BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
He stands alone on stage, sinewy muscles tensed
against the amplified sound of a single note. Suddenly, as the
music starts to race, he catapults himself across the wide space,
tumbling with limbs flying, defying gravity with his vaults.
He lies on his side, his profile silhouetted against the floor.
With limbs pumping wildly, he desperately runs in place.
Dancer Homer Avila has been “running”
ever since cancer took his right leg and part of his hip. Nearly
two years after amputation changed his life, Avila, a top professional
dancer based in New York, has redefined what he can achieve
with his new body and has rediscovered virtuosity.
“I’m
much further along now than I ever thought I could be,”
Avila told students, faculty and visitors filling the seats
and spilling onto the floor of the dance studio in the Kinross
Building to learn about dance and disability. “What has
impressed me most about this human organism – this corpus
that is us – is that you may alter it in so many ways,
but it still has this incredible drive to have this expression
of life.”
To tap that primal drive, Avila turned to Victoria
Marks, associate professor of choreography at World Arts and
Cultures, who made “Solo,” a choreo-portrait of
this soft-spoken young man whose inner ferocity and rage against
death’s near-intrusion in his life literally propel him
to dance.
“I’ve known Homer since 1978 when
we were both aspiring dancers. We were part of the New York
downtown dance community,” Marks recalled. Fellow dancers
ached for Avila, who had decided to continue his stellar career,
one spent dancing with such luminaries as Twyla Tharp and Bill
T. Jones.
“He was a virtuoso dancer with a ‘normal’
body who would now be a dancer with one leg,” Marks explained.
“We were looking at a phenomenon that this generation
of dancers had not seen before – a man with incredible
body knowledge figuring himself out all over again.”
This was not Marks’ first experience
as a creator of dance for differently abled dancers. In 1995,
she won wide acclaim for choreography featured in a prize-winning
film, “Outside In,” produced by the BBC and the
British Arts Council. The film, which has been shown all over
the globe, showcases the dynamism of a mixed-ability professional
dance collective, Candoco, based in London.
The
company included two dancers who work in wheelchairs and another
whose legs are so foreshortened they seemed nonexistent. What
they wanted most, they told Marks, was to be visible –
in reaction to the way people avert their eyes when they first
see them. And if these dancers could be visible, they did not
want to be seen as victims, Marks said.
“They wanted to be defined as complex
individuals, not by their disabilities,” said Marks. “So
I set out to make a piece in which that happens.” The
experience of making “Outside In” was a milestone
in her career. “It shifted forever my thinking about what
my purpose as a dancemaker is. We were going to create new images
of this group and challenge conventions,” she said.
Her dance for Avila does that as well, with
powerful movements for a warrior-hero. Since his surgery, he
has been busy performing in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and
recently the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Said Avila: “If I have a message to give
you, it’s not, ‘This is what a disabled individual
can do.’ It’s that we all have a dysfunction, and
we all have to move forward to get beyond that.”
