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INFINITY'S NUMBER
Mary Brennan
When dancer Kitty Lunn broke her spinal cord, she faced a tough choice:
give up or get going. The rest, says Mary Brennan, is history.
American Kitty Lunn is - in between sips of tea - bringing me up to
speed on the why and how of Infinity Dance Theater. Why she founded
it, in the 1990s. What kind of repertoire we'll see at Tramway when
the New York-based company performs there on Saturday and again, on
Monday. How she fixed on Infinity as a company name.
"I chose Infinity because it's the symbol of never-ending motion,"
she says. Which is fair enough. However, it's only when you consider
the circumstances that gave rise to the company - and the dancers
who are part of it - that Lunn's choice reveals how appropriate this
image of open-ended and unconfined energy is.
Following an accident in 1987, Lunn - a former soloist with the
Washington Ballet - has been a wheelchair user. "One piece of ice
and two seconds and you, too, can join the club that I belong to,"
she says, merrily. Her ability to joke about this is, I think, a
typical courtesy to others - it signals that she isn't looking for
any rigmarole of "poor you - how tragic, but how brave etc".
Even so, her accident was one of those devastating random happenings
that we all dread. "I was leaving a building, going down a flight of
stairs. And I slipped," she tells me. "It was winter. There was one
piece of ice . . . I fell down six steps and I broke my back, and
got a spinal cord injury. So life changes, in the blink of an eye."
Surgery did not reverse those changes. After months in hospital,
Lunn found herself confronting a future that seemed the bleak
antithesis to all she's dreamed of and worked for, since early
childhood. She's forthright - but just as low key, unhistrionic -
about this depressing aftermath. "I thought the dancing was over."
The engagingly vivacious Lunn is quite soft-spoken, but at this
point her voice noticeably lowers. "I tried very, very hard to not
want to dance any more. To not need to dance any more. And I was
miserably unhappy. So much so, that I was suicidal." There's a
pause. And it's as if Lunn is shaking herself free of those shadows
for, when she continues, her whole demeanour is back on the bright
side. "After the third suicide attempt I guess I decided I'd better
figure out what I'm supposed to be doing, because I'm no good at
suicide."
A mere month before her accident, Lunn had met Andrew MacMillan, the
man who is now her husband - "our courtship took place in hospital,
and we were married six months after I got out. He is not a dancer."
Maybe not: but as an actor, MacMillan clearly understood the loss of
self that Lunn was experiencing, by being cut off from her art. And
he became the catalyst that reconnected her with her former world.
"He said, 'If you really want to dance, what's stopping you? Is
there a rule, or a law?' And, of course, I realized I was stopping
myself. So I went back to ballet class. Put my $10 on the table in
fear and trembling - was I going to be laughed right out of the
room? Class started. Instantly I just knew I was going to be all
right."
What wasn't alright, however, was the lack of dance classes open to
people with disabilities - or indeed those supposedly integrated
companies which, to Lunn's mind, were unimaginative, tokenistic, in
their use of disabled dancers. The only way to challenge this was to
start her own company, and lead by example.
"There are tow rules hard and fast, for this company - whoever is
doing the choreography," she says. "One: there must be parity of
movement. IT can't just e the non-disabled dancers doing all of the
dancing. Two: no wheelies allowed. It's a stereotype. And it's
totally apparatus-driven."
Instead, she looks for choreography that requires serious,
disciplined technique, be it based on classical ballet, contemporary
dance, or - as in Reflections - the Argentinian tango.
Drawing on her own professional background of training and
performance, Lunn has transposed the principles of ballet and modern
dance into a movement system for dancers using wheelchairs. She's
homed in on shape, rhythm, and dynamic, and the result is a
vocabulary that inspires and intrigues choreographers such as Peter
Pucci (of Pilobolus fame). His company piece, Hoop-LA!, is a fun,
nonsensical finale to Saturday's show. His solo for Lunn, In time
like air, is the curtain-raiser, though she prefers to call it a
duet for herself and her wheelchair - a way of showing that "this
has no soul, is an integral part of my freedom".
"Without my chair, I'm really an invalid," she says. "I never refer
to myself as wheelchair-bound - that sounds like I'm in chains. I'd
rather describe myself as a dancer who sits down a lot. And you
know, if someone like Mark Morris or Baryshnikov put a dancer in a
rolling chair, it would be seen as very interesting, radical even.
The difference is: at the end, they would get out of the chair and
take the curtain call."
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