New York dancer/choreographer Heidi Latsky’s “GIMP”, a dance work featuring both disabled and able-bodied dancers, focuses on the ways bodies can function in art through powerful solos, duets, and group numbers that confront widely held preconceptions of beauty and physicality.
While “GIMP” has been performed in several cities, beginning with its 2008 premiere in Albuquerque and subsequent touring to Boston, Buffalo, and New York City, perhaps the most appropriate venue for this piece was in Washington D.C. during the National Summit on People with Disabilities in the Arts where it was featured on the Kennedy Center’s Millenium Stage.
Despite its challenging content, the performance was well recieved and Latsky found perfoming in the nation’s capital to be a very positive experience. “I felt very supported,” she says. “I felt people really got it. To be able to perform something especially at a time where there’s a new President..to me this piece is really about honoring different and the uniqueness of each person and I think it makes so much sense the way this country is hopefully heading.”
As an able-bodied dancer, Latsky admits to feeling pressure to live up to the passion and expressiveness of the other dancers – like those who are missing limbs or who have cerebral palsy – and it’s a challenge she’s facing head on. “For the disabled dancers, most of them have never danced before. Yet their commitment and risk that they take is a really powerful performance. It’s been harder for the able bodied dancer who’ve been trained to really make the same kind of commitment and investment. It’s really easy as a technical dancer to lose yourself in the technique, but we had to really think about what our risk was. I wanted everybody to take a risk and be vulnerable.”
While the disability community has been very supportive of the piece, Latsky has found that the dance community needs more convincing. “I think it’s harder for them to wrap their heads around it. I really want to go to universities and talk to dance departments about what this work brings out in people in terms of whole body image.”
Undaunted by the obstacles that “GIMP” faces to larger exposure, Latsky remains confident that the piece will find wider acceptance over time. “My hope is that it will be seen and presented internationally, and seen as solid dance work that happens to have unusual components,” she says. “I think that’s a dream that’s going to be difficult to fulfill. I think its going to take people time. This form is new and most people have not been exposed to this. Hopefully their frames of reference will shift a bit.”
For more information on Heidi Latsky and the “GIMP” Project, visit http://www.thegimpproject.com.
