Reflections in Sequins and Satin

Mary Verdi-Fletcher remembers vividly the startled look on dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones’ face when she showed up to take one of his master classes. “I told him, ‘Don’t worry about me; I will just translate what you are doing. Don’t give it a second thought,’ ” she says.

Jones’ brief moment of panic came about because Verdi-Fletcher dances from a wheelchair.

Born with spina bifida in 1955 in Cleveland, Ohio, Verdi-Fletcher says that even as a child in leg braces, she knew she had to dance. Coming from a family of artists (her mother was a dancer and her father a professional musician), she says dancing was in her blood. She would routinely break her leg braces trying to dance. After acquiring a series of progressively stronger braces, she finally broke her leg instead of her braces. Because of that incident she was advised by her doctor to use a wheelchair.

Being in a wheelchair did little to deter Verdi-Fletcher from dancing, and at age 12, trying to emulate dance moves she saw onAmerican Bandstand, she broke a wheel off her wheelchair. As she grew up and into a career as one of the nation’s first professional dancers in a wheelchair, Verdi-Fletcher began to develop less destructive ways to use her wheelchair to dance.

A pioneer out of necessity, she not only had to overcome people’s perceptions about who could be a dancer; she also had to invent a new technique that allowed people in wheelchairs to dance. “Because I was only dancing and working with non-disabled dancers, I had to look at what they were doing and come up with translations,” she says. Part of her approach is what she calls “smooth technique,” in which wheeling the chair does not look pedestrian.

After years of proving her mettle as an independent professional dancer in the Cleveland area, in 1980 Verdi-Fletcher founded Dancing Wheels, the country’s first physically integrated professional dance company, combining disabled and non-disabled dancers. A joint venture with Cleveland Ballet followed in the 1990s, along with the additions of Dancing Wheels’ affiliated school, summer programs, and community outreach programs. As a result, numerous wheelchair, or “sit-down,” dancers have been able to take dance classes with their “stand-up” counterparts by using Verdi-Fletcher’s translation methods and techniques. Today Dancing Wheels’ integrated school boasts 984 students and its professional company, which tours nationally and internationally, employs 13, 4 of them dancers in wheelchairs.

The Approach

Verdi-Fletcher’s translations key off of several factors in the movement, such as balance, quickness, speed, and intention, regardless of the technique (ballet, modern, or others). Sit-down dancers use their arms to represent leg and feet movements, arm movements, or a combination of both.

While Verdi-Fletcher’s translations are geared typically to wheelchair dancers with a good deal of upper-body mobility, her translations can be modified to fit the needs of dancers with lesser physical capabilities. Many of her translations are common-sense interpretations of dance movements, says Verdi-Fletcher. For example, a pirouette is translated into making the wheelchair spin in a circle, jumps into popping wheelies, and a grapevine motion into a zigzag motion with the chair. The trick, says Verdi-Fletcher, is incorporating both leg and arm movements into port de bras while at the same time controlling the motion of the wheelchair.

Teaching Translation

“If you don’t know how to tap dance, you can’t teach someone to tap dance,” says Dancing Wheels School coordinator Kristen Stilwell. To that end, Stilwell—a stand-up dancer—feels that those who wish to teach dancers in wheelchairs need firsthand experience in a wheelchair in order to learn its capabilities. Learning how to move and manipulate a wheelchair is a good first step in learning how to translate dance movement to a sit-down dancer.

“Wheelchairs are like dance shoes,” says Verdi-Fletcher. “They are all different and are fitted to the person in the chair.”

Because wheelchairs are also very expensive, most sit-down dancers dance in their everyday chairs. That can mean limitations in mobility compared to a chair specifically designed for dance. Whether the wheelchair is powered or non-powered, whether it is weighted more in the front (making it harder to do wheelies), differences in turning radius, tip bars, the types of casters and wheels, the camber of the wheels—all can factor into the sit-down dancer’s range and ease of mobility.

“The chair is really the instrument by which a dancer can achieve their level of performance,” says Verdi-Fletcher. “A more capable dancer in an older chair with limited movement capabilities can be outperformed by a dancer of lesser physical capabilities but with a better chair.”

In teaching sit-down dancers, says Verdi-Fletcher, “the main focus in a classroom setting is looking at what would benefit [them].” She and the other teachers at Dancing Wheels identify the muscles being worked by a stand-up dancer in a given movement and translate that movement into a motion a sit-down dancer can emulate. For example, a plié works a stand-up dancer’s legs to build strength; sit-down dancers would emulate that motion and resistance using their arms, also to build strength. Or sit-down dancers with a broader range of mobility might hold onto a ballet barre and work one or both legs.

“There are so many variables in translation that have to be put together,” says Stilwell. “It is just like the makeup of a sentence; you need the right combination of movements to construct a proper translation.

It can be mind-boggling to novice sit-down dancers when they see a stand-up dancer moving arms and legs in all directions. How can they translate the movement they are seeing? Stilwell advises those who want to teach sit-down dancers to start slowly, just as they would with any dance student. She teaches her student wheelers basic moves such as a “wheelie bump” (slightly popping the front wheels of the chair off the ground). For this move, the dancer puts her hands on her chair’s wheels, then takes them back to her hips and pushes forward to raise the chair, being careful not to lean forward and fall. Once that is mastered, the student can move on to executing full-blown wheelies.

One student in the Dancing Wheels School who is learning to perfect the art of the wheelie is 13-year-old Alexandra Martinez, a member of Dancing Wheels Junior Dance Company. Born with spina bifida and paralyzed from the knees down, Martinez has been taking dance lessons since age 5 and sees balancing in her chair as one of her toughest obstacles in learning to dance.

Martinez and her sister Gabriella, a 14-year-old stand-up dancer and fellow Junior Company member, take ballet, modern, and hip-hop classes together and help each other with skills such as spotting during pirouettes and proper partnering technique.

“Watch out for your toes,” says Gabriella, referring to sit-down/stand-up partnering. “You can get run over if you are not paying attention.”

Sit-down/stand-up partnering is not traditional counterbalance partnering, says Stilwell. There are the same trust issues, but partnering someone in a chair requires both dancers to know the wheelchair’s capabilities with regard to ease of movement, braking, turning radius, proneness to tipping, and how fast the sit-down dancer can move in the chair.

“When partnering a wheeler, you never want to take their hands behind their head because that will cause them to tip forward,” says Stilwell. “Keep their hands in front of their face so you are not pulling out their shoulders.” As a member of Dancing Wheels’ professional company, Stilwell is all too familiar with what can go wrong in sit-down/stand-up partnering and group work if all parties aren’t mindful of each other. She once suffered a concussion when a wheelchair banged into her head.

Verdi-Fletcher believes there is a mechanism of control and stability that needs to happen in sit-down/stand-up partnering. “When that doesn’t happen, that’s when you see people in wheelchairs being flipped over backwards and stand-ups being run over.”

While much of stand-up dance technique can be translated to the dancer in a wheelchair, the opposite is not always true. Some movements in Verdi-Fletcher’s wheelchair technique, such as “feathering” the chair (so that viewers can hardly see the push) and gliding, can be done only by a sit-down dancer.

The Future of Translation

The Dancing Wheels Company and School have translated techniques in ballet, modern, jazz, ballroom, and hip-hop that have given opportunities to sit-down dancers they might not otherwise have had. Verdi-Fletcher hopes to include other forms of dance such as tap, if the problem of how to affix taps to a wheelchair can be resolved.

Dancing Wheels is also applying its translation methods to teaching dancers with other disabilities, such as impaired vision or hearing and learning disorders.

Verdi-Fletcher and former Dancing Wheels company member Mark Tomasic are in the beginning stages of codifying Verdi-Fletcher’s wheelchair technique and translations. In the near future they hope to release a DVD and training manual that will allow dance teachers to integrate sit-down dancers into their classes. Some other goals Verdi-Fletcher sees for the project are to offer teacher certification in translation and wheelchair technique, and to make it possible for college and university dance programs to offer degree programs for dancers in wheelchairs.

Verdi-Fletcher’s translations have allowed her company to work with notable choreographers, including Dianne McIntyre, Pilobolus’ Rebecca Anderson, Nai-Ni Chen, and Keith Young. While many of the choreographers the company brings in have never worked with sit-down dancers, the dancers have the tools to adapt to most anything thrown at them. Thus the choreographers have the freedom to create while the dancers take care of the translations. Verdi-Fletcher says she gets involved in the process only when a choreographer requests it.

Verdi-Fletcher’s translations have also helped and inspired others, like sit-down dancer Alana Wallace. After taking a Dancing Wheels summer workshop, she founded Chicago’s physically integrated company, Dance Detour. Other physically integrated professional dance companies include Axis Dance Company in Oakland, California; Full Radius Dance in Atlanta, Georgia; and Verlezza Dance in Shaker Heights, Ohio, run by former Dancing Wheels co-artistic director Sabatino Verlezza.

Although physically integrated dance does not have a huge presence on the nation’s dance scene, it is on the rise, offering not only its own inherent artistic value but also challenging prevailing attitudes about disability and dance. Like Verdi-Fletcher’s Dancing Wheels, the aforementioned companies and others are giving rise to new methods of translation to meet the needs of their preferred dance styles.

With translation techniques like those developed by Verdi-Fletcher and others, the door to dance has been swung wide open to those with physical handicaps, helping to build a future of acceptance and possibility for everyone who wants to dance.

For more information, visit dancingwheels.org.

Tips for Teaching Sit-Down Dancers

Mary Verdi-Fletcher outlines her teaching approach

1) Don’t think inability. First think the students can, and then determine how far they can go. If a teacher starts out thinking that the students are incapable because they are disabled, then the students will not grow to their full potential.

2) Avoid assumptions. Not everyone in a wheelchair is the same. People arrive at their disabilities from different ways such as birth defects, sickness, and accidents; their physical abilities vary greatly.

3) Always ask. Generally the best way to learn the capabilities of a student with a disability is to ask. Initially students might not feel comfortable telling you everything, but as confidence in your relationship grows, you’ll be able to learn more about what they can and can’t do.

4) Be open. Don’t be afraid to bring these students into a class. Experimenting together can prove rewarding for both student and teacher. Have an open dialogue with non-disabled students and the student with the disability (and parents, if underage) about the newness of the situation, encouraging open-mindedness and patience.

5) Seek training. As in the instruction of all dance techniques, it is beneficial to seek out a school or dance company that offers physically integrated dance training to teachers. A wellspring of knowledge has come from years of experimentation and practice in the field.

“Who is this Greek chap Clitoris they’re all talking about?”

- Lord Albermarle, 1918

The above enquiry was made by Lord Albermarle, the judge presiding over a 1918 defamation action by Maud Allan, one of the forgotten names and identities of history. The story is not only fascinating in its own right, it is also illustrative of the perceptions and thoughts of a past age, of prejudices, pseudo-science and the power of the mob. Have we advanced since then or merely substituted new prejudices? How far have we come?

Maud Allan

Maud Allen (1873-1956) was a famous, or more correctly infamous, dancer who was born in Canada as Beulah Maude Durrant, raised in San Francisco, and who later trained in piano in Berlin. When her brother was hanged in 1898 for the murder of two women in San Francisco, the trauma affected her for the rest of her life. She changed her name to Maud Allan, abandoned her career as a pianist and became a dancer.

In 1906 she premiered her production of Vision of Salome, based loosely on Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Especially notorious was her Dance of the Seven Veils.

She became billed as “The Salome Dancer” and in 1908 took her show to England where she was obliged to put on extra shows to cater to demand, 250 performances in less than one year. From 1910 she toured the US, Australia, Africa and Asia. By 1918, with her popularity declining as younger performers in skimpy outfits attracted greater numbers, she was appearing in Vision of Salome again in London.

Like Isadora Duncan, a contemporary who also danced in brief, provocative costume, her dancing was interpretive. According to Maud Allan in 1908:

"The art of dancing, as understood by the great masses, is a series of regular rhythmical movements requiring a certain music; not so in my work. In that the movements of the plastic poser are inspired by the music.... What one usually only vaguely feels when listening to beautiful music I am trying, through movement and mimicry, to express clearly and deeply - the thought which seems to hover on the wings of the melody."

The New York Times reported on her 1910 performance in the US:

"Bare-limbed and scantily draped in filmy gauzes, diaphanous in texture and unvivid in colour, she floats from one pose to the next, emphasizing the plastic transitions with waving arms and raised legs and sundry poses of the head. Miss Allan in spirit and in the nature of her dances resembles her predecessors. However, she is more beautiful in face and figure than some of them, and she has a grace, a picturesque personal quality, which is all her own."

Noel Pemberton Billing:

Billing was a demagogic pre-Fascist who espoused his racist, xenophobic views from a newspaper he published, originally named The Imperialist and later renamed The Vigilante. Particular targets had been Jews, Germans and homosexuals. In one swoop in 1918 he linked all three. Billing published that the German secret service had a list – the Berlin Black Book - of 47,000 British perverts. These perverts, it was alleged, were preventing the full effort of Britain being applied to the war then in progress in that they were corrupt and/or were being blackmailed by a secret German society known as The Unseen Hand.

The information in the Berlin Black Book comprised:

“..reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute.”

According to Billings:

“It is a most catholic miscellany. The names of Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors, members of His Majesty’s Household follow each other with no order of precedence.”

The reference to “dancing girls” was a reference to Maud Allan.

Billings had heard, and believed, rumours that Maud Allan was in a lesbian relationship with Margot Asquith, the wife of former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. He also believed that the three were secretly assisting Germany and betraying England.

In February, 1918, it was announced by theatrical producer, Jack Grein, that Maud Allan would give two private performances of Oscar Wilde's Salomé in April. The reason for the private showing was the play was banned from public showing by order of the Lord Chancellor as being blasphemous.

That was followed, in the same month by a blistering attack by Billing on Maud Allan in an article in The Vigilante. Published on the front page under a heading “The Cult of the Clitoris”, he wrote that:

“To be a member of Maud Allan’s private performances in Oscar Wilde’s Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of those members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000.”

It sounds innocuous enough today but not so in 1918:

From the late 18th century until the early 20th century there was a consistent medical characterisation of the anatomy of a lesbian as having an unusually large clitoris. Furthermore, such thinking held, lesbians were masculinised females, throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage, imperfect women who were more concerned with sexual pleasure than reproduction.

Oscar Wilde was an infamous disgraced author and playwright, considered by society to be a moral pervert. His work Salome was seen as a representation of degenerate sexual lust, sexual crime and unnatural passions, in the words of one writer that it had been “vilified for some 25 years as a degenerate's hymn to Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Translated, Billing was accusing Maud Allan of being a lesbian, of spreading lesbianism and of being part of The Unseen Hand.

In March 1918 Allan commenced criminal proceedings for obscene, criminal and defamatory libel.

Eileen Villiers-Stuart:

Noel Pemberton Billing and Eileen Villiers-Stuart arriving at the Old Bailey

At this time the government in power under David Lloyd George had begun peace negotiations with the German foreign minister. This was opposed by the British generals and by the Far Right. There was talk of postponing the Maud Allan trial and using the Berlin Black Book to smear David Lloyd George and his supporters.

The government hired Eileen Villiers-Stuart to compromise Billing. She was to become involved with him, give him information and sleep with him, then lure him to a male brothel to be secretly photographed and thereafter blackmailed. Villiers-Stuart, a 25 year old bigamist who been the mistress of Asquith’s chief Whip, met with Billings and became infatuated with him. Not only did she flip her allegiance, she became his mistress, told him of the conspiracy against him and became a star witness for him in court.

Background to the trial:

The trial began in May 1918 with Billing appearing for himself. (Billing had graduated in law but not practised).

Petra Rau in her work English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950, suggests that the perceived perversions at that time were linked with German identity. Recruiting posters portrayed Germans as animal brutes ravishing pure women. Homosexuality was portrayed as a German phenomenon, with Lord Alfred Douglas (who had been Oscar Wilde’s lover and who later repudiated both his homosexuality and Wilde) writing in 1916:

Two foes thou hast, one there one here,

One far, one intimately near,

Two filthy fogs blot out they light:
The German and the Sodomite.

It was against a backdrop of such public sentiments that the Maud Allan trial proceeded, a Canadian born dancer trained in Berlin, a friend of the rumoured German sympathiser Margot Asquith and performing a work based on the writings of Oscar Wilde, a disgraced sodomite.

Moreover, as Rau points out, it was perceived by those in the know that only medical experts, traitorous perverts (read here lesbians) and Germans knew what a clitoris was. The fact that Maud Allan knew the meaning of the word, coupled with her dancing, was claimed to be evidence of her sexual deviance.

According to Samuel Hymes in his 1990 book A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, the lack of knowledge of female anatomy and female sexual function at that time prompted Lord Albermarle’s remark, quoted at the beginning of this item, to his colleagues on visiting the Turf Club.

Today we may be incredulous at the 1918 public’s lack of knowledge of anatomy and sexual function so as not to know what a clitoris was but it was quite different in 1918. During the testimony of one witness who used the term “orgasm”, the cross-examining barrister, puzzled, asked if it were ''some unnatural vice.''

The trial:

Billing’s first witness was Eileen Villiers-Stuart who testified that she had been shown the Black Book by two politicians who had been killed in the war. She claimed that the names of Herbert Asquith, Margot Asquith and Richard Haldane, the former Secretary of State for War and former Lord Chancellor, were prominent in the book. When Chief Judge Darling ordered her to leave the witness box, she declared that his name was in the book as well.

Billing presented Dr Serell Cooke as a witness for the defence. He testified that it was his opinion, and of his Harley Street colleagues, that texts such as Salome stimulated thoughts of perversions in the mind of the reader. Based solely on their intent to stage a private performance of Salome, Dr Cooke diagnosed the theatrical producer Jacob Grein as a secret homosexual posing as a happy family man and Maud Allan as a sadistic prostitute. Asked by the judge ''Have you any opinion where they ought to be?'' the doctor answered ''Locked up.''

Another witness for Billing was Harold S Spencer, a vindictive young man who had been invalided out of the British Secret Service after obviously insane claims of German conspiracies. He maintained that Edward VII’s mistress was a member of the Unseen Hand. He also explained what Maud Allan’s “Cult of the Clitoris” was:

"In order to show that a cult exists in this country who would gather together to witness a lewd performance for amusement during wartime on the Sabbath... The Cult of the Clitoris meant a cult that would gather together to see a representation of a diseased mad girl."

The reason for the article was expressed to as follows:

"Any performance of a play which has been described by competent critics as an essay in lust, madness and sadism, and is given and attracts people to it at from five guineas to ten guineas a seat, must bring people who have more money than brains; must bring people who are seeking unusual excitement, erotic excitement; and to gather these people together in a room, under the auspices of a naturalised alien (Jack Grein), would open these people to possible German blackmail, and that their names, or anything that transpires, might find their way into German hands, and these people would be blackmailed by the Germans; and it was to prevent this that the article was written."

Billing echoed Spencer’s words:

"Such a play.... is one that is calculated to deprave, one that is calculated to do more harm, not only to young men and young women, but to all who see it, by undermining them, even more than the German army itself."

Even Lord Alfred Douglas gave evidence for the defence. He had written a poem referring to Margot Asquith "bound with Lesbian fillets" and during the trial described Wilde as "the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last three hundred and fifty years". Douglas made such a nuisance of himself that the judge had him evicted from the court.

Allan’s brother’s crimes were also raised as further evidence that her sexuality was genetically predisposed towards criminal and immoral behaviour. It was argued by Billing that perversion and deviance were in the blood of her family.

The verdict:

Billing was acquitted of all charges. The crowd in the gallery jumped to their feet and cheered, women waved handkerchiefs and men their hats. The reaction was the same by the crow outside the court when he emerged, the path being strewn with flowers.

Cynthia Asquith, daughter of Margot and Herbert Asquith, wrote in her diary:

"One can't imagine a more undignified paragraph in English history: at this juncture, that three-quarters of The Times should be taken up with such a farrago of nonsense! It is monstrous that these maniacs should be vindicated in the eyes of the public... Papa came in and announced that the monster maniac Billing had won his case. Damn him! It is such an awful triumph for the unreasonable, such a tonic to the microbe of suspicion which is spreading through the country, and such a stab in the back to people unprotected from such attacks owing to their best and not their worst points."

Basil Thomson, who was head of Special Branch, and in a position to know that Eileen Villiers-Stewart and Harold S. Spencer had lied in court, wrote in his diary:

"Everyone concerned appeared to have been either insane or to have behaved as if he were."

The aftermath:

In September 1918, Villiers-Stuart was convicted of bigamy, and sentenced to nine months' hard labour. In a sworn statement she admitted that, as noted above, the evidence she had given in the Maud Allan trial was entirely fictitious and that she had rehearsed it with Billing and Harold S. Spencer.

Billing retained his seat at the 1918 General Election but with the end of the First World War he was seen as an irrelevance. His reputation was severely damaged when Eileen Villiers-Stewart admitted that the evidence she had given in the Maud Allan trial was fictitious and had been rehearsed with Billing. Knowing that he faced defeat in the next election he retired in 1921 claiming he was too ill to continue.

Allan never returned to dancing and, according to her biographer, by the outbreak of the Second World War "she was living in comparative poverty in a section of the West Wing, a large mansion on Regent's Park". After her house was damaged during the Blitz she returned to the United States. From the 1920’s she taught dance and lived with her secretary and lover, Verna Aldrich. She died in Los Angeles, California in 1956 aged 84.

“Although she has been long forgotten, Maude Allan is one of the most fascinating figures in history.”

- John Simkin, Maud Allan and the Cult of the Clitoris

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