Challenging the label

12 August 2010
Watching a performance by Auckland integrated dance company Touch Compass in 1998 was a life-changing experience for Suzanne Cowan.

Having lost the use of both her legs in a road accident several years earlier, the woman who started dancing when she was five assumed her days performing on stage were over. Within 18 months, Suzanne was touring internationally as a dancer and assistant teacher with the London-based CandoCo dance company.

Working with world-renowned choreographers Javier de Frutos, Doug Elkins and Finn Walker encouraged her to follow her own choreographic career. Since returning to New Zealand in 2004, she has worked with Touch Compass as a dancer and choreographer, studied choreography at UNITEC and completed a masters degree in Creative and Performing Arts at Auckland University.

Her thesis explored how dance and disability can be combined as a powerful way of shifting perceptions around disability.

Suzanne believes it is important that disability be “part of the fabric of artistic life, reflecting an integral part of the human experience”.

In the dance work Grotteschi, a character piece she created from her masters degree research, she played with stereotypes of disability and ideas of freakishness.

“I was interested in how disabled people have been presented, particularly on stage. I really wanted to reference the freak show, which is an important part of disability history,” she explains. “That’s why I chose this character piece, where I’m Ava the Spiderwoman and my dance partner is Argyle the Magnificent Mantis Man.”

The piece uses a dance style known as contact improvisation, based on a rolling point of contact between two bodies and using the momentum of gravity to create the choreography. Grotteschi was described by the New Zealand Herald as an “enthralling duet”, and the “standout highlight” of the opening week of the 2008 Tempo New Zealand Festival of Dance.

Challenging perceptions of disability

Suzanne’s desire to challenge perceptions of disability and present physical impairment as an integral part of human experience were also strong themes in House of Memories, the centrepiece of her stint in Dunedin as recipient of the 2010 Caroline Plummer Fellowship in Community Dance. The show, performed in a villa near the University of Otago, provided insights into the world of visual impairment.

Audiences were led through a series of rooms to experience five-minute slices of the lives of the performers, almost all of whom had sight impairments. One room featured the sound equipment of a blind man juxtaposed with a graceful duet derived from guiding techniques. In another, the audience experienced the precious memories of a man’s ballroom dancing days brought to life with a live band. Interest in the six performances was so high people had to be turned away.

As well as the opportunity to take her choreography in a new direction, working with members of Dunedin’s visually impaired community was a humbling experience for Suzanne, and “a fascinating journey of discovery”.

Part of her research involved being blindfolded throughout a show staged by university theatre students.

“It was quite a scary experience to have my sight taken away. The relationship between my inner and outer world shifted dramatically. Gradually I relaxed around my feelings of heightened vulnerability and let myself just enjoy the passing show. At the end I felt like I had journeyed into another world.”