactly do we dance its syntax? Context?

So, we began with the hunch - a signature of the Ankylosing Spondylitis i also live with, intensified over time. Despite knowing in my bones that no one is disposable, i'd begun seeing my future body as shutting down as a dancer, somehow; only seeing more and deeper hunch, crushing ribs, vertebrae, immobility, compounding Crohn’s, and a future of fear, loss and no-dance. But as Rianne danced and responded to the questions and desires i was practicing bringing into the room, we discovered the hunches’ curling, winding, glitching, popping, gliding, its relationship to the rest of this body. The possibilities were at times overwhelming. How do you take something marked in an ableist society as fundamentally inherently broken, and allow its fullness to reveal itself through a currently able-bodied dancer, without creating inspiration porn?

This called for a practice of consent that included: offering my voice and desires to the space as a choreographer, allowing them to form a sort of scaffolding for the process; supporting Rianne’s desires and exploration of what this meant in her own body; and letting ideas exist freely, keeping what was meant to stay. It demanded deep trust, something we’ve had the opportunity to build over time in All Bodies Dance.

Together we took that hunch out of the claustrophobic overwhelm, and began to see creative possibility, through the alchemy of integrated dance. There are many questions remaining, and rather than being only afraid of them, i’m so excited about the exploration.

romham pàdraig gallacher is an interdisciplinary crip artist who began dancing/ performing/ scheming/ creating with the All Bodies Dance Project in 2014. romham has participated as a dancer and collaborator in many projects with ABDP since then. Their piece Re/Integrate debuted at ABDP’s Magic & Remembering: Dances for stage and screen in 2019, and marked their first intensive foray into choreographing. Their body has changed significantly over the years, and choreographing has become another creative outlet allowing them to explore, play, create, and understand and express their artistic desires.