Original subtitles

Okay.

All right, okay.

So, there's this thing about well, I will never be considered,

in the dance world, as simply a dancer.

I will always be looked at as an anomaly.

I can not be compared.

I can't be sort of set next to any of these other

whatever great dancers that might be out there,

that, you know, are sort of the hallmarks of dance.

I'm saying that.

I'm saying that because that's how I,

I mean that's how I experienced, you know,

the dance world, you know,

'cause they supposedly have this big focus on dance

and the body and all that, but the reality is that,

you know, they're interested in the perfect body.

(light ambient music)

He's known as the Crutch Master

and he's surprised audiences all across the world.

This is something

I guarantee you have never seen before.

This is Bill Shannon, who is the Crutch Master,

and his buddies back here, who are the Step Fenz,

direct from New York City-

The show is called The Art Of Weightlessness.

It's sponsored by The Dance Umbrella,

and Bill Shannon defies gravity with the help

of his crutches.

Get down to the studio at the Opera House

because there's an amazing performer

from Brooklyn coming out, called Bill Shannon.

And the night is called Spatial Theory.

It's had rave reviews.

I've never seen anything like this.

I was looking at the video tape yesterday

and I was amazed.

(indistinct chatter)

His art sometimes capitalizes

on interactions with others.

(indistinct chatter)

It's sort of a funky dance routine too.

(audience applauding)

(upbeat jazz music)

Extension 3320.

Are we ready?

What's going on?

I feel like I'm treading water.

Are we going?

This way?

Okay.

Let's go get a rental.

I wanna sit in the back. Okay.

Keep right toward I-275 North at Tampa.

It's kind of blindsided me like oh yeah, Perthes Camp,

cool, they're like okay,

you're gonna meet a bunch of kids with Perthes.

I'm like oh, wait a second.

(indistinct chatter)

It's gonna be right on beat, okay?

Three, two, one, jump!

(light ambient music)

Turn left to stay at Camp Florida Road,

then your destination will be on the right.

(indistinct chatter)

(kids cheering)

It's really emotional for me because

I'm gonna have this moment of like seeing kids

living their life at that age and the way

that I lived my life at that age, which is really tough,

you know.

I'm already gonna cry just thinking about it.

It's something that's really a hard time in my life.

(light acoustic guitar music)

When Bill was born,

Randa and I were both activists.

I had come of age basically on the doorstep

of the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville.

And I was in the Peace Movement, the whole variety

and spectrum of organizations in the Women's Movement.

My parents were like all about humanitarianism,

and like helping the steelworkers,

and helping the unemployed, and ending, you know, apartheid.

I grew up with the smell of permanent markers

on banners, going door to door, delivering leaflets.

The big picture was we can do better as human beings.

And we can, we can treat each other better

and we can have a better world.

As a toddler, Bill, he loved speed.

He loved things like Big Wheels going down steep hills,

and climbing trees and jumping out of them.

Sometimes after he had been running around a lot,

he would limp.

So I took him a doctor and he came in

and told me he has Legg Perthes Disease.

And I said I've never heard of that.

I'm a nurse, you know, but I never heard of it.

It's a developing deformation of the head of the femur,

which is normally like a rounded,

very smooth cartilage-covered ball that fits

into a socket very smoothly and rotates.

And in his case, the head of the femur

had no circulation and it becomes necrotic, basically,

sort of rotten, and becomes misshapen.

All the doctors in Pittsburgh wanted to operate.

We talked about subjecting a four-year-old

to multiple surgeries.

I'm an anesthetist, I work in a major medical center

and I know what the aftermath can be

if you don't have a good result, major pain,

major risk of infection.

There's the danger of any kind of mishap,

a blood clot, you know, things happen

to people all the time in surgery.

It's kinda scary, you know?

And that's when I started researching metallurgy

of these implants.

And all these things they've been putting in people's hips,

you know, deteriorate and the implant kills the bone.

I was like this, this is not going to happen,

you know, not for an active kid, so no.

Randa talked to so many doctors until she finally

found a doctor that said, you know,

there's an alternative, which is the brace.

It felt really sad not to see him, you know,

crashing down the alley in his Big Wheel

and doing things like that anymore

because it had been such a joy for him.

They were like this, this kind of a cage in a way, you know

It was like literally living in a cage.

I went to put him in elementary school

and they said oh, he'll be in a special education class.

I had to go to the school board to insist

that Bill be in a mainstream classroom.

Bill had to learn to deal with the world

as it was treating him because he was a freak

in the eyes of a lot of kids.

And there was a kid who called him

a four-legged chicken a bunch, and so I chased him down,

and wrestled him, and held him 'til Bill got there.

With Perthes, you know, because you have

that sort of dexterity of your legs and they kind of work,

and they look okay, it's like somehow harder

for people to deal with.

Even with my disability and kids calling me faker in,

in the playground, and when I'm wearing a chunk of steel,

and crutches and running around,

and hey like still think I'm faking.

It's alienating when you have a disability

that no one else understands, and that no one else

has to solve problems for.

Bill was a provocateur when he was a month old, you know.

He was a never a person who was gonna just ride along,

so he would sneak around without the brace and the crutches.

(upbeat jazz music)

In my medical expertise as a third grader,

I thought the brace should come off.

I began to play and to try and participate

as much as I could, even though I was definitely limited,

like you know, king of the hill, I mean

every time I would climb up that hill, man,

I'd get pushed the fuck back down and I hated it.

I would get so mad, I would cry.

I mean I would get calls from the neighbors

they would say your little boy is jumping off walls

with his crutches, you know.

And he's climbing a tree.

The thing is when you're a kid with Perthes,

like you can always be off crutches,

like you can always stand up and walk around if you want.

You can even run if you want and that's kind

of frustrating as a kid, like I know I can do these things,

but you're gonna pay the price

'cause you're gonna feel pain later, extreme pain.

During your teenage years, your bones harden

and at that point in terms of Perthes,

whatever damage has been done to your hip is done.

But if you don't feel any pain,

you don't need to use crutches.

I remember coming home from school

and he was standing next to the couch,

and he was like "No crutches!"

(upbeat dance music)

I remember walking out of the hospital

sort of feeling weird, like lighter.

I really felt very strange with my arms

without walking with crutches.

When you grow up always being, you know,

that kid on crutches or that kid with something's wrong

with him, when you get that moment

where you're just a regular kid, it's like thank you,

like I just wanna just do everything,

like it truly is an explosion.

(upbeat dance music)

It took me a good year to really,

to get back into walking.

And then there was break-dancing right there waiting for me.

When straight from like learning how to walk to learning how

to moon walk.

(laughing)

I remember they had a talent show.

He's a freshmen in high school.

Bill would get out there and he was popping

and moon-walking, and all of the girls

in the audience went, "Ahhhhhh!"

It was magical, the, the movement was magical.

And my brother was lit up.

♪ It's a beautiful day to go skating ♪

♪ Won't you shred, won't you rip ♪

♪ Won't you skate your balls off ♪

(upbeat rock music)

They still were doing break-dancing

and then they went into the skateboarding thing.

And we just attacked the streets.

♪ Marijuana! ♪

[Bill] Oh shit.

It changed my life in one day.

♪ Cheap beer! ♪

I knew it was like no going back.

♪ Women! ♪

Bill, Bill.

Look what I did to my board, oh no.

That was just when street skating was coming about,

like wall riding, and rail sliding,

but it wasn't like the rails yet.

It was like more on the long curbs

that would be outside the gas stations

and we'd just slide the whole curb.

Bill was the kind of skateboarder who, you know,

looked like he would probably sprain

an ankle or break an ankle doing a trick,

and just figure it was the cost of learning

to do that trick.

Young people are trying to fight the establishment

of an ordinance that would prohibit skateboards

in Pittsburgh's business districts.

These skaters say their board is their transportation.

Because I work in Oakland and, you know,

I live here in Point Breeze,

so I have to skate through Oakland just to get to work.

And if they ban that,

then I'm gonna get a fine going to work.

You should get the footage of Bill getting arrested.

He got arrested for skateboarding.

(all shouting) (rock music)

(screaming)

Get off my fucking hand.

Just get off my wrist, man.

What the fuck?

(grunting)

Fuck.

What the fuck is this, man?

I'm just a skateboarder.

I'm skating down the street.

And the cops threw him in jail.

It was all in the news.

And he went to jail saying, "Skateboarding is not a crime!"

Skateboarding is not a crime!

Skateboarding is not, that was like the slogan.

And but actually technically it was.

I followed them to jail, then they came out

and we cheered like they were

political prisoners being released.

What happened, Bill?

I don't know.

(camera shutter clicking)

After that they had his picture in Sassy Magazine.

He became a big rockstar to all the girls,

Like damn, Bill, you look cute.

(laughing)

(light guitar music)

Bill's situation with his illness, you know,

that had been such a focus for our family that

when that was gone, then Randy

and I had to look at our relationship.

That's the way life goes, perfect storms

every once in a while where everything

just goes to fragments.

, wow, look.

It's totally destroyed.

I think Bill felt responsible for me

and Randy getting divorced.

Me and my brother, like we were very dependent on

each other and we were split during the divorce.

My brother went to live with my mom,

but I still had to live with my dad.

And that was really tough.

Randy and Bill had a dynamic that was really,

they had horrible fights.

My brother really started to get the brunt

of my dad's hard-ass reactions to being defied.

Bill often saw his art as a sword and a shield.

For Bill, his art has been very cathartic

and has been shaped by whatever happened

to be happening with him at that particular period

in his life, and his reactions to it.

(light electronic music)

Support the troops.

Bring them home.

I call the Pentagon's war.

This is my body.

My body.

Art was just the place I went,

the place I went when I wanted to be

on a level playing ground with the other kids in class,

the place I went to get away from my family issues.

(vocalizing)

Everybody has that experience of suffering.

[Electronic Voice] Three-legged chicken.

[Electronic Voice] Three-legged chicken.

But I think sharing the experience and understanding it

as other people experience it

is another step in the process.

[Electronic Voice] Three-legged chicken.

Hey, were you sleeping?

No sleeping, no sleeping today, bud!

Uh-uh, it's National Un-Holiday.

♪ Wake up ♪

(vocalizing)

I remember there's one scene that, you know,

everybody goes and does an acid drop.

An acid drop is like an old move where you

just like ride off a drop and you just drop down.

I was just scared of it,

like I didn't have flexibility in my right leg.

Every time I would fall or my back leg would get,

would get pulled out,

it was like horrible excruciating pain.

When we were skating, we would just go, go, go.

And he couldn't keep up.

And so it would be a question of okay,

do we stop skating or do we leave my brother behind?

Are you all right, man?

Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm fine.

You'll be all right?

Yeah, I'll be fine.

(dramatic guitar music)

I knew that my time like without any problems

with my hips was already into those days were numbered,

just a matter of time.

I knew that when I was 16 and I was skateboarding,

like this shit isn't gonna last.

There's no fucking way.

I better enjoy it while I can.

And then it happened and I started having really,

really bad pain.

And there would be times when he would

just be like in tears from the pain.

And I'd feel like I was seeing the pain change him

in his personality.

It was really, really, really heartbreaking

to tell him that he had to go back on crutches.

And for Bill, a bottomless pit of sorrow.

He cried.

We all cried.

(dramatic music)

(indistinct chatter)

All right, Twenty.

Go, Twenty.

Another thing you can do is we go down to the floor

and come back up, so you have different ranges of,

levels of your movement.

You know, you're standing here doing this.

You open up, you start to step it around,

two, one, two, spin.

Like that, get, keep going with your feeling,

whatever your flow is, but then go, try to go to the ground.

Go to the ground and do it again, and come back up.

Just do another turn.

Yeah, so you go lower down.

Yeah, beau-, good, then come back up.

Good.

Come here, give me five, man.

You got skills.

All right.

(light electronic music)

Here you go, like that.

Pop your chest out and roll it around.

And keep 'em moving.

Keep your neck alive.

Good, yeah.

I have a question that I don't think came up.

What's that?

What hip do you have it on?

I have it bilaterally.

My right ended up worse than my left.

Yeah, it started in my right and went to my left,

so when I started compensating for my left with my right,

my right wasn't fully healed,

so I damaged my right more than my left.

Yeah.

I'm gonna take you for your x-rays, okay?

Okay.

And you're here today for your hips, right?

Yeah.

Okay, you're gonna be lying down

on the table on your back.

Eww, it's cold in here.

Do they have to A/C it so much?

Yeah, for the film.

For the film it has to be cold, too.

That's why it's so cold in these rooms.

You know, I've been wondering why the hell this room

was so cold my entire life.

(light electronic music)

Coming in here when I was five years old

and just being cold, like all the sudden it would

just be freezing.

I just thought why is it so cold.

Like this machine in 1978,

(imitating whirring)

It was like a monster, you know?

Back then it was like the hole in the window

was like a little thin little slat

they would look through like it was a gun hole.

And they would speak on a microphone,

(imitating static)

okay now,

we're gonna take the picture.

You know, Perthes Disease,

the big question is should he or shouldn't he

have an operation.

So there's your right hip.

Normally, that should be a sphere within a sphere,

a ball in a ball, you know, and that is a mushroom.

It was very confusing in treating Perthes Disease

because there's so many different options

on just attempting to treat it

and there's no solid method of how to do things.

And there's still no cure, and no one knows what's right

and what's wrong.

It's not always a direct-

We've inherited a medical model of disability

that assumes that when there is a body

that doesn't fit a stereotypical abled body,

that it is something sad or tragic,

and something that needs to be cured.

And so when you see that in Bill Shannon's life,

when people say well, if you have this hip problem,

why don't you just get hip replacements?

And you're doing pretty well,

but it's gonna go someday

and you're gonna need a total hip replacement

when that hits someday.

The pain that I have is a, is a constant adjustment.

It's like always adjusting for different gradations of it.

Perthes Disease causes quite a bit of damage.

That dead bone, you know, it starts to flatten out,

and causes a lot of pain and friction in that hip area,

and so it causes kids to limp,

or you have pain after walking for a while

or any physical activity.

I tell my parents that sometimes it

was like something was stabbing my leg

'cause it got so painful

that I felt like somebody was cutting my leg off.

The pain it's really bad.

It's like you, kinda feel this grinding every time you

take a step.

In the spring I started

having just a teeny tiny bit of pain.

And in the summer I started limping a lot.

'Cause you never know like whenever you want

to do something fun, you can't, if you barely walk,

you really wanna do it.

Somebody will have to take you

or you will have to go in your wheelchair and do it,

and that sucks.

Do you have any thigh pain?

Yeah, it radiates down to my knee.

That's, that's part of it that people don't understand,

like yeah, okay, my hip hurts,

but does it hurt enough for me to go get surgery

to replace it.

And then how long's that surgery last for?

You can, you know, get a hip replacement

and in 10 years you're getting another one.

And in another 10 years you're getting another one.

And after so many of them, you can't get another one.

That's it, you know, you reach the end of the line.

Now you have to fuse your hip, which is basically

put it in one position and freeze it.

And just like I'm not into that option at all.

I wanna be, you know, responsible for my own fate.

(light electronic music)

And so I tried to use canes and they were just useless,

I mean, because, when my hip really was hurting,

they kinda really didn't do enough.

And then when I was trying to be preventative

and kind of not use them fully but use them some,

they kind of were in the way 'cause you,

you can't really have your hands free when using canes,

so I started using a single point crutch.

And then he started developing better tips

for them, and then one day I saw the rocker bottom.

Those crutches were like no other crutches

that you see, really.

And they were legitimate crutches,

but they were just U-shaped.

(light dance music)

With the rocker bottom you had the range.

You reach forward and you have that range around the curve,

so you get a longer, smoother push.

That really made a difference with skateboarding.

A doctor, you know, with no experience skateboarding

would probably just look at that and go this motherfucker

is so stupid, not realizing that with a hip like that,

you take one push on a board and you just roll

for like half a block, so you're actually saving your hip.

When we see Bill Shannon using a skateboard

as a mobility aid we forget that the mobility aids

that we're more familiar with, like wheelchairs,

came out of somebody solving a problem.

It's just creative necessity.

I was looking at my childhood

and how I was in certain situations with my peers where,

you had to come up with a solution now.

That's creative necessity.

It's like the necessary instant reaction gut.

You know, and that's a, that's playground mentality.

That's like on the street and you have to come up

with a solution in the moment.

(upbeat electronic music)

He would use them to hit the ball,

so it was like an extra appendage.

He could really gain a lot of ground just

by swinging when we were sprinting,

and I think that might even have been

where the glide kinda came from.

(indistinct chatter)

♪ With the camera lens ♪

♪ Spittin' the freestyle with my friends ♪

♪ Yeah, I'm makin' ♪

(upbeat dance music)

They roll up like construction paper.

Step Fenz, baby, Step Fenz, baby.

Yeah!

(upbeat dance music)

My crew, the Step Fenz, here,

we counted 15 different clubs a night in New York City

to dances, just underground shit, after hours in Chinatown,

but it was like just dance, dance,

and we would go dance all fucking night.

There were no established competitions to go to.

There were these circles and people would battle.

Their style was clashing with styles, egos clashing

with egos, you know, going at each other through dance,

you know, as an expression.

Anybody that we had known, like we were gonna

throw some rounds.

In that, there was a conversation, you know,

but what if part of the conversation

was like back the fuck up, you know.

No sympathy in a cypher.

(upbeat dance music)

Crutch knew where to go.

Where the music was, Crutch would show up

just like we would.

(upbeat dance music)

I came to New York

and I had a little of this and a little

of that, you know, but I didn't have any footwork for real.

(upbeat dance music)

He was still working on the movement side of it.

You know, he wasn't as far along by any stretch.

He was doing a whole lot of falling before he was flying.

The way he was able to navigate himself around

on them crutches, that shit don't take overnight, man.

I started going out to clubs

and other people were dancing at the cub.

And I just naturally just started doing little moves,

like fuck it.

You know, and then I started going to hip hop spots

and like doing whatever the fuck I could do

what I can pull off with my crutches.

We would dance.

He would come in.

He would do a move and if he didn't bust his ass,

I'd be like yeah, that shit was dope.

And if he didn't, he always got up and tried it again.

But there's no way Crutch got a pass.

There's no way it was, it was easier for him

to get recognition or props just because he was on crutches.

But when you first introduce something different,

everybody's isn't gonna just immediately start hugging you,

like wow, that's great.

They're gonna look at you like

what the fuck are you doing, you know.

Go home.

Don't come in here with that bullshit.

(upbeat dance music)

Until I got good enough, until I got better.

♪ One of a kind, verve of the mind ♪

♪ Servin' a rhyme, workin' on time, yes sir ♪

♪ One of a kind ♪

♪ Free-Form fetish ♪

♪ Medicine in for your headaches ♪

♪ We bomb fellas, better sin for the medics ♪

(crowd cheering)

♪ Stay on mellow ass ♪

♪ Why you don't walk it ♪

♪ Nights sparklin' ♪

♪ Charlie here is my man ♪

When he's in it, woo-hoo.

Let it go 'cause he's like ah, yeah, bring it

'cause you think I don't got it?

Ah.

♪ Ripped them off and wax shit gets to solve this ♪

♪ Gift revolves around ♪

♪ Earth space station that'll rock you, pa ♪

♪ Have you runnin' for your ground ♪

♪ A little baklava ♪

♪ Let me talk to y'all ♪

♪ About some off the wall ♪

♪ Rapper wannabe in front of me ♪

♪ That got the balls to not know ♪

You know, how he would slide that, before he brought it up

and held it up for a second, like...

I've seen Shaolin monks with the sticks

and I gotta tell you, they,

it's the same

span of time he's on that stick and he's turning

and putting moves in concession to make it

to a combo to a beat.

♪ One of a kind ♪

♪ One of a kind, verve of the mind ♪

♪ One of a kind, heard it in my first step ♪

♪ One of a kind ♪

♪ One of a kind, verve of the mind ♪

♪ One of a kind, heard in my first step ♪

♪ Servin' rhymes and workin' on time, yes sir ♪

This is Crutch Master, man, you know what I mean?

(crowd cheering)

(percussive music)

I thought I'd seen it all until I seen UFOs,

turtles and body rolls on crutches.

That shit right there is real.

I like his style and I like the way he's aggressive.

I like how he goes out there and hits his freezes on point.

(crowd cheering)

This man right here is an inspiration to all dancers.

If you all ain't seen this cat get down,

you all ain't seen nothing.

(light electronic music)

You know, a lot of people like obsess about oh,

I'm too skinny, I'm too fat, all that stuff

about not having the right body type to dance

is all bullshit.

I'm dancing, it's in your head.

No matter how healthy you are, your body is limited.

Once you get that through your head

that your body is limited, that dancing

is in your mind and not in your body,

then you're pretty much free as a dancer.

So if you're driven to dance, if your soul is of a dancer,

and you have a bad leg and you're on crutches,

you're gonna dance no matter what.

(upbeat piano music)

It's 6:42 right now and chances

are you're never seen anything like this before.

The show is called The Art of Weightlessness.

It's sponsored by The Dance Umbrella,

and Bill Shannon defies gravity

with the help of his crutches in a unique dance performance.

Bill, thanks for coming.

Thanks for being here so early.

I'd never seen anything like this.

I was looking at the videotape yesterday

and I was amazed because when you start dancing

around on these crutches,

it is just like you have no weight.

It's like you're light as a feather moving about.

And it's sort of a funky dance routine, too.

I heard one critic say that your hip is bad,

but your hop is spectacular.

Yeah, that's a, that's a little,

that was a little cute little title, yeah.

(upbeat dance music)

Bill had an idea of putting a couple

of his old pieces together and create an hour-long piece.

The Art of Weightlessness, man.

(upbeat dance music)

Bill was on another level at the time.

There were only two pioneering companies

that was doing hip hop dance

on the concert stage and he was one of 'em.

I was completely ignorant

at that point to like what performance art was.

You know, if you thought theater, I though the-at-er.

And so I didn't think about theater as being a place

that we could like illustrate anything hip hop.

How can you bring something that exists in a circle

in a club into the square, into the proscenium.

(light ambient music)

Crutch's whole like approach wasn't just

that he was bringing genuine hip hop into it,

but he was also bringing in like this abstract art

into the space at the same time.

Bill had a raincoat, you know, he came out.

I had this rain sound effects, you know, on.

It's trippy, man.

I mean the show is just like trippy, I'm telling you.

I'm sitting there during the show

and I was tripping looking at it,

like don't forget your cues, you know what I mean?

(percussive music)

The politics, the current state of affairs,

his background, all that stuff is

put into everything that Bill Shannon does.

(vocalizing)

(upbeat dance music)

♪ Take it easy ♪

♪ Don't worry about it ♪

♪ I got this, I got this ♪

♪ Let me work it, let me work it out ♪

♪ Take it easy ♪

♪ Take it easy ♪

♪ Don't let me bother you ♪

♪ I got this, I got this ♪

♪ Let me work it out, let me work it out ♪

♪ Take it easy ♪

So much was happening with his career.

It just got to be like one thing after another.

(upbeat jazz music)

Hip hop is out of all things, it's really important

to maintain your individuality.

My name is Jeff Grosso and I'm your host.

This is fucking Love Letters. Welcome back.

The Guggenheim, I met Crazy Legs,

I'm going to Kuwait, I'm going to Japan.

Whooo.

We went to France.

Look at this shit.

England.

(humming)

Scotland.

Freedom!

♪ Only y'all know what happened ♪

♪ With some passion ♪

♪ Rappers battlin' all rappers ♪

♪ Carry it all backwards ♪

♪ Laugh and say that's it ♪

♪ It's battlecon ♪

♪ Future blackness ♪

(upbeat jazz music)

There were some good reviews and people really

like the work and, you know, all this stuff,

but at the same time the dance world, they were looking

at it like ahh, isn't that cute,

he does the break-dance on the crutches.

I've seen Crutch get angry.

They keep asking him about his crutches and, you know,

not about the, the artwork, the music, or the dancers.

It was a lot about his disability, you know.

It's kind of fucked up.

No matter how high you go on skills on crutches,

there's still the baggage

of a crutch representing failure

that can trump your achievements.

Ready?

Yeah.

So tonight we're gonna see

the two pieces that I choreographed for "Varekai",

Cirque Du Soleil's "Varekai" show.

(light orchestral music)

(vocalizing)

Just knowing that Bill had anything

to do with Cirque Du Soleil was just a huge honor

that one of us made it, one of us did it.

(grand orchestral music)

So we were really proud, but I don't think it was like

anything that really shocked us so hard.

It was like, it was almost like of course.

You're supposed to be doing that.

The contacted me after they saw my glide

and they wanted me to actually be a performer

in the show, like a, a main character, basically.

But then I found out like what their artists

have to go through.

I watched these dudes one night

and this guy was busting his ass.

I was worried about it damaging my hips

or damaging the nerves in my arms from doing

that much every day, same exact thing.

That just does wear and tear.

I said I'll train somebody to do what I do and become a part

of the creative team and do choreography.

Yeah, yeah, hell yeah.

Nice.

He had to teach these gentlemen

to dance on crutches.

Vladimir Ignatenkov, three time world champion tumbler.

Do a flair.

Flair your legs out, both.

Yeah.

And also he had to train several aerialists.

Keep going, keep your flow on.

I had these guys threading and parroting and tick tocking,

and all these different flavors of like boogaloo style.

Then they had their own acrobatic moves on top of that,

so it just looked really, really sick.

Whooo, beautiful.

(camera shutter clicking)

The director wanted to put like

an upside down wheelchair act in the show,

where there's like clowns in a wheelchair

that flips upside down and clowns fall out.

And I was like you're not fucking putting that in the show,

like I felt insulted literally because he was trying

to make into like a disability theme where

my work was gonna be a part of the spectrum

of representation of disability.

And I was very uncomfortable with that.

I didn't want to be a part of the disabled Cirque show.

I wanted to, my character to be the one that flies.

(light electronic music) (audience applauding)

(light orchestral music)

When you want to teach people,

they have to understand what it is you're doing,

and the communication has to be the same.

Otherwise everything gets lost in translation.

So when you develop a technique,

you begin to codify a language for,

for a particular vocabulary.

You name it, you call it what it is, and Bill Shannon

is doing that in the Shannon Technique.

(upbeat dance music)

(singing in foreign language)

By him creating a specific vocabulary and naming it,

it creates an awareness that those movements

have been absolutely articulated, like it's a real choice

of his body to go to a very specific place

and he can hit it every time.

I was in the studio with him.

We had six weeks of one-to-one mentoring,

and I expected to be able to do things like that.

And he just cracked up,

he's like you've been trying this for 15 minutes.

I've been doing that for 15 years.

Yes, it was dance, it was movement,

but it was this thing that absolutely

exploded the preconceptions that I even had

of what dance was.

Those are the respected art forms

or genres in dance are the ones that have technique.

One that puts itself in

that frame deserves respect.

And that is learned and that requires discipline.

But it's also there's a little bit like a little fuck you to

that system at the same time.

(upbeat dance music)

(audience applauding)

Yeah, yeah.

(crowd cheering)

Yeah, let me hear it, New York.

(crowd cheering)

Raise the roof up!

Raise the roof up, come on,

all right, all right, let's get this started.

Yeah.

Sketchy, Sketchy.

That's his Sketchy, he definitely stepped it up

after coming from Cirque.

One, two, two, two.

It was a sketchy attempt at bringing hip hop to theater.

Oooh, nice, D.

I wasn't necessarily that the moves were sketchy,

but having hip hop in the theater at that point

was a sketchy idea to people,

so it was like a little bit of sarcasm behind it

if you know Crutch.

He finally had a little bit

of money behind it and so we were able

to give a little bit more to like costumes.

He was incorporating so many things

that aren't even typical in hip hop, you know,

like slow motion capture.

Hype him up, right?

We want to see it again, right?

Come on, are you with me?

Sketchy attempts trying moves

that you don't necessarily know that you that you can land.

You're never gonna see that in a contemporary show.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

eight, nine, whoaaa!

(crowd cheering)

You could feel people, like the energy,

like oooh please, you know, like you can make it.

(crowd cheering)

The crowds absolutely loved it.

Hand hops, elbow hops, whoa!

There's so many people in New York that came out

to see us that we grew up in the clubs with.

And I think it was their first take at ever seeing us

in theater.

It was like we just won a contest somewhere,

like a battle, and like everybody

was just so fucking thrilled to see, see it happen.

Like I, I wanted to clap, but I'm like yeah, we did it.

(audience applauding)

Were to add another character to his repertoire,

did you read that?

Oh my God, she started out with the ax.

What are you gonna do?

Is a real person with pretenses of being...

oh my God.

Pretenses of being what?

A contemptual artists.

Conceptual.

Conceptual, I'm sorry.

That's very nice.

I'm upside down.

Well, you either are or you aren't.

Right?

If you don't have the potential to be.

You can't have a pre,

you don't have a, you don't have a pretense about it.

You either are or you're not, you know,

so what she's saying is I'm not, but.

It's just like I don't know,

I want to send Crazy Legs to review a ballet show.

Okay?

(laughing)

That's what I want to do.

And he'll write for The New York Times.

They're used to seeing one thing one way,

like theater to them is supposed to be the old fashioned way

or what they see as, as hip hop,

that's the way it's supposed to be.

Any dance critic that comes to my work does not

know what I did.

Like ballet is well documented.

Modern dance is well documented.

Like I'm out here pushing the boundaries

of a form I've invented in ways that are completely

like invisible to someone who's just looking at me.

Uhhh, it's a feeling of being profoundly misunderstood.

(laughing)

(dramatic music)

Which is, this is how you learn your balance.

Which is this tight line

That's how you, bend your knees, keep low, point,

be like, I'm going!

Whoa.

(light electronic music)

(kids cheering)

Use your muscles, Earl.

That was Bill.

(laughing)

Come on, buddy.

While I was here, like I was retouching some part

of my childhood and revisiting that part of my life,

and I don't know, my dad during the time

that I had my disability was going

through a lot of emotional healing from his own childhood.

And so I think a lot of the brunt

of that was taken out on me.

I was the oldest.

And that's really hard because I have to think

like my own relationship to my,

to my own kids is so different.

Like I never, I never raised a hand on my kids.

And my dad didn't know any different, you know.

So,

I don't know, it's just hard to imagine.

(upbeat dance music)

Bill told me he had met somebody.

He was pretty smitten, you know, kinda like really kid

in the candy store kind of smitten.

Bill was, you know, cute.

He was very different from me.

We met in New York and he likes to tell the story

of us being from the opposite sides of the tracks,

'cause I was in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn,

which was, you know, brownstones.

And at that time he was in Red Hook,

which was down and dirty.

(laughing)

They were both like theses salmon, just swimming upstream

as hard as they could.

I mean you could just, you could just read it

like from a mile away, this is it.

Mmmm, boogy, boogy, boogy, yeah.

Uh-oh, is a lip coming out?

Look at the lip.

He's so cute.

Wait, where's the lip?

There it is.

Give 'em the lip, give 'em the lip.

Ohhh.

After Sketchy, everybody goes in their own path.

Daddy.

Oh, watch out.

Watch out.

Crutch did the last thing

you would expect from Crutch.

You know, he's like I'm moving to Pittsburgh.

Like he's growing his own food and vegetables, and has a car

that runs off like fucking potatoes or something.

That's, that's Crutch, you know.

But he goes back to a more refined Crutch

into solo work.

Back into his like organic interactions

with people or their reactions,

to Bill, you know, doing his thing,

going through the street.

It's fucking raining, man.

Come on, we gotta get started here!

What's going on?

What's taking so long!

(banjo music)

Hear yourself.

Oh!

So I met Bill at School of the Art Institute

of Chicago in around 1993.

And I actually remember him, you kinda, can't not,

remember the way he looked.

(barking)

I was like damn, this kid wants attention like really bad.

(shouting)

You know, I think being a public spectacle

as a child, going to demonstrations in public

throughout my whole childhood, and then being

in the street skateboarding and break-dancing

just all fed into like I'm just a performing artist

in the street, this feels natural to me.

(banjo music)

In Chicago we shot on some really nasty, bad cameras, man,

and it was all noise.

And just like hidden camera guy in the,

in the corner, whatever, like off,

offsite where you can't see any spying on innocent people.

You know, he's getting tangled up on the street,

getting caught in doors, you know.

He's just falling down and he's got crutches.

So then, you know, somebody'll go to help him.

And then he'll just make them fail in helping him,

which is kind of a sad place to be, you know what I mean?

Once the reemergence of my disability came back in my 20s,

I was like dealing with the same expressions

in people's faces again.

And it was like a really old memory, a very old memory to

have people treat me the way they did.

(light electronic music)

One of the most difficult things about the transition

from the status of non-disabled to disabled

is figuring out how to manage the awkwardness

of encounters between themselves and non-disabled people.

It was like a turning point when I realized

that I have this relationship to the public doing tricks

on crutches, and that it's not all

like look how cool I am on crutches.

There's all this other stuff happening.

And that I have not even begun to deal with it.

And that was the beginning of that journey.

(static hissing)

It's provocative.

You're taking advantage of people's good nature.

Like these are good people that care.

But I was often in the position of helping him

when he needed help, so I know what it's like

to be the person who's reaching down to help somebody up

who may or may not need it.

So I identify with both sides.

What happened in that performance

that's so interesting was that my skateboard was there,

but the sidewalk had a slight incline to it,

and so the skateboard just rolled out

and went into the street.

A cab crossed three lanes to run over the board on purpose.

Now mind you, I had no money at that time.

I was on full scholarship at the Art Institute of Chicago.

I had no real job.

My family doesn't have money, plus I no longer

had a way to get back to the train station

and back to my house, which, like, tons of distance.

I mean it was a long ass way.

I had to walk all the way to the train.

And I was just miserable.

And I started crashing to the ground,

and people were coming and helping me.

Instead of being like no, I'm not gonna let you help me,

I just started hugging them.

And I would be hugging like three or four people at once,

and they would all be lifting me up.

They'd lift me up and stand me up, and instead

of rejecting them I was just kind of like okay,

I'm just accepting this.

I was just really upset about my situation,

but also just everything that has happened.

(light electronic music)

It was like I was just surrendering when I realized

I don't really want to mess with people.

I just want to express these feelings and these ideas.

You know, I imagine that people might be a little upset

by that.

Some people are, like how could you do that to people,

like isn't that mean?

Come on, there's at least a couple people in here

that think it's really mean.

I want to know who they are.

I think you're awful.

Okay.

(laughing)

This guy behind you, here.

I think it's kind of manipulative.

You think it's what? Kind of manipulative.

Manipulative.

Ahh, okay.

Um, well, I kind of want to talk about that a little bit.

You know, like "Regarding the Fall" was a question

and some of the questions were asked in a wrong way.

And that there are failures to it that happened

in order for me to dig further into it,

I had to go down paths, every dead end.

And out of that mistake came the concept

of the neutral palette,

which is that you never see me like just all,

all out and out fall.

Bill realized that he was in some ways being manipulative

of people because he was putting them into a crisis moment,

so he decided that a better way to continue to investigate,

because he was very interested in how people

were responding to him, was not to present himself

as something flashy

that would very obviously draw attention.

I mean this shit is just beyond like reasonable,

it's almost like so strange,

one, for him to do it,

two, for me to accept him doing it.

You know, it's just uh,

I'm sitting there going oh my God,

he actually fucking gave me a drink of water.

At that point I had surrendered myself

to whatever other people thought I needed,

and this was like probably the height of that,

somebody actually feeding me.

Like that is just, that really gets to the core of help.

You know, you will have people who will, you know,

try to feed you in your real life and you'll be offended,

but in your performance you embrace it

and you try to understand it.

It's like I am out there interacting with phenomena

that extend throughout my whole life.

And the people that are representing those phenomena

are individuals, but I don't look at them

as good or bad people based on how they act.

I look at them as individuals that manifest phenomena

that occur to me whether I'm performing or not.

The phenomenology of disability

that Shannon explores comes out

of an experience of repeated patterns of interaction.

He sees the same things and experiences

the same things over, and over and over again.

That's burdensome, but what it also does

for someone who as thoughtful as Shannon is it pushes him

to want to name those things.

(upbeat jazz music)

Imagine if I get up, I get dressed, I go outside,

I throw on my tunes, jump on the board and start

to like bop down the street.

And as I go down the street,

pushing on my crutches, everyone turns to stare.

A lot of people stare directly at me,

but even more people turn after I pass.

So I continue on down the block and a cab pulls up,

(car horn honking)

"Hey, hoo, what do you call that?"

And before I can even answer, the car's gone.

I get to the bus stop.

I sit down.

A perfect stranger comes along

and looks at me and says, "Sorry."

And then another person comes

and sits down on the bench, and then the guy looks

at me and goes, "Hey, what happened to you?"

And I'm like, what happened to you?

And he's like, "No, I mean the crutches."

And I said, everybody has crutches;

some of them you can see, some of them are invisible.

He goes, "Come on, man, what happened to your leg?

I bet it was your ankle.

I broke my ankle once."

And he continues to tell me his whole story.

Then the bus pulls up, the bus driver opens the door

and says, "Hey, come on, buddy, I got ya.

You can do it."

I get off the bus and there's a store.

I'm looking a the store and I realize

that the thing I need to get, there's two places

that sell it and one of them's maybe having a sale.

And I can't remember which one.

And as I'm standing there I notice

there's a woman holding the door open for me,

waiting for me to go into the store,

but I'm still trying to decide.

And she's holding it longer, and she's looking at me.

And her face changes, are you coming to the door?

And I get this little bit of a backlash eye roll,

but I go into the store anyway.

And I find the item I want, and I go to the register.

The cashier says, "Hey, man, did you break your ankle?

I broke my ankle once."

And that's just one day.

It's not even a whole day.

It's just one errand.

And these things all are cumulative, day after day, week

after week, month after month, year after year after year.

(light piano music)

Disability always demands a story.

Non-disabled people are never required

to give an account of themselves in the same way.

What happened?

To my hip?

I was born with a disease.

It's a really long story, but my hip is not round.

Really? Yeah.

Most of us simply learn to manage this.

We have a standard answer.

We get it out of the way and we move on.

So that he's turned this into a performance piece,

into an art form where he evokes this question,

this interrogation is absolutely brilliant.

It's a language, and it's a tool,

and it's a way of seeing, but it's not a sort

of guidebook to "do's and don'ts" of dealing

with disabled people who need help.

What I actually encourage is to abandon assumptions.

(light electronic music)

Get down to The Studio at the Opera House

because there's an amazing performer

from Brooklyn coming out called Bill Shannon.

And the night is called Spatial Theory.

It's had rave reviews.

You know that I was doing these performances

where I was having these interactions with people based

on their ideas of who I was, people were responding to it,

you know, interested in it.

(audience applauding)

Yeah, yeah.

And it became necessity to communicate it to audiences.

So welcome to this evening's presentation of Spatial Theory.

(vocalizing)

(audience applauding)

Okay, now I'm gonna sit down and talk a little,

go over some video of some street performance work,

where I perform simple utilitarian tasks in public

and sort of begin to look at people look at me.

(upbeat jazz music)

So I said you know what I'm gonna do,

I'm just gonna pick up a bottle.

I'm just gonna pick up this bottle in public.

It's a utilitarian task, a very simple task.

And you're gonna see, this is me.

I'm the hero.

This is the villain, right.

And that's a random babushka from a Russian marketplace,

so here's the reach for the bottle,

which could be like the initiation

of what I call projective narrative.

So her story about me picking up the bottle

is like way deeper than my own story

of me picking up the bottle,

which is basically a high mid, low mid split reach.

(audience laughing)

She's looking at it like will the man pick up the bottle?

I cannot go on to my destination until I know

if the man will pick up the bottle.

Now, if you watch the purse area here,

you're going to see this height of the conflict

reach a cataclysmic point.

Watch the purse, get it, get it, get it.

Ohhh.

(audience laughing)

A psychosomatic reaction to the height

of the arc of her narrative.

(audience laughing)

And what I've noticed in, this next little moment

here is what I call fate of distraction at the top

of the stairs, fate of distraction right here.

Whoa.

Okay, I don't, I mean when it happened I was like terrified,

like oh no, she's going down on the stairs.

You can see my good samaritan impulse,

I mean I'm ready to like dive down after her,

so I'm not like out here just like accusing people

of like being stupid for trying to help other people

in need because I do it myself.

And then there's final reckoning, you'll see it here,

this look of like, right here.

She's like you know, I almost died looking at you.

(audience laughing)

(audience applauding)

I think Bill understands people's reaction

to disability more than most people do,

and he knows he's being misunderstood.

And he can reach in and like bloop, here it is,

you see that.

So this next relationship I call peripheral fluctuation.

So peripheral fluctuation is the kind of thing

where your periphery is like right here, right,

you can see my field of vision.

Then you have like peripheral over here, right,

so then as soon as my periphery starts to move

towards a full field of vision,

it's like peripheral function.

No, I wasn't looking.

(audience laughing)

All of those things, were things

that I could recognize in my life in different ways,

and oh yeah, I do that or I know that.

And and yeah, that's not,

that's not understood by everybody.

This next relationship I call "Gesture of Help."

A gesture of help is very different than real help.

Real help, you know, like put me over your shoulder

and carry me up the stairs.

A gesture of help is like I'm gonna help her help me

up the stairs.

(audience laughing)

Now normally for me, I go like up the stairs,

but she's going sideways.

(audience laughing)

I'm like where are you taking me?

I'm going to another dimension.

People who haven't experienced these interactions,

people who move through the world with sort

of ordinary bodies don't necessarily understand

what Bill is talking about, but it's that intervention

with the video technology, that's when people get it.

(audience applauding)

(light electronic music)

People say, they'll write about me, Bill Shannon,

you know, he's this great dancer, right,

it's too bad that, you know, he tricks people

into helping him on the street.

You know, or he does things where he falls to the ground

so that, so that people help him.

So it has this sort of notion that, that I'm getting people

to do these things as if they don't do them already,

whether, well, no matter what I'm doing, they're doing it.

(upbeat jazz music)

What's it for?

it's a trio of video projects,

called "Window, Bench and Traffic."

And those projects are my sort of way of addressing

a basic problem about dancing in the street,

which is my dancing in the street

is never seen by audiences,

it's only seen by people who happen to be there.

(light electronic music)

He could've just kinda gone down some easy route

of making some really entertaining dance shows.

People would love the sort of flippancy

and the superficial level of the virtuosity that he has.

And he didn't.

The mad scientist in him is brewing something,

he's just, you know, he's brainstorming

for his next big form of expression.

(percussive music)

Moving into a series like "Window, Bench, Traffic"

solves one problem that Bill had when he

was doing his click and point edited video talks.

And that is that people could see him picking and choosing,

which, in fact, he was.

He might have captured four hours of film

and found the three seconds that really illustrated

his point.

And people might say well, there's a,

there's a manipulation that's happening there

because you're freezing,

you're stopping does it really unfold that way?

Well, let's find out.

There's a fabric.

There's a social fabric.

There's a a landscape of gazes, and approaches

and subtleties around how humans look at each other,

and pass each other, and the body language

and the patterns that take place.

And I really wanted to prove that the spectacle is there,

I don't have to use anything.

It happens no matter what I do,

whether it's my real life or I'm in a performance.

(upbeat dance music)

Window was people would be viewing the performance

through a window in a building on a square,

and then the audience in the window

would see the performance, not only directly,

but also through the camera

so they could see up close how people were reacting.

It's an extension of his own investigations

into how people treat those who are disabled,

and we often don't know, you know,

until we see it on screen.

Bill realizes there are two different audiences,

the people who have been watching see a guy

who's clearly capable, whereas people

who have been walking by, what they have

is crutches equals fragile.

Everyone who sees that thinks they know

what they're seeing, but they're interpreting it

so differently that it's

like they're two different realities.

Bench was before the time of the GoPro, you know,

he attached cameras all around him to

give a 360 degree view.

I remember doing a 360 in a suitcase thing.

The hidden cameras were a way to get an honest reaction.

You all right?

You all right?

Everyone would see all of these reactions behind him,

his wake, basically.

People literally stop on their tracks.

That happens all the time.

(upbeat dance music)

Stage it in the middle of the back.

Traffic, we put that on wheels

and it becomes a lot more elaborate.

The audience boards a bus.

There's a DJ on the bus.

The DJ would pipe music that Bill could hear

and that the audience in the bus could hear, too.

(upbeat dance music)

He took his audience into the street.

He took his audience on a goddamn ride.

(all laughing)

And I was on the bus like dude, this is fucking genius.

It was so cool.

It was so exciting, like you really felt

like you were with him.

Whooo, whooo!

(all laughing)

It's interesting enough to be called art,

but it's got this, you know, spectacle

of showmanship kind of quality and you're not looking

at the Empire State Building,

you're looking at somebody who's living art.

Hi.

It's hot out today, right?

Yeah?

How is what?

With these? I try, I flap them, I try to get air.

Like that, like they catch air and then I can kind of fly.

I need a what?

I do need a parachute.

Thank you.

You, too.

(upbeat dance music)

Traffic is so spontaneous

that we get to see not only those disability phenomena,

Bye.

(upbeat dance music)

Ah, that's failure.

But even when I, even when I fail I try to keep it smooth.

You all right? Yeah, I'm cool.

I, I look good, don't I?

I look good, right?

On the ground.

Yeah, I'm, I don't really need help, but if you want

to help me, you can.

Okay, you wanna help me, all right, cool.

Here we go, Shannon.

I don't need this help though.

No, listen, I don't need the help,

but I really appreciate it.

All right, brother.

Thank you, brother.

Huh?

It's my hip isn't round on both sides.

Well, it's both, actually.

I'm playing and I have hips that aren't round.

Yeah.

So it's, it's in between.

You know, it's like wearing glasses.

When you take them off, you're not blind, you know.

Like, I can walk, but not very far.

I respect that, man.

Oh, thank you, man.

I've got tons of respect for you,

just your whole vibe is just amazing, man.

What's that?

A donation?

Yeah, sure.

I love donations.

(all laughing)

Oh, man.

Wow.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Wow, that's, that's a blessing right there.

Yes.

(all cheering)

That's the street, baby, right there.

You watch people and their reaction to him

as a person being on crutches,

they automatically assume that he needs help.

When in fact, he's helping them help him.

And he's been able to take that and turn it

into something magic.

There he is.

Wave everyone.

(upbeat dance music)

And there is a section in Traffic where he

is on a staircase and he is clearly acting as a performer.

He is dancing, he is twirling, he is performing

in a way that lets us know he has exceptional abilities.

And then into the frame walk these two men.

(laughing)

And they step into offer him this help, but what they

do is completely disrupt a moment of pure performance.

That's the power of the habits of interpretation we have.

It's so abundantly clear that these guys have no idea

and they're acting on assumptions

that don't fit the situation.

There it is.

And the audience gets it,

whether they have any background or not.

(audience applauding)

(indistinct chatter)

And now listen, this is really, really important.

Be yourself.

Be yourself, don't try, don't fake, don't fake the funk.

Be you.

That's how this happened.

You think everybody was like when I first did

my moves on crutches, you know how bad

I looked trying to dance on crutches the first time

I tried to dance on crutches?

You wanna see it?

Yes, yes.

You wanna see what it looked like in the beginning?

This is what it looked like in the beginning.

(humming)

Then I started to do one of these.

I started to go woop, boom, da, woop, boom.

Then I was down here.

The next thing you know I was doing this.

(grunting)

(all cheering) (upbeat orchestral music)

And so this camp is very special.

It's special to me.

This is the first time I've ever met any kids with Perthes,

so it's really an honor and a pleasure to be here.

And I really am touched to be invited here,

and I wanted to thank you all very much and let you know

I support you and the parents here in the struggles

that you go through, and the tough choices you have

to make every day.

You know, you live with this and, and you struggle,

and you know, I, I feel you.

I feel your pain.

I know I had,

my parents had to deal with it,

and so I just feel really blessed to be here

and thank you so much, all of you.

(audience applauding)

(light jazz music)

There's a necessity to capture moments in time,

an importance to recognize somebody

that created his own art form.

That didn't attempt to be anyone else,

didn't attempt to dance like anyone else,

somebody that absolutely personified the potential

of his own physicality.

I think he represents hip hop,

and he represents skateboarding, and he puts 'em together

in a way that is a one of a kind.

Look at that shit.

Our general response is about people who use crutches

is the story that to use crutches is to be miserable,

to use crutches is to be awkward, to use crutches

is to be pitiable.

And his performances re-script, re-narrate,

re-tell every single one of those stories.

(crowd cheering) (light jazz music)

He's an agent provocateur that's really the essence

of his character to some extent.

It's like oh, you think so?

I'll show you, you know.

(speaking foreign language)

(crowd cheering)

He's brought so much to the world because he has shared

and taught, let's learn to question the assumptions

that we bring and let people teach us about who they are.

What he's doing, I don't think people have caught up

to that yet, man.

And when they finally catch on,

he's like on to something else.

And I think that's, the way great artists should be.

(light jazz music)

(audience applauding)

There's the dangerous word of inspiration,

and there's a dangerous world of inspiration porn

that we talk about now particularly of

disabled people looking at disabled people

and going, "That's so inspiring."

I'm not here to inspire you just by my very being,

but I'm okay for you to be inspired by me if you change.

(light jazz music)

(upbeat jazz music)

(light electronic music)

(light electronic music)

(light electronic music)