my,
my name,
my name is
squeezing, squeezing in like a mosquito. Butt.
The boys, the muscles,
Some people walk. I roll,
I push. Some dancers dance. Some dancers walk. This dancer push and push. Push from the Caribbean to California.
Pure energy
flowing in the studio of BBT, a b, a b, a b, b t, where the people come to dance ballet and do technique. A light camera lights, like my eyes
in the sky, the beautiful sky that is above us, holding the stars, like me, holding the clouds, holding The World. I.

- Janpi Star Crespo Rodriguez

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In early May of 2023, I began experiencing discomfort in my chest, a twisting sensation whenever I had an uncomfortable thought. It soon became a nonstop, scary screaming pain. It hurt to breathe or laugh, signs that my ribs were starting to fracture and, on my sternum, a bone tumor was encroaching on my heart. Radiation was scheduled, but I didn’t make it that far; instead, I found myself in the emergency room of Mount Sinai Hospital, my blood levels wildly fluctuating, my kidneys threatened. It was yet another relapse, one of many I have suffered since 2019, when my eighteen-year career as a choreographer and interdisciplinary performing artist was irrevocably altered by a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer that affects bone marrow and destroys bone, leading to bone fractures and malignant bone tumors.

I wasn’t supposed to be in that hospital. I was supposed to be on a plane, flying from my home in New York to Berkeley, for two glorious weeks of studio research through the AXIS Dance Company’s Choreo-Lab Fellowship, an annual program that seeks to develop, refine, and advance the artistic skills of disabled and/or neurodiverse choreographers. 

When I had earlier alerted AXIS that I might have to forego the fellowship, they did not hesitate to offer me a position for the next year. After chemotherapy and two major cancer treatments during the summer of 2023, I was (and am, as of this writing) safely in remission. Envisioning the dances I would make filled me with purpose during the many hours of healing spent on my back: when May of 2024 rolled around, it was a great gift to myself to see the fellowship through.

What surprised me the most about the AXIS Choreo-Lab was how personally affected I was by the daily presence of fellow disabled dancers and art makers. In collaboration with this community, I re-discovered how joyful my choreographic process can be. I realized my deep resilience as a disabled person re-entering the world from illness. And I found the path to continue my personal dance practice within my physically changed (and emotionally wiser) body. For me, artmaking is essentially about understanding and acting upon personal truth, and for these two weeks I was able to consider all aspects of myself with honesty, with no parts of myself in hiding. What was extraordinary for me seems of the everyday for members of the AXIS community, who prioritize creating this grace-filled space for everyone in their sphere.

During my daily time in the studio I presented my improvisational practice, StarPû Method (formerly known as Star Crap Method). I worked with AXIS Dance Company members Zara Anwar, D. Calhoun, and Janpi Star, and guest dancer Zee Jackson. Star Pû Method is an act of service to dancers, created in collaboration with them. The work holds the participant in care as their needs are discovered and revealed through improvisation. In solo form, the performer speaks and sings their embodied experience while dancing. I consider it a means of writing in real time, upright in the middle of the room, influenced by your aware (and sometimes moving) body.¹

Star Pû Method embraces failure and the impossible. The dancer fully defines their idea of “success” in each moment, identifying what they are called to do or able to do in any moment. It is a language-driven process, with clarity of intention and suggestion for how I, as facilitator, co-create experience with dancers, and for them how to verbally articulate the often-unspoken nuance of being a creative body. The text excerpts throughout this essay were generated during Star Pû Method’s “Hello My Name Is” introductory exercise, which asks the dancer to begin with the phrase “hello my name is,” followed by whatever they experience in the moment. This could be sensations, what they see, hear, think — whatever they choose to name — with their full name stated at the end.
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Hello, my name is beautiful, speaking, enjoying listening, experiencing the things you experience, pen to paper, marley to skin. Class, circling, swiping, the music, the stress, the worry, the community. Being here we are in community. The sun is shining. It is loud outside. It is inaccessible outside. It’s testing us. We’re winning. We’re always winning. We’re here in this space. We are gifted. We are a gift. I feel like Dr. Seuss finding words to rhyme. I am curious. I am finding my star, poo, transformation.

Challenged.

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- D Calhoun
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In the past few years, as I’ve facilitated a dancer’s way into and through improvisation while performing alongside them, I’ve sometimes wondered whether I should be there. It’s very common for a choreographer to simply age out of their work and stop dancing; given my illness and the resulting shifts in my body, I have every reason to not perform anymore, to just sit on the sidelines of my work. But really I make work to be in it. I am not even sure I’d want to make work without performing.

Because AXIS welcomes bodily difference, I was invited to grapple with my changed and aging body, to experiment with being in the room as I am now. I have differing needs as a director and performer and these needs were addressed instead of being suppressed or brushed aside. The AXIS Company dancers are incredibly adept at empathy; each day in the studio, experiencing their embodied wisdom and their varied abilities, voices, and stories, I saw new ways to facilitate and improvise alongside them. One memorable day I struck a subtle balance of directing, interjecting melody with voice and mixing live musical accompaniment — a literal interdisciplinary juggling act. The dancers swiftly responded with technique, humor, and sass. We clicked! As I research projects that question the potential of healing in community, the truth, bravery, and honesty of these dancers has created a new kind of prowess for them and me in the Star Pû Method.

Since my cancer diagnosis, dance class has felt like an unsafe and unwelcoming place; instead, I’ve kept to my daily solo rehabilitative sequence of exercises. But on the invitation of my mentor, AXIS artistic director Nadia Adame, I tried a small portion of two morning classes, one offered by the AXIS Dance Company and the other by the Berkeley Ballet Theater, which shares its home and building with AXIS.  

AXIS has its own pedagogy to establish a safe and inclusive space for disabled dancers in classes and rehearsals. For example, one might avoid relying on formal terms from ballet to describe movement, in solidarity with dancers from different cultural contexts and experiences. Instead of using the term “adapting” movement for people with disabilities, one could use the word “translation” to describe a disabled person’s approach to movement; “adapting” sets up a hierarchy of one movement choice over another, connoting a downgrade, whereas “translation” evokes agency and artistic choice. Being introduced to the technique of movement “translation” for a dancer of disability was like peering into a whole new personal language for each individual in the studio. As a performance maker driven by the connection between movement and language, this “step” (if I risk calling it that) of movement translation opens a world of new options for engaging myself and dance collaborators in the studio. Now I understand more deeply how disability artistry is a form of embodiment that, at its core, disrupts the hegemony of traditional dance expectations. Person-centered translation of movement honors the needs of the body at any particular moment or circumstance — just the flexibility that my variable disability needs. In these classes, I was able to start considering my personal form of movement translation, one that could support me participating in dance training and performance again.

I will admit there was a little bit of quiet weeping at the ballet barre during my first class, as the teacher played “God Only Knows,” by the Beach Boys, for solo piano. Multiple myeloma has fractured the bone of my dominant right arm and changed its shape, leaving me unable to raise it overhead. My usual solo movement involves not really placing that arm in a situation outside of its comfortable capacities. I am even discouraged from physical therapy as it would put the joint under undue strain.This self-acceptance extends to the movements of my spine, which has also endured multiple fractures and changes. Being at the barre and attempting the simple port de bras or circling arm motions that accompany movements of the feet in ballet gave me the opportunity to fully encounter the loss and change in my movement. It also gave me the opportunity to consider how to move my arm my way now, alongside a room of fellow dancers doing their work within the dreamy backdrop of ballet piano music. A ballet class holds so much personal history (luxurious and traumatic) for many dancers — and now for the first time for me, this space accepted bodily difference. Such nuanced, embodied discovery of personal truth, weeping and all, is exactly what I seek in performance.

It seems everything about AXIS fosters respect for other people’s needs — honoring not only disability, but our general humanness. The company has daily check-ins at the top and end of each day; a moment for dancers, staff, and the Choreo-Lab fellows to connect and establish access needs. By this example, I learned how to further advocate for my needs and better facilitate advocacy for others in subsequent company endeavors. As a choreographer, at a foundational level I am structuring the experience of my dance collaborators, not only onstage but in scheduling how the performance day and week run, and most importantly, what occurs in the creation room. As I seek to steward fair and equitable experiences for artists, artist workers, and audiences, I feel lucky to have witnessed AXIS’s standard of accessibility for their company model, including incorporating tools of audio captioning in all our group meetings via an iPad and simple microphones. I was inspired to use the tools available for audio translation in my rehearsals, to capture the language of rehearsal in transcript form. My future in art will be to marry more of my creative techniques with accessibility technologies, expanding my own forms of making and equitably inviting a greater audience to experience the work.

As I read through these rehearsal transcriptions, I am understanding more about how the embodied stories and language within my artistic research create not only poetry, but a rich and heartfelt take on identity politics. The speaking asked of the dancer fits naturally with my growing curiosity about my performance practice as ultimately being a form of writing. I sincerely ask, “What is the difference between speaking and writing anyway?”
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Hello. My name is questioning. My reasoning, not purpose. Heart beating five times quicker than the Grinch's heart. Size one sock, no sock, pink sock. Blue roller. Top of head extends all the way down to the base of my spine, that the energy circles around my legs and wraps around like a candy cane as my mind drifts off into a quiet, quiet silence. I wonder how to keep talking, because there's so many beautiful artworks around us.  

- Zee Jackson
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Thank you, AXIS, for an incredible and enriching experience and for providing a space where dancers with disabilities can find each other. It wasn’t just abstract — my whole body felt like it belonged to a community. I couldn’t imagine returning to more public, professional dance and choreographic life any other way.

I write to you now in Star Pû Method form, with a little numbness in my spine, a cat purring on top of the keyboard (blocking my view of the letters), feeling grateful to remember this work of dance that needs to be better protected and understood by all. Stomach swirls because of too much decaf, a smile, and hoping I get to beautiful Berkeley again soon, to be with my beloved dance community.

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1. I chose “upright” in place of the phrases “writing on your feet” or “writing while standing”; during the fellowship, “upright” was used as a way to gather folks without saying, “Let’s stand” or “Let’s walk.” Let’s be upright together.