Radiate: a response by Shireen Hamza

Image captured by Oz Lamont

In November 2023, Maggie Bridger was in-residence working on "Radiate” at Links Hall in order to adapt her dance film from 2021 for the stage. Maggie is the recipient of a 2023 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Production Residency sponsored by Walder Foundation.

This response is from embedded writer, Shireen Hamza, to Maggie Bridger’s production residency at Links Hall.

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A body in pain seeks relief.

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Bodies in constant pain seek relief constantly, until we can’t anymore. Relief is not always achievable, but we search for comfort until our movements become rote, habitual. Sometimes our needs conflict. We roll aching ankles only to be reminded of the pain in our lower backs. We sink into a comfy chair until we can’t sustain it anymore, until something or other propels us back into the search for relief. Sometimes tools help us prolong our fleeting moments of comfort.

Maggie Bridger’s “Radiate” is, for me, a performance about the constant negotiations of a body in pain. A sensitive dancer and choreographer, Maggie attends to her own routines of seeking relief and amplifies them on the stage. On Sunday November 12th, on the final day of her production residency at Links Hall, I attended a showing of the newest development in this project. Upon entrance, I walked straight to a velvety blue cushion large enough to lie down on, that Maggie often brings with her to disability dance events. Sprawled on the cushion, I watched the “white box” studio of Links Hall transform into Maggie’s hallway, office, and kitchen, through the clever use of props, light, sound, and movement. I’ve attended a range of classes, jams, and performances in that room over the last three years, but never had it felt so cozy.

These were staged versions of the home spaces I had seen in Maggie’s first iteration of “Radiate,” a dance film shot in 2021. Therein, with overlapping images of her radiator and her body, Maggie explored how dramatically her life had changed in the pandemic lockdown because she could stay home. Suddenly, she had access to tools like a comfy chair and a heating pad all the time, but that very same heating pad now shaped and limited her movement in new ways. Her Chicago Dancemakers Forum production residency at Links Hall this November enabled Maggie to develop this work into a performance for the stage. The way Maggie took up her residency was characteristic of all of her work: she pulled in a dozen other artists, most of whom are Deaf, sick, and disabled dancers, photographers, and writers.

In her newest iteration of “Radiate,” Maggie displayed, described, and repeated some of her movements–the choreography of her daily life–until they were strange and unfamiliar. Until her home was a stage and the stage was her home. Until the initial shock of intimacy softened and we settled into her living room, welcomed guests, all.

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Today marks two months into the siege on Gaza. In these two months, we have been witnessing atrocity after atrocity, the latest chapter in eight decades of the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. We have seen war criminal Henry Kissinger eulogized by the powerful, even as people in the Congo, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere struggle desperately to garner public support for their safety and freedom. We have seen the non-indictment of yet another white police officer, this one instrumental in the murder of Elijah Mcclain. We have met refugees from Venezuela sleeping outside in the cold, all over our city. Maggie and Alison Kopit, the Access Dramaturg of this residency, spent their breaks calling & emailing congresspeople, witnessing the horrors of a genocide continuing –impossibly– for an entire month. Now, as I write, another two months have passed, and the siege continues. It was part of the residency and it is part of this write-up; I am starting to fear, God forbid, that the siege will be ongoing by the time this piece is published.

How can you welcome people into your home, when so many people are being forced from theirs? And what kind of a welcome can include the many people in our cross-impairment disability arts community, making that one “home” accessible to all? Maggie’s thoughtful collaborations with Blind, Deaf, sick, and neurodivergent artists are an important part of how she ensures that “Radiate” will work in different ways for different audiences.

Systems of oppression limit our imaginations of what our futures look like. Living with pain everyday often makes it hard to imagine my own future (more of this, but worse?). But being part of disability dance communities has given me brief glimpses of a future that, together, we can keep dreaming up and fighting for. War, pandemic, incarceration, occupation, environmental racism… there are many ongoing “mass disabling events.” My time in this community prepares me to look upon the future and say: we will all be there, and we will be dancing.

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Image captured by Oz Lamont

Creating collective access in cross-impairment disability spaces is a puzzle Maggie delights in solving. Logistics is love.

By collective access, I mean setting up a space in which we can ensure together that everyone’s access needs are met. We all know enough about each other’s access needs that we can pay attention to whether they are met and rise to meet them if we can. In a disability dance space, if we set up a rule that everyone speaking English introduces themselves before speaking, and uses a mic to speak, that would facilitate participation for folks who are Blind/low-vision and folks who are hard of hearing. It would help live captioners and ASL interpreters hear, as well as those joining on Zoom from their beds. The time it would take to pass the mic would create necessary pauses and time to digest what was said. If someone was not able to move towards the mic, someone else would bring it to them. But no matter how much planning goes into it, access is never complete – and folks still have to interrupt when their access is disrupted due to human oversight or technological malfunction. Then, we troubleshoot, we improve our system, we make it work.

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Bend, bend

Bend, bend

Bend, bend

Blue Maggie

Joán Maggie

Pajama Maggie

Voice Maggie

Shadow Maggie

Dark Brown Cozy Chair Maggie

Video Maggie

Radiator Maggie

Bend, bend

Bend, bend

Bend, bend

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In “Radiate,” Maggie uses media to multiply herself. Sometimes her virtual selves and her in-person presence blurred; I couldn’t tell whether some of her sighs were recorded or live. Her recorded voice fills the room as an audio description of the piece. Captions and a video of Joán Joel interpreting in ASL appear on different parts of the projection depending on where Maggie is. Maggie sometimes appears in the projection itself. With the sound design of Andy Slater spatializing the kitchen, office, and hallway even further and marking the transitions from day to night, the performance will be as rich sonically as it is visually.

Maggie’s work as a dancemaker often gestures at imperfection of access within a performance setting, and at the limitations of our attention as audience members, disabled and non-disabled alike. Many aspects of Maggie’s works remain partially illegible to all audiences. Balancing that fugitive desire with a foundational commitment to access is the puzzle at the heart of Maggie’s work.

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A search for warmth pervades the piece, even beyond the centrality of Maggie’s electric heating pad to its conception. Living with chronic pain and illness in Chicago, Maggie seeks comfort through warmth, physical and social. The sound of the radiator, recorded in her apartment, fills the space intermittently. At the showing, we learned that the repetition of Maggie dipping and circling her knees, accompanied by the words “bend, bend” in the audio description, brings warmth to her knees before she changes positions.

Towards the end of the showing, I felt my body tiring, aching, stiffening. I lay down on the heating pad central to this performance and turned it up to the maximum setting. It was shaped differently from the one I use at home. This constant adjustment of temperature to ease chronic pain is a privilege, relying on steady access to shelter, layers of clothing, and for the cyborgs among us, electricity and batteries. As I watched “Radiate,” I thought of the misery that temperature brings to people forced to leave their homes. From the millions on the move under bombardment in Gaza now to the refugees living outside in tents to the people living in cages at Cook County Jail and Stateville Prison, who I met through teaching in prison education projects and volunteering with a bail fund. I felt this grief well up and overflow when Maggie suddenly slid down the wall - PLUNK - and her heating pad came unplugged.

Sometimes our will to seek comfort runs out.

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My affection for Maggie floods my heart and my fingers with warmth as I write this. When I falter, when I doubt whether making art is worthy of our time and effort, amid so much horror, I remember how the many rooms we have danced in together have changed me. The disability dance community has helped me want to live another day in this body, to learn better how to listen to, embrace, and share its wisdom. A few weeks ago, I attended an outdoor vigil for thousands of people murdered in Gaza. But as the names of martyrs under six months old were read aloud, I was in too much pain to stand. I laid down on the concrete sidewalk and let the tears flow, grateful that dance had made the ground a place of refuge for me.

Sick and disabled people know intimately that we –not the state– keep each other alive. We dream up a world in which the value of our lives is celebrated by society. As Maggie started “Radiate” in the pandemic, she was not sleeping much. She was worried for sick and disabled family members living in rural Missouri, where an under-resourced healthcare system could not keep people safe.

We know the ingenuity it takes to sustain each other. Dancing together means we can resist together – state violence, prisons and policing, eugenics, apartheid (medical and otherwise), here and everywhere. We prepare for the cold, bring warmth into our achy selves and into each other, and move forward.

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Shireen Hamza is a 2024 Embedded Writer selected by Maggie Bridger in partnership with Chicago Dancemakers Forum & PRJ.