Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

Dr. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy currently teaches Adolescent/Adult Literacy at Kent State University in the US, and so even though she has been involved in dance all her life, attendees at the Monday Night Theatre Forum on April 24 were not expecting to be treated to an impromptu dance lesson.

Joanne told the story of a disabled dancer and dance instructor, Keith Williams, who she met at an assisted living facility in the US, whose left side was paralyzed following a stroke. She said he had given up on regaining movement and inspired her to come out of retirement to give him the gift of a dance of his own.
After performing the piece, which took into account the paralysis, she asked volunteers to sit in a circle and taught them some of the steps. These involved lots of slow movements including hand movements, pointed toes and slow head raises and turns. It was a powerful experience to feel and to watch, as the movements imparted both sorrow and hope. She said creating the dance and teaching it to Keith was putting the Banyan ideology in practice, which she had learned as part of the Banyan TV Network while in high school in T&T. She would tape the sessions and replay them for him each week, as due to the stroke damage he would not remember everything he had done.
Joanne said it was immensely inspiring to see Keith perform the dance and figure out how to do the dance movements in his wheelchair. She said he had spent his whole career teaching by demonstrating and now he had to teach through explanation only. Joanne said she saw how being able to participate in creating this dance changed him. “Doing this brought me out of the darkness I had fallen into. It’s a call to figure out what we dance, how we dance and who we dance for.”
Kilgour Dowdy said she took the opportunity to present the dance at the Forum because she doesn’t really have a community in T&T as she is a dancer, an actor, a teacher and a writer, which means there isn’t a set space where she can interact with others like her.
An audience member thanked Joanne for her gift to them, as he said he had experienced damage to his leg that restricted him from being able to dance as he once had, but the movements she had taught them were still dancing, even if they hadn’t moved from the chairs.
A psychologist who was present said he could see where he could incorporate movement into the work he did with traumatized patients. Joanne said she knew the technique had been used in co-therapy and that Broadway had done several plays with people in wheelchairs. She said Keith wanted to be a leader of a company of differently abled people now that he had gone through the experience.
Joanne then performed a second dance which inspired another audience member to share her story of having suffered a stroke and how she had had to reteach herself to move, to walk and to dance. She said it was a struggle to get up on some days and keep going, but that you had to, once you were in the land of the living, and the dance reminded her of that.
Joanne said there are many ways to communicate, including song and dance, and once we ask children just to write, we’re cutting them off from all the forms of expression available to them.