Kitty Lunn and Infinity Dance Theater

It took an injury for Kitty Lunn to return to her beloved dance
and make it her life.

By Linda A. Cronin

“The dancer inside me doesn’t care about the wheelchair,” says Kitty Lunn, artistic director of Infinity Dance Theater. “She just wanted to keep dancing.” (Photo by Dan Demetriad)

Kitty Lunn always wanted to be a ballet dancer. For years, she lived her dream, successfully pursuing a career in dance. At 15 she danced the role of Swanilda in Coppélia with the New Orleans Civic Ballet and later was a soloist with the Washington Ballet. Lunn danced in such ballets as Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Nutcracker, and worked with such dance greats as Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, and Eric Bruhn.

In 1987, Lunn was 36 and had decided to switch careers from dance to acting. She was in rehearsal for a Broadway show, Sherlock’s Last Case, when she slipped on some ice, fell down a flight of stairs, and broke her back.

After five surgeries, many complications and nearly three years in a hospital bed, Lunn’s future was uncertain.

From Drugs Back to Dance

Excruciating pain from the fifth surgery led to a dependence on narcotics and several suicide attempts. Her doctor suggested he re-break her spine further up, leaving her with less pain but also less mobility. Instead, she chose to wean herself off narcotics and dedicate herself to rehab.

Lunn began working with Shaw Bronner, a physical therapist and former dancer, five hours per day, six days per week, for five years. She had to relearn activities of daily-living while being in a wheelchair. “[Bronner] had taught me that I had a life and that I wasn’t the sum total of my limitations,” says Lunn. “The day that I transferred from my bed to the chair and took the elevator down to get the mail by myself, I knew I would be rejoining the world.”

It was a performance of The Sleeping Beauty that she saw at the American Ballet Theatre re-awakened her to dance. Lunn faced a turning point when she realized she would never walk again. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t dance. She began to realize that being a dancer had nothing to do with being in or out of a wheelchair.

“My accident took away my identity as a dancer,” she says. “If I wasn’t a dancer, I didn’t know who I was. The dancer inside me doesn’t care about the wheelchair. She just wanted to keep dancing.”

At first, teachers were hesitant to have Lunn in their classes. They feared she would disrupt the other students. Armed with the Americans with Disabilities Act and knowing they had to let her in, Lunn handed over her money to Steps on Broadway. Today, Lunn still begins her day by zipping through the Manhattan streets in her electric wheelchair on her way to a ballet class at Steps.

Adaptations

When Lunn arrives at class, she switches to her dance chair, a sleek, ultra-mobile, 17-pound, carbon-fiber chair designed especially for her by her husband, Andrew Macmillan. Macmillan, an actor, designs dance chairs for dancers with disabilities and also serves as production stage manager and technical director for the Infinity Dance Company. The chair has no brakes and allows movement in any direction with a gentle push. Balanced to her body weight and fitted for her body, the chair’s light weight allows her to spin with ease or blast through space at a mighty speed. The low back invites movement throughout her torso. “I make it across the stage faster than any dancer can bourée,” says Lunn.

Lunn asks her audience to consider her chair as part of her moving body. “When I’m dancing in my little manual wheelchair, the chair becomes an object of motion and movement that has nothing whatsoever to do with medical accommodation,” she said in Breaking the Code, her address written for the New Jersey Arts Access Task Force of the New Jersey Theater Alliance. She even integrates the pushing motion into the choreography.

“I started to think about the construction of a ballet class and began transposing it to my body,” Lunn says. She considers the exercise’s function and creates an equivalent. Moves like traditional style pliés (knee bends) are impossible. Instead, Lunn creates a deep contraction, warming the major torso muscles that will support her. She uses her arms for all the legwork. At times, her right arm plays the role of a leg while her left arm sweeps through the port de bras. Without the use of her lower abdominal muscles, the dancer uses breath control for movements like transferring from the floor to her chair. “I had to find out what I could use that could compensate for what I didn’t have,” Lunn says.

To Infinity

In 1995 Lunn, along with Robert Koval and Christopher Nelson, formed Infinity Dance Theater (www.infinitydance.com) to “expand the boundaries of dance and to change the perceptions of what a dancer is.” Lunn says, she “was appalled at the lack of excellence in integrated companies. Training was not being done . . . While disability does diminish movement, it doesn’t diminish talent. There could still be professional excellence.”

Infinity has a cooperative relationship with the Roxey Ballet in New Jersey. They share 14 dancers, some with disabilities and some beyond the age traditionally associated with concert dance. The number of dancers, both people with disabilities and non-disabled, in Infinity varies as the work/performance changes, and some of the dancers have invisible disabilities.

Infinity Dance Theater ensemble performs throughout the New York City metropolitan area and New York State, throughout the country, and the world.

In 1997 Lunn served on the faculty of the National Dance Institute and created a dance curriculum for students who use wheelchairs. She used her transpositions to create a wheelchair dance technique which she teaches in New York and throughout the world. She regularly teaches at the Matheny School in New Jersey and Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in New York. She has trained dance educators at NYU and was recently the featured guest at NYU for a graduate-level dance pedagogy class. While she often provides private training as requested, she is planning to launch a regular dance class for people with disabilities in Manhattan.

Lunn suggests that people in wheelchairs who are interested in dance should go to wherever the local dance classes are and put themselves in a mainstream situation. “In the beginning it will be awkward,” she says. “But if you persist, it will get better.”

Linda A. Cronin writes frequently for Action.