Mixed abilities dance first occurred to Karen Peterson in 1990. She received a phone call from a wheelchair bound woman who wanted a part in a ballet.

“My direction to her was to write about her physical memories, and that gave us the direction for our duet. She gave me incredible inspiration to do something I’d never done before. I was really bored as a choreographer and she gave me something to sink my teeth into,” says Peterson, a veteran dancer and choreographer. For the next 23 years, mixed abilities dance would be the foundation of her internationally known dance company, Karen Peterson and Dancers. “It’s a force and an energy that keeps going round and round,” she says.

Known as KPD for short, the company has featured about 35 choreographies and toured throughout Florida, the United States, Europe and the Americas. About half of the works use mixed ability dancers, which includes a range of formally trained students from New World School of the Arts and Florida International University, as well as a paraplegic, a quadriplegic, and a dancer with Spina Bifida and others. Among the company’s upcoming performances, it will hold its more extensive “23^rd season” concert on April 11 and 12, before heading to Belgrade in May.

On stage, Peterson’s dancers with disabilities are tightly woven with abled body dancers and are equally supportive to execute complex, professional caliber choreography. “It’s a particular art form that has developed along the way,” says Peterson, who has collaborated with the Miami String Project, among other entities, that she said helped attract new audiences. Her clever use of lighting, shadows, backdrops, and mixed media add another element of entertainment to the company’s performances./
Peterson talked to Artburst about the special qualities of mixed-abilities dance, her upcoming performance and how this art form has transforms lives.

What is the process of turning people with disabilities into dancers?

A: I use movements that work best on their bodies. Say there’s a dancer who can only move his right elbow and his head, so you of think of how many ways you can find that uses those body parts. You find common denominators as a group. These are simple tasks. It’s almost like working with a palette and meshing together certain colors.

Your company breaks the mold of traditional dance. Therefore, what is your idea of a dancer?

Someone with an open hearted, generous spirit of physicality that needs to be shared with others. Intimate, honest and willing to be flexible and patient and willing to be part of a creative process, where you don’t know where you’re going, but at the end of the line there will be something that’s waiting for me.

How do you convince a disabled person that they can actually perform as a dancer? And how have abled body dancers embraced the concept.

My experience is that it’s not for everyone. I don’t think you really need to sell the idea. I think dancers have decided that it’s something that they want to do. They understand my vision and my work and that they are part of the creative process. Both disabled and abled body dancers balance the other out 50 percent.

What type of impact has performing had on some of your dancers with disabilities?

On March 10, we had a performance with 190 students with learning disabilities from Miami middle and high schools. The kids really love it. They usually don’t get the opportunity to train with dance instructors and it’s a very supportive day. They all love to move and dance. Despite their learning disability, there was never a moment when they didn’t want to dance and express themselves.

From where do you draw inspiration to create dance pieces?

Some are driven by music. Some are driven by visual images such as animals, water and trees. But this particular concert (April 11, 12) follows a narrative of one man and two women drinking in a café and what can happen. The dancers range in age from 28 to 63, so there’s a wide-range of abilities and a wide-range of ages. That’s a great maturity and a great weight to the work.

What are some of the most memorable experiences that you’ve had with your dance company over the years?

I feel very lucky. I’ve met some beautiful people along the way. We had a performance in New York City in 2003 at a mixed-ability festival. My first teaching residency in Brazil, which was the first thing I did by myself out of the country. We were welcomed, accepted and embraced in their country. And in 2010, when I made my dancers jump from their wheelchairs into my pool. We video-taped them underwater and the footage was used as a backdrop to one of the performances.

Karen Peterson and Dancers Season of Dance With New Work, Thursday, April 11 at 8:00 p.m. and Friday, April 12 at 8:00 p.m., Miami-Dade County Auditorium On Stage Black Box, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami; tickets $18, $13 students; www.karenpetersondancers.org.

New works from the mixed-ability (and mixed-age) dance company, including guest artists from Sarajevo and live music from local violinist Vicki Richards.

In celebration of National Dance Week, the Florida Dance Association and Dance Now! Miami presented the Daniel Lewis Dance Sampler on April 27, at the Little Haiti Cultural Center. The eponymously named event is a revival of the Modern Dance Sampler, founded and run for many years by former New World dance dean Daniel Lewis. The ongoing mission of the event is to feature and celebrate the diversity of local companies and individual choreographers that make their work in South Florida.

Lewis, a former Jose Limón dancer and choreographer in his own right, developed the dance program at New World School of the Arts and through his company Miami Dance Futures produced, among others, the Miami Balanchine Conference, the Dance History Scholar’s Conference, the aforementioned Modern Dance Sampler, and various dance companies such as Houlihan and Dancers. It was very fitting to see a former Houlihan dancer, Bill Doolin, director of the Florida Dance Association, along with co-directors Hannah Baumgarten and Diego Salterini of Dance Now! Miami, present to Lewis an honorary award in recognition of his dedication and success in nurturing and promoting dance in Miami.

The sampler presented a diverse concert representing 10 companies and choreographers, including a special performance by Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company’s Keystone, danced by Jacqueline Dumas Albert and Louie Marin. The duet moved in three acts to the accompaniment of Rufus Wainwright’s haunting cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah; the ever inspiring Louis Armstrong recording of What a Wonderful World; and a modern cover of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas by Jamie Randolph. Using a vocabulary full of counterbalance and weight-sharing, the couple gorgeously maintained an intense and athletic energy while making the most difficult partnering look seamless and effortless. Albert and Marin’s physicality was ever present in both the most intimate and moody moments to the most jubilant.

Pioneer Winter’s Mother-Son(days) was a profound piece performed by Winter and Ana Bolt as the mother-son pair. The duet was accompanied by the live narration of Winter’s mother’s diary from when she was 17 years old, ruminating on her future about love, family, and death — and from Winter’s own diary as a 10 year old facing the death of his mother. The diary entries are almost 20 years apart and illustrated the similarities in the mother’s and son’s emotional and sometimes prophetic tenor. To use Winter’s own words, “separated by time… [the entries] reflect similar personalities, fears, and even [the] same humor.”

In less capable hands this could have easily been a maudlin and overly sentimental piece.  But Winter’s true genius is that the he created a movement landscape that, although was as abstract as the dialogue was literal, existed alongside the narration within the same tone poem. The dancing rested like a subconscious layer over the words without any literal translation yet still provoked the sense of love, loss, and humor without any sentimental manipulation. His work evidences a profound maturity in such a young creator whose talent was well matched by the incomparable stage presence, subtlety and intensity, of Bolt. Both dancers mirrored and informed each other in their separate landscapes only to join at the very end to the echoed sentiment of how Winter and his mother both really didn’t like Sundays.

The Brigid Baker WholeProject performed Wonderlawn excerpted from Comet Lovejoy Survives and choreographed by Baker. Baker is known for her “hand made environments” and the piece opens with a dim lit stage offset by a garden of glittery and illuminated trash including lights, shiny garlands, and gold paper strewn about the stage that has transformed the space into something otherworldly. The dancers, in black evening wear and dresses, walk through this landscape while one of the men throws paper airplanes as he walks the circumference of the stage. Ultimately the company dons sanitary gloves and collects the garbage and heaps it into a corner. Once the stage is cleared the pedestrian act of sweeping the stage follows. The second movement with the full company is lush and gestural, with large sweeping unison movement. The dancers seemed released from some confinement just as the stage had been cleared of its debris and they moved as dark whispers in the wind. On their own, both the hand-made environment prelude and the subsequent dance were interesting and captivating.  The only detraction is the two put together felt like they belonged to two different pieces, or needed a more unifying transitional component.

Arts Ballet Theater danced a lively ensemble, A Celebration to Klimt that lifted the Handel selection off the floor with a swash of bright colors and strong diagonals in this pleasant interpretation by Vladimir Issaev of Gustav Klimt’s art nouveau symbolist paintings. Another ballet offering was the modern balletic duet Liminally Venn choreographed by Lara Murphy with an articulate, tense, quick, and staccato vocabulary impressively danced by the duet.

Brazarte Dance Company’s Corpo was a piece more driven by the music than the movement vocabulary. The strong rhythmic music dictated the transitions in the piece, whereas the movement, at times overly pedestrian and posturing, felt flat despite the energy of its accompaniment. The ensemble at times was blatantly not together in the unison sections and the appearances at the beginning and the end of the piece by the one male dancer lacked reason or device for his entrances and exits. Luis Alberto Cuevas’ It Gets To A Point, similarly relied on music changes for its choreographic transitions. The recorded accompaniment of classical strings playing pop selections from the Isley Brothers and No Doubt was jarring and the piece deserved to live free of these selections.  However, as a group ensemble this was a stronger piece and there is some build to the final moment of one single dancer moving frenetically as the lights fade. In terms of vocabulary, this final moment was the most interesting and arresting and just as the piece actually found its legs, it had ended.

Afua Hall’s Sitting Stand starts with Quilvio Rodriguez wearing nothing but dance briefs with his back to the stage. The striking and vulnerable moment fades too quickly without further exploration as partner Ronderrick Mitchell dresses Rodriguez in matching Bermuda shorts and unbuttoned shirt. What follows are different partnering sections that although sometimes interesting, together seem disjointed and awkward and never fulfill the promise of such a strong and provocative beginning. Karen Peterson and Dancers Potpourria, a 2012 excerpt, is another duet that had visually interesting moments in a “mixed-ability” partnering duet but did not create any distinguishable emotional tenor or overt definition of the space.

The bookend pieces of the concert were offerings by Dance Now! Miami. Megan Holsinger and Quilvio Rodriguez partnered in Mitosis, the opening duet piece by Salterini. Costumed in shiny body suits and lit in purple hues, the dancers moved and appeared like pieces of silk in a stream of water through a series of lifts before coming to a full and breath catching stop, alone, on opposite sides of the stage. The closing piece by Baumgarten, Visions of Unrest, is excerpted from a larger work and presents the final three of five movements. The piece progresses from Dariel Milan’s solo where he moves like flesh turned liquid in his fluid but frenetic rendering of IN-somnia to the duet in the fourth act, Dreams, and finally the group finale in Awakening. The piece is rich in  Baumgarten’s quirky original motifs such as the opening head toggle and sauté.  Baumgarten builds layer upon layer both in the emotional tones of her piece and in the carving of space through progressive variations, canons and inversions as dancers weave in between each other and join together in satisfying unison.

Together with the CrossTown String Quartet, Karen Peterson and Dancers performs Classical Music Meets Contemporary Dance

Say the word dance or think of a dancer, and legs invariably come to mind.

What if, however, that weren’t always the case? What if someone were to subvert the traditional notions of what to expect from form and movement?

In South Florida, that someone has been choreographer Karen Peterson, who in 1990 founded Karen Peterson and Dancers to create and promote dance works that combine the abilities and talents of performers both with and without disabilities. The result is an inclusive, “mixed-ability” dance experience.

This Friday and Saturday, at the New World School of the Arts, Peterson will showcase a collection of pieces under the program Classical Music Meets Contemporary Dance, featuring new works, live music by The CrossTown String Quartet, and two guest dancers from the REVolution Dance Company in Tampa.

“I’ve always stressed that I want people with disabilities to be equal to their ensemble,” shares Peterson one recent afternoon at her rehearsal space, Excello, in The Falls industrial area.

As she tells it, Peterson has worked with the disabled community for over two decades now.

“Twenty-two years ago a woman called me. She was in a chair, and wanted to be involved in a collaboration, and I worked with her,” remembers the artistic director. “And I just kept being inspired by new people who came with disabilities.”

Whether in Miami or anywhere the company goes — Bosnia, Brazil, Italy, Scotland, and Spain, to mention a few places — in the end, the message should always be the same, believes Peterson: to feel uplifted.

“I think, first, there’s always a little bit of uncomfortable-ness in someone’s thinking. Maybe they need to shift, maybe question what they see, and then just see it,” says Peterson. “So many people have said to me ‘We don’t really know what to expect.’”

Precisely what dancer John Beauregard — stunning as he manipulates his wheelchair while performing a duet called Give and Take, with dancer Jenny Larsson, to the sounds of tango maestro Astor Piazzola — asks this writer after the rehearsal is over.

“Is this what you expected?” he says.

Beauregard has been in a wheelchair for 26 years, due to a construction fall, and has danced for 12. “I’ve done every study they’ve ever done at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. That’s why I’m in Miami. Because of the research. Ever since I’ve been injured I’ve been trying not to be.”

He went to a lecture once, he explains, in which the take-home message was that old cliché “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“And I thought, ‘B——t’,” he remembers. “As I left that lecture hall, on the very next door there was a flyer — ‘Modern dancers, wheelchair dancers, wanted.’ And I go, ‘What is that?’ I couldn’t even comprehend. Not only did I take the little number off, but I took the whole thing down and showed up, and I’ve never looked back.”

In an interesting twist to what the company does, Peterson also has her abled dancers move in the wheelchair. And that presents a whole new set of challenges to that kind of performer.

Such is the case of Bernadette Kalyan Salgado, who found the wheelchair extremely difficult to maneuver the first time she experienced it, and who uses it to dance with wheelchaired partner Adam Eckstat in the duet Take on Vivaldi.

“You have to switch your brain because when you pull the right side you’re going to the left, and when you pull the left you’re going to the right,” says Salgado.

To synchronize everyone, she adds, Peterson does a lot of exploration and has the company practice exercises using different body parts. Thus, for everyone involved, both performers and audiences, every show is an invitation to think differently.

Karen Peterson and Dancers, with the CrossTown String Quartet; Saturday, May 12, at 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and Sunday, May 13, at 4:00 p.m.; at the New World School of the Arts, 25 N.E. 2nd St., 8th floor. Tickets available at the door, $20 (general), $15 (seniors) $5 MDCC, NWSA, MDCPS students with ID. All mothers ½ price ticket on Mothers Day; www.karenpetersondancers.org.

Photo: John Beauregard and Jenny Larsson

This article also appears in the Miami Sun Post, April 11.

Eight dance projects are among the 56 finalists in this year’s Knight Arts Challenge. We’re proud that we’ve been covering 7 out of the 8 groups among the finalists at Artburst. The only group we haven’t covered doesn’t exist yet — but a company led by the regal Peter London sure sounds good to us.

Plus there are 5 more projects that definitely could include dance, 3 proposed by presenters we cover and love.

We have to confess, of course, that we too are funded by the Knight Foundation, so we’re bound to get a little gushy.

And we’re especially proud to see on the list another Artburst funder, Miami-Dade County of Cultural Affairs as well as our partner the Arts & Business Council of Miami.

Still, we hope you’ll agree that all the ideas below are winners and join us in wishing them the best when the winners are announced in November.

2011 Knight Arts Challenge Miami Finalists

Camposition: To promote unity in South Florida through a series of dance-theater productions that suggest artistic solutions to the discord that threatens communities

ERE. Bistoury: To foster improvisational performance through a weeklong, multidisciplinary festival offering free public performances

Inkub8: To cultivate local performing artists by creating a residency program that offers time, space and a modest stipend in exchange for artists teaching classes and exhibiting works

Karen Peterson and Dancers: To provide dance instruction to the 3,000 children with disabilities in Miami-Dade County Public Schools, who will perform their work at a gala performance

Miami City Ballet: To broaden programming and support the future of ballet by establishing a fund for the creation of new works

Peter London Global Dance Theater: To stem the flow of talented local dancers who pursue careers elsewhere by launching the Peter London Global Dance Theater in Miami

Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre: To bring attention to Miami’s distinctive cultural voice by having the innovative Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre employ a full-time ensemble to create a repertoire

Tigertail Productions: To promote innovative thinking in the local dance community through a series of artist-curated and site-specific performances that team visiting and local choreographers

DANCE-ISH
FUNDarte: To expand the visibility of Miami artists by creating a virtual office and interactive blog that will build partnerships among local art presenters

Miami Dade College Cultura del Lobo Performance Series: To provide professional development training for Miami’s performers by creating a series of intensive summer master classes

Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs: To “bring home” prominent and influential Miami artists now living elsewhere through a series of performances at the new South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center

Miami Light Project: To introduce the community to the new Light Box at Goldman Warehouse through a campaign featuring monthly podcasts, open mic and dance jams, artist-community potluck lunches and a direct-mail campaign

Teatro Avante: To promote Miami as the center for Latino performing arts by creating a bilingual website featuring the rich and diverse work Latino artists produce in the United States

ALSO: Arts & Business Council of Miami: To broaden the number and diversity of board candidates accessible to arts organizations by developing a website where professionals can explore their interests, review opportunities and pursue board placement

December 18, 2010 Living in Miami we are spoiled with the pleasures of nature and beauty unfolding. We are world-famous for our worship and dedication to the physical form, and yet we live in a complicated place — a dance of contradiction, struggle, and awe. Driving over the Macarthur Causeway, I remember water is a constant metaphor. It comprises most of our body, and hydrates our life story. Water is constantly dancing around us, moistening and heating our experiences navigating the city. Driving over the bridge, flanked by water on both sides, I imagine drinking a wave of ocean through my belly, undulating in my car seat, hoping to make traffic go by faster. I play with the idea of floating through traffic, bouncing and gliding like an old school weeblo.

Choreographer Karen Peterson expands and explores these playful  musings, in her show “Buoyant Dreams,”  on December 11 at the Byron Carlyle Theater in Miami Beach. Pairing with video artist Maria Lino, they create a “mixed ability” choreographic piece where disabled dancers move through water on video and perform onstage in wheelchairs, with able bodied dancers in mirrored cohesion. Different choreographies elicit different moods using images of trees, sky, and projection over bodies moving together onstage. Liquid sounds envelop the stage like soft or crashing waves, chirping birds, or the clang of thunder. One choreography I especially look forward to is where the dancers perform with buckets and water onstage, using levels, spirals and lines, dancing through space like children on slip ‘n slides.

The show also includes a new live jazz work, I will catch you, by choreographer Joanne Barrett, dancing live to the Wendy Pederson Jazz Trio. This section offers both choreography and extemporaneous, in-the-moment creation of dance and sound, in the spirit of jazz itself.

Karen Peterson and dancers was established in 1990 and is a non-profit arts organization. Peterson graduated from the Boston Conservatory and has won numerous grants and fellowships. Karen Peterson Dance is the only Florida dance organization dedicated full-time to working with dancers with and without disabilities and has extensive outreach and programming to the disabled community. Peterson’s career trajectory reminds me of water itself; full of power and nurturing growth, feeding new worlds and nourishing the body in all its forms.

Karen Peterson and Dancers celebrate their 21^st season with “Buoyant Dreams” at the Byron Carlyle Theater, 500 71^st St., Miami Beach, at 4:00 pm. and 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 11.

Originally published in the Sunpost in December 2010.

Artburst Exclusive December 8, 2010

Fulfilling one woman’s unlikely dream launched choreographer Karen Peterson into the realm of artistic expression and advocacy that has fueled her own creativity for more than two decades.

“She called me on the phone one day and said, ‘I’d like to be in a ballet,’” recalls Peterson, a Boston Conservatory graduate who was collaborating with various Miami artists at the time. The caller was Miami Beach resident Mildred Pallas Levenson, a well-known watchdog for the rights of the disabled in South Florida who had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy in her 20s. In 1990, Peterson, Levenson, and another dancer appeared on stage at the New World School of the Arts.

Since that initial foray with Levenson, who died this past February at age 75, Peterson’s nonprofit company, Karen Peterson and Dancers, has mounted dozens of “mixed ability” works, which integrate professionally trained, able-bodied dancers with disabled individuals who usually have little or no prior experience. The company has performed in Italy, Bosnia, Washington, D.C., and South Florida (in the danceAble festival), among other places, as well as in Kendall, where Peterson, a 2010 Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs choreography fellowship winner, opened Excello Dance Space in 2002.

“Mixed-ability dance is also used as a healing tool,” notes Peterson, who has programs for special needs children as well. “It makes the audience open their eyes, forces them to look at something—maybe question their prejudices,” notes Peterson.
On December 11, Karen Peterson and Dancers continues its 21st season at the Byron Carlyle Theater in Miami Beach. Hoping to cast a wider net in a tough economy—Peterson notes that she’s seen her state grants cut by almost 75 percent and county grants by 25 percent this year—Peterson invited colleagues to collaborate on a multimedia event that includes mixed-ability dance, live jazz, video art, and more.

For the show’s second half she connected Miami-based modern choreographer Joanne Barrett and jazz vocalist Wendy Pedersen. “I just put them together and I let them deal with their own journey,” says Peterson. The result, “I Will Catch You,” is an after-hours-style mood ring of a piece in which the music, musicians, and dancers all become equal, interactive partners. Described by Barrett as having “kind of a loungey, seedy, we’ve-been-up-really-late-at-night kind of feel,” the hour-long work is an intimate conversation between Pedersen’s sultry arrangements and the dancers, who interact with Pedersen and her trio on stage, from a loose-limbed romp to a solo set atop a piano that’s been moved out into the house.

The show’s title piece, “Buoyant Dreams,” surfaced out of a chance encounter in Little Havana four years ago during a workshop at the now-defunct art space of choreographer Octavio Campos. It was there that Peterson met visual artist Maria Lino, a two-time Cintas Foundation Award winner.

“One of the pieces I showed,” Lino recounts, “was when my aunt was carrying her son who had cerebral palsy—he was already a grown man and she was already in her 60s… I slowed [the sequence] down to the point where you could see her muscles and you could see the strength but also the incredible effort [it took] to carry a grown man. Karen saw that piece and afterward she turned to me and said, ‘cerebral palsy, right?’ So we connected.”

“Buoyant Dreams” is their second collaboration of dance, video, and digital media. It dives into a theme Lino has been exploring for a few years: buoyancy and how water changes the body’s physical relationship to the world. Born in Cuba and raised in New York City and Miami, Lino has always lived surrounded by water.

She presented Peterson with several sections from her own footage and from there, the creative dialogue took off. Lino shot new video with Peterson’s dancers, two of whom are in wheelchairs, and Peterson developed movement that would resonate and reverberate as the dancers on stage partnered with projections of their past selves on-screen. It’s a fluid exchange inspired and informed by water.

From the chaos of a storm to the ethereal composure of a pool, water flows from screen to stage, contained in drinking cups, buckets, and ultimately spilling onto the floor. “At the end,” says Peterson, “we really use the water to create choreography that slides through the space.”

To achieve that same sense of freedom in her medium, Lino shot all of the dancers underwater, providing Peterson with an additional choreographic tool. In the piece, the audience sees dancers who are in wheelchairs on stage simultaneously gliding and floating languidly on the screen behind them. “You come to understand there is so much movement they have without the confine of the metal chair,” explains Peterson.

“This is how life came for them” adds Lino. “Their personalities can actually express themselves regardless of their physical capabilities and if you’re open to see that, there’s also beauty in the way their bodies manifest themselves.”

Karen Peterson and Dancers performs Buoyant Dreams on December 11 at 4 and 8 p.m. at the Byron Carlyle Theatre, 500 71st Street, Miami Beach. Tickets are $15 and $20; $25 VIP tickets include admission to a fundraiser/after-party at the New Hotel, within walking distance of the theater. Call 305-298-5879 or visit www.karenpetersondancers.org.

Performers are Marjorie Burnett, Ivonne Batanero Cernuda, Shawn Buller, Dia Dearstyne, Lina Ferrera, Jenny Larsson, Mariana Oliveira, Jennifer Smallwood, Katrina Weaver.

April 30

Miami dance talent showcase presented by Karen Peterson and Dancers, featuring eight choreographers, three musicians, and six works.

Saturday April 30 at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Excello Dance Space, 8700B S.W. 129th Terr; $15 at door.305-298-5879.