In March 2019 I was awarded the Disability. Dance. Artistry. Residency through Dance/NYC, which funded the making of a piece of dance work. I saw this opportunity as a crossroads of everything I represented: a dancer and a musician with a disability. This naturally led to me create what I’ve been calling a ‘power chair ballet’, which is a dance film set to an original piece of music I wrote while living in Uruguay. To make this film I worked with a cast of five dancers who use power wheelchairs (two of whom founded AXIS Dance Company, the company that introduced me to the world of integrated dance). Over the course of six months these dancers, a cellist, an upright bassist, a drone pilot, a videographer, two photographers, a makeup artist, and a production assistant, and I created “we sleep no more”, a haunting dance film that I believe celebrates the aging and disabled body. Never having had worked exclusively with dancers in power wheelchairs, I found myself both humbled and challenged in creating movements that were accessible to people of different physical abilities my own.

One of the coolest parts of this piece that most audience members will never know is that it was shot in the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, CA, a building that houses many disability-related organizations and named after one of the leaders of the Independent Living Movement. If you ever have a chance to read about Ed Roberts’ history, it’s a fascinating story.

However, besides being an aesthetically beautiful film set to cinematic music, I want this piece to challenge viewers to question “Who is allowed to dance? Or appear on screen? Or entertain us?” Too often there is an exclusive elimination process when we consider what types of people are allowed to occupy and audience’s gaze. As content makers we should always be calling these habits into question, principally by proving that incredible artists exist in unexpected shapes and sizes.

My main collaborator William Tyner behind the camera with the dancers.

My mom Candice second from the left. 

I released my debut EP last week on August 15, which also marks the three year anniversary of the car accident that killed my mom and rendered me paralyzed from the chest down. Finally sharing my music with the world has been both an exciting and bittersweet moment, mostly because I began writing this EP shortly after leaving the hospital during the darkest days of my life.

As I reassessed my future in a wheelchair, I began to turn to music to cope with the catastrophic curveball my life had taken. What began as a few simple songs evolved over time into a coherent music project that narrated my experience of loss, pain, and being forced to rediscover self-love and my inner badass. "The Last Thing She Heard (Intro)" is the first tune I wrote in this process. The lyrics "It will be ok..." over the piano refer to the few words my little sister managed to mumble right after we were rear-ended by a truck, and as I panicked thinking she had died. Additionally the clip of Dolly Parton in the beginning of the song haunts me because her voice was the last voice my mother ever heard. I decided to produce this song as a lo-fi soundscape to portray a fast-forwarded version of the car accident, which is what the event felt like. After all, it was only a split second that changed my whole life forever.