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Slight (the direction and choreography of a total theatre performance for the FATHoM project)

Slight is a total theatre performance, directed and choreographed by Benjamin, combining dance, spoken word, live music and film. It was made with and for The FATHoM Project, a collective of able-bodied and disabled artists, and funded by ACE and Northern Rock. The company included two musicians who were not movement trained; four dancers, including wheelchair user Caroline Bowditch; one actor and a filmmaker. Slight premiered as a work-in-progress at Dance City Newcastle (March 2008) and toured between September 2009-March 2010 to Stockton Arts Centre; Plymouth University, during the Theatre & Performance Research Association conference; Contact Theatre, Manchester; and Lillian Baylis, Sadlers Wells, London. Benjamin’s primary research imperatives were to explore strategies: 1) to direct experienced, edgy improvisers from different disciplines into structured choreography that still enabled agency; 2) to innovatively choreograph a work that safely incorporated the cumbersome, mechanical chair used by Bowditch. Slight responded to Petra Kuppers’ observation that ‘As “real” objects wheelchairs are transporters full of weight, texture, and sensation. On stage … [they] become rhetorical devices carrying narratives and marking identities’ (2007). The choreographic process focused on sensitivity to proxemic tensions created through improvised tasks. Within open structures, Benjamin worked closely with the performers to build a musical and vocal score which suggested movement and choreographic structures that the company could inhabit freely. The position of Bowditch in her chair guided extensive improvised explorations of seated movement, which led to the creation of props for performers to sit and move on and play as instruments. Raising the chair’s seat positioned Bowditch to dance a waltz-like duet and to interrogate a musician, moving his head with her foot. Slight aimed to challenge the traditional silences of both the contemporary dancer and disabled body through the pleasure of visibility enabled by the co-existence of wheelchair-as-object, voice and movement.