Dancing like nobody is watching

I've always loved to dance.

When I was little - like, perhaps, five years old, I went to ballet classes in one of the halls in my home town. I wore a bright pink, long sleeved leotard and pink ballet shoes. I still have the leotard stored away in a box of treasures. It has faded with time but is still one of my most treasured possessions (along with my Brownie uniform). I remember our teacher's name was Mrs Stoddart. She called my friend Adine and I her, "Little professionals." I think we were possibly anything but!

I learned to skip by taking ballet lessons. I still remember all the feet and hand positions. If I close my eyes I can still hear some of the music Mrs Stoddart would play as we practiced our skipping and our gallops. The year I started ballet we also put on a concert at the Regent Theatre in Yarram.

Source

It was a real community event! It wasn't just the ballet school involved, but school teachers and a number of local people. We did an adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. I played the Dormouse and an Oyster.

Apparently I had the only solo in the show. I also had three lines. "Treacle!" "Teeth!" and "Treacle!" Before my solo I was supposed to say "Treacle!" I knew I was supposed to say "Treacle!" but I just didn't. I don't know why. Who knows the mind of a five year old anyway?

The whole show really must have made an impact on me because to this day I can remember rehearsing, getting to know the two teachers who played the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, the smell of the piglet we had backstage that played the part of the Duchess' baby and being wheeled down the aisle in my teapot during the show. I remember that this music was used for the painting of the roses dance. I can still hear the music in my head that we used for my solo, but for the life of me I don't know what it is. I wish I could hear it again.

With the moving of our family here, there and everywhere during the 70's I didn't get to continue with ballet...or jazz or anything. Most of that was due to financial reasons I guess. It didn't make me any less passionate about dance, in fact I longed to be involved in dance classes and performing to the point where sometimes a few friends and I would choreograph little routines and present them to our class at school. When I got to High School sometimes there was a dance component in the Physical Education curriculum which made me so happy because it was something I could participate in on a level footing with everyone else. Other than that, there were no dance classes for me. I used to often put records on and choreograph some dances in the play room upstairs at home. Most of these dances were pretty dorky, I must admit, and my sisters and I often have a laugh about it.

Recently though, at the ripe old age of the wrong side of 45 I have finally found a place where I can finally indulge my passion for dancing. This year I have joined the ensemble of Weave Movement Theatre - a talented and diverse dance and movement company comprised of people with and without disabilities. Weave has quite a reputation and has performed at the Melbourne Fringe, Scienceworks and Artshouse, At the moment we are currently engaged in a series of intense dance training workshops with instructors such as Yumi Umiumare, Kat Worth, Michelle Heaven and Caroline Bowditch.

I can't even begin to tell you how much these workshops have meant to me. They are a highlight of my week. I get to hang out with the most amazing, creative people and together we get to play and imagine, create and move in ways I never thought possible. I have been challenged and confronted, amazed and inspired. I have soared the heights and explored dark places within. Through different workshops I have discovered that I am actually good at physical comedy. Who would've thought? I've also been able to reactivate the imagination I had as a child and am beginning to "see" the invisible scenarios we are asked to play out in our movement pieces. A couple of weeks ago we were asked to improvise a slow motion piece that involved escaping from a burning wreckage to Cochise by Audioslave. 

I felt the fear and the desperation. I saw the flames. We all seemed to dig deep and find experiences to use as a basis for our pieces.

One day we will put on a show. I am hoping for the honor of being able to perform with the ensemble, but even if I don't I am so honoured to be a part of the group. It has been a wonderful thing to be able to create and move in such a safe, embracing space and dance my heart out as though no one is watching.

Memories of the medical kind

My dear friend Carly Findlay published an emotional post the other day entitled Feeling like a freak on the opposite ends of the spectrum. In it she speaks about the different types of staring and curiosity she receives - both from strangers in the street and also from the medical profession.

I guess in this way I have been relatively "lucky". I have the average garden type variety of dwarfism called achondroplasia. Although it is still rare, occurring once in every 15,000 to 40,000 births, on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being BORING and 10 being "OMG! This is a new one we haven't seen before!", achondroplasia would sit down the end of the boring scale. Yes you can have your nuances and there can be issues, but in many cases it's, "Congratulations Mr & Mrs X, your baby has achondroplasia! Take him/her home and love him/her, we'll see them often enough to take care of anything that crops up!"

Well....that's almost what my parents were told and I was most certainly told something like that when I asked, "What should I be watching for?"

As a child I really only saw the specialists three times. Once when I was diagnosed, once when I was six years old and then once when I was about fourteen to check up on my dicky leg. Maybe they would have liked to see me more often but we were in the country and, according to my mother I reached all of my milestones on schedule, was healthy, seemed to be well-adjusted (apart from being an anxious little thing!), so she and Dad had no reason to make the arduous journey into the Big Smoke to have doctors poke and prod and tell them what they already knew.

However, the appointment when I was six hasn't really left me with the most wonderful of memories; in fact it followed more along the lines of what I would imagine research consultations would be. There was the measuring, the weighing and the, "Well, what's she doing Mr & Mrs X? How's she doing at school? Does she have friends?"

And then there were the x-rays......

And then I was taken downstairs for a series of photographs......

It was all fine....until they asked me to take off all my clothes.

All of them.

My mother wasn't in the room at the time. She tells me that she had stayed behind to talk to some other doctor, or social worker, or someone.....but my Dad was with me.

I remember them asking me to take off everything and I helplessly looked at my Dad, not wanting to stand in this room of strangers in my Birthday Suit. I was six years old, not a baby. I was ashamed, humiliated, dreadfully embarrassed.

And this was back in the day when parents never thought to question doctors or any other figure deemed to be one of authority....so, after the doctor suggested that my father help me....he did.

And I stood for those photos....and I smiled for the photographer, because that's what you think when you're six - you have to smile at the camera - but I was so terribly, terribly scared and embarrassed; so much so that I blanked out the rest of the time there.

I'd always known that those photos were in existence. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was always aware of them. It wasn't until I was a mother of three children and we were all at the hospital for a check up one day that I saw them again and realised why six year old me blanked out the rest of the memories. That day when I was 25 we were all at the hospital also being interviewed for an article being written about a new computer database that would assist specialists make more accurate diagnoses. We were lucky enough to go into the lab where the system was and have a look at some of the contents.

I think I remember someone saying to me, "I think some of your photos are in here too!" They looked into the files and there they were....

Oh, my eyes were covered with the characteristic black rectangle that was supposed to preserve my anonymity (and they also did it to protect their own backs because no one had contacted me to ask permission to use the photos), but there I was. Six years old, looking nervous and scared and very, very exposed. Not only that, but the photographer had taken close ups of ALL of my body parts.

ALL of them.

And I wouldn't have been standing for all of them either.

I'll leave you with that for a minute........................

No wonder that little six year old blanked out the rest of the session.

To cut a long story short I thought about those photos for days....and ended up calling the hospital and having a chat with the Social Worker who had known me since I was little. I asked them to take the photographs off the database seeing they hadn't sought my permission to use them and I asked to have the original photographs sent to me. It took me a while to feel ok again.

When I became a mother, the memory of that day ensured that I was very protective about the amount and type of documentation kept about my children. Yes, they had photographs taken at one point, but I was present and ensured that they were appropriately covered in the right places. I have refused most research and only allowed their cases to be presented at conferences if doctors have assured me that they remain anonymous. Never have I allowed my children to be in a room full of doctors discussing their case. Ever.

In my files at home I have ten black and white medical photos of a little six year old girl. Her little mouth is smiling, because she's in front of a camera...but her eyes are not. She was scared and confused and so terribly, terribly embarrassed.

That girl is me.