Educational Media Reviews Online

Bill Shannon is a dancer born with a disability; the degenerative bone disease called Legg-Calve-Perthes for which there is no treatment. As a teenager, he participated in rap battles, and dance on his crutches, as well as skateboarding and as an adult, performance art as well as choreography. He also offers movement training for children who have been diagnosed with Legg-Calve-Perthes.

He did not let his condition determine what his boundaries were as a teenager. His having a brace was hard for *others* to deal with. He slips out of his leg brace and does what he wanted to do - climbing trees, running etc. He was into rap battles/dance battles/break dancing in the 80’s, using his bespoke round bottomed rocker bar crutches, also used to propel his skateboard and to dance. He earned respect in the skating community and in the Hip Hop community for his moves.

Bill studied at the Art Institute in Chicago in the early 1990s and began to do ever more provocative street art performances incorporating his crutches. Bill addresses bodies, body types, and insists on the idea that those aspects of dance are “in your head”. Dancing is in your mind, “you are pretty much free in your body”. One of his dance performances called The Art of Weightlessness, was an hour-long choreographed Hip Hop dance piece performed in a theater. Work it Out is another of his public performance pieces. Featured in The NY Times, he was not really embraced by the “dance world” as that community focused on his crutches and his disability.

His street/art performances were about the response from people who wanted to help him up off of the pavement. As an artistic performance and a provocation, an expression of feeling, surrender and his ideas. About art and embodiment. How people are responding to him, specifically, responses to help that he draws in his street performance. “Disability always requires a story... everyone has crutches." He looks at people looking at him in his street performances. He explains it as the phenomenology of disability, the weight of empathy, helping people help him. As his choreographed performances become more formal, his performances happen everywhere, still on the street, still in theaters and in venues around the world. "The interpretations of what people see on the street as they pass him or see as performance, living art/spectacle so as to “Let people teach us who they are.”

Awards:Runner Up, Audience Award, DOC NYC; Doclands Film Festival; Cleveland International Film Festival; Bentonville Film Festival; ReelAbilities Film Festival

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