At the inaugural DisFest on Saturday at the Chicago Cultural Center, Robby Lee Williams moved with grace as he glided across the floor with his dance partner Tatiana Castañeda, lifting and spinning her as they performed a duet.
Named “Boyh,” the piece explores the intimacy of caretaking for a partner with a disability through choreography by Julia Cox at MOMENTA and set to music performed by a string quartet and piano.
In a second piece, Williams and his partner joined two other sets of dancers to perform a tango.
To be able to make the complex movements the dance requires, Williams uses a specially designed wheelchair that is outfitted with two metal arms that have bicycle brakes connected to the wheels. The chair gives him the ability to lift both his arms to dance with his partner and to also lean on the brakes to move and turn the chair.
“It’s such an intimate dance, you have to be so close to your partner,” Williams said. “So to have this amount of control makes it easier to propel and play around with the movement.”
Williams, who lives in Humboldt Park, got into dancing through doing musical theater. After college, he started dancing with Tango 21 Dance Company. He uses a wheelchair after he had a spinal cord injury five years ago.
“There’s not a lot of visibility for disabled dancers. Before my injury, I had no idea this was a thing,” Williams said of the importance of venues like DisFest.
Not limited to dance, the festival showcased creativity through a wide range of mediums, including acting, film and visual art, like the mixed media works of Deanna Krueger.
Krueger’s work Saturday was created by painting on old x-ray and MRI medical film, which she lets dry before tearing them up and stapling the pieces back together.
Krueger even brought film to the fest for other attendees to rip and cut up.
“It’s cathartic,” she explained. “For some, they’ve dealt with constant medical appointments where they’ve been poked and prodded and have probably had countless of their own scans taken. Today, they can rip up this film to take out their anger, their sadness.”
DisFest was created by Ladonna Freidheim through her nonprofit ReinventAbility to celebrate the work of artists whose disabilities manifest in different ways — not always visibly.
Six short films were also shown the events, including “JMAXX and The Universal Language,” which profiled a teenager with autism learning hip-hop to communicate and express himself.
“It’s really important to show that disability isn’t always a wheelchair,” Freidheim said. “Just because someone is able to stand for their performance doesn’t mean they don’t have a disability.”
