The Dance of Radical Rest and Being

Disability Arts Online commissioned Caroline Cardus and myself to run Creative and Heartfelt Tactics for Chisenhale Dance Space, a residency programme, exploring arts practice as activism using Disability Justice as our influence and driver. This project was funded by the Trust for London’s Disability Justice Fund.

Caroline and I ran four workshops, one online and three in person to eight disabled creatives who are part of Chisenhale’s community. The three in person workshops covered our art activism template of HEAD, HEART & HAND, the ways we use art to engage people’s head, heart and hands to make social and political change. The participants were amazing, so talented, so deep in humanity and perspective that it could bring you to your knees. They taught us as much as we taught them.

One of the outcomes of the project was giving the participants an event to offer their creative responses to the workshops and the themes emerging from them. The first of these were on June 11th at Poplar Union, hosted by Chisenhale Dance Space, and uplifted the work of Blodwyn Davies, Niquelle LaTouche, who took part in Creative and Heartfelt Tactics, plus Michael Mendones, who is part of the Chisenhale Artist Community.

First up was Blodwyn’s work. Blodwyn (they/she) is a Queer, Welsh born neurodiverse and Disabled dance artist whose practice looks at challenging the perceptions of disability within the arts. Sadly due to unforeseen circumstances, they weren’t able to to be there in person. Frances Morgan, Associate Director at Chisenhale, sensitively read Blodwyn’s intensely powerful and beautiful poem RADICAL REST.

Heartfelt, poignant and unapologetic, it recounts going from a protest frontline, through pain and introspection, to the realisation resistance can be soft too, in care, in rest, in community. Blodwyn’s poem has the power to stagger you but hold you too. You understand the existential excursion of going from:

“Back then, I believed resistance had to be visible in that particular way: loud, relentless, unbroken

I believed worth lived in endurance.

Then my body changed its language.”

They realised:

“Radical Rest is not surrender

It is the reimagining of power.”

Rest is political, devastating to ridiculous and greedy systems.

“To pause in a world that demands constant productivity is protest

To move slowly when violence demands speed is protest

To ask for support, to lean on community

To remain soft in a culture that celebrates self-erasure –

this too is resistance.”

The poem ends:

“I may not longer stand on the front line

But my body is still part of the movement

And sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is remain here, together

Unapologetically alive.”

Niquelle LaTouche (she/her) was next, another participant of the workshops, read her breathtaking, compelling and gorgeous piece THE SHEDDING. Niquelle is an artist, educator, and cultural producer whose burnout in 2024 ignited a journey of acceptance, gratitude and reintroduction as a Disabled artist committed to radical empathy through a currency of care.

She read from her profound and heart-wrenching piece with a gentle, soulful lull, another piece about the turbulence of being disabled the world and holding a nervous system like a kindly touch upon ableism’s electric fence arrogance and intersectionally hating world.

As she says:

“tiring machines inside you,

it cannot cope under the pressure”

You think the fault lies with you:

“Your mind learned to gaslight itself, whispering the same lies to your shoulders.”

The third stanza reports:

“Cortisol is a familiar float to get things over the line… treading water feels like drowning when you do not know what you are carrying.”

It ends with hope and regained power:

“Only now, at almost 31, this body has permission to breathe out.

To reassemble the pieces you have neglected while your cogs get a chance to rest.”

The last creative presentation was from Michael Mendones (he/him) . Michael makes films that depict strong emotional themes through movement, music, spoken word and photography. He showed a 25 minute excerpt his 90 minute long-form dance film (Be)longing, exploring the notion of unbelonging through a late diagnosis autism lens. Michael explained that four people after seeing this film recognised themselves and sought an autism diagnosis. He has also made a 62 minute film using a similar template about his experiences with bipolar called Oscillations, an equally intense film that has a trigger warning as it deals in part with suicidal ideation.

I know nothing about dance, I could only respond to the film and dance intuitively. I thought it was a stunning film, although not a tranquil ride. Much of the choreography in the film touched the boxed walls of the screen with an unsettling haul and tow, the jerk and pull of sensory overload, burnout, masking and mirroring the typical world as it drags you through the world, unravelling the ruined texture of breath from the loom of other hands, pulling the thread to break free.

I learned a lot about dance during this project and event, that its grace can be ragged, unregulated, freer under the press and conform of an orchestrated inhumanity, against the thinnest veneer of civilisation, a facade that sounds like fingernails scratching against a blackboard. We know the bullshit and pain it wants to heap on us.

All these artists were/are fighting space to have space in the world. It will not be gifted to them; they have to grab empty air and build their artistry upon it. There’s your fucking grace, a grace the normal world will never have. I didn’t know why atoms danced to create humans, I do know now.