Axis Dance Explores New Frontiers With Mobility Technology

What are crutches for? To help an injured or disabled person get from Point A to Point B?

Like most mobility devices, crutches are often designed and viewed in a matter-of-fact medical framework. There is a problem to be fixed; the device is the solution.

Performances by Axis Dance Company routinely explode that idea. For Axis — a Berkeley, Calif., ensemble of both disabled and non-disabled dancers — a crutch brims with creative possibilities: It might be a partnering support, a third leg, an elongated arm.

But what happens when that expansive way of thinking is applied to the design of the device itself? What kinds of movement might be possible if, for example, a crutch could extend and retract?

That’s not a hypothetical. Telescoping crutches play a central role in Axis’ “Kinematic/Kinesthetic,” premiering Thursday at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. The work is a collaboration between the interdisciplinary artist Ben Levine; the choreographer and Axis artistic director Nadia Adame; and engineering students from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland. It features two imaginative mobility technologies developed for the project — the telescoping crutches, and a hexapod robot that gives its user six legs rather than two — as well as a hands-free Omeo wheelchair.

Levine, who is disabled, hopes “Kinematic/Kinesthetic” will enlarge our understanding of the relationship between bodies and machines. Dancers are deeply attuned to their physical selves; people with disabilities often interact extensively with technology. Involving these knowledgeable bodies in the development of assistive devices can reshape ideas about the devices — and potentially generate new ways of moving.

“When we were creating this technology, we were thinking about the possibilities and not the limitations,” Levine said. “And this is a perfect metaphor for disability dance: When we think about our bodies, we think about their possibilities and not their limitations.”

Levine, who has made technology-focused dance and theater for 15 years, traces the roots of his tech fascination to his disability. Growing up, he would sleep wearing electrodes to stimulate the muscles on the right side of his body, which is weaker. “I think in some abstract way that really did turn me into a technologist,” he said.

For “Kinematic/Kinesthetic,” he wanted to go big. Early plans featured an elongated robotic arm and a motorized shoulder joint. The initial design for the telescoping crutch incorporated a hydraulic backpack, to shoot the user into the air as the crutch extended.

Adame and a team of technical advisers and students helped narrow and refine the list of ideas. Jack Murphy, now a mechanical engineer, worked on the crutch design last year as a student at the University of Maryland. He described the experience as both revelatory and distinctly challenging.

“A lot of engineering projects will start with, ‘We want this 12-foot-long column that can support two tons of weight and will only deflect 13 degrees,’” he said. “But when the prompt is, ‘We want to help someone dance,’ there’s a lot more room to play around.” His team ended up jettisoning the hydraulics idea and developing an elegant scissor-style mechanism for the crutch, partly inspired by the gates used to block off the aisles at the Home Depot stores.

The design process continued in Axis’s rehearsal studios, where the dancers tried out prototypes of the crutches and hexapod legs and made suggestions. Levine was delighted to see that the dancers’ first instinct was to take everything apart. “That resonated with me so much, because as a technologist I’m also always looking for, ‘How do I hack this device?’” Levine said. Adame noted that she and the dancers also sent feedback to the creators of the Omeo wheelchair.

The Axis dancer Jean Pablo Crespo Rodríguez, known as JanpiStar, was initially skeptical of the “Kinematic/Kinesthetic” concept. “When the team first said, ‘Oh, we’re going to enhance your movement,’ I was like, ‘Wait, what?’” said JanpiStar, who uses a wheelchair. “I already feel I can do anything I want to — I already feel invincible.” (Even the term “assistive device” can be contentious among people with disabilities, because it might imply a lack of independence.)

But the beauty of the devices, and the possibilities they engendered, won over JanpiStar, who uses they/them pronouns. They found that the Omeo wheelchair — which they control by shifting their body weight, rather than using their arms or hands to push the wheels — opened up a world of partnering options. “It brings all this freedom,” they said. “It feels like I can fly.”

Watching a video stream of a recent rehearsal, I was reminded of ice dancing as JanpiStar and a partner glided together in a graceful, frictionless arc around the studio. The crutches, too, prompted abundant ingenuity: The dancers used them not just to amplify their jumps, as the engineers had imagined, but also to propel standard wheelchairs and to make sculptures on the floor. They even threaded their heads and shoulders through the crutches’ scissor joints.

“Kinematic/Kinesthetic” might evoke science fiction stories about cyborgs and other man-machines. But Sydney Skybetter, a professor of choreography and emerging technologies at Brown University, admires the way the piece avoids the ableist assumptions often baked into sci-fi, where machinery is typically used to make a body fit a narrow definition of “whole” or “normal.”

The devices here “do not insist on a normative understanding of how a body and a technology relate to one another,” said Skybetter, who will moderate a panel discussion about the piece this month. Instead, they help bodies — in all their varied poetry — explore uncharted territory.

The cast of “Kinematic/Kinesthetic” includes non-disabled performers who dance with some of the new devices. That decision was made carefully, said Adame, who uses a crutch. Crutches and wheelchairs aren’t props. But she chose to have non-disabled dancers employ the “Kinematic/Kinesthetic” devices because Levine and his team conceived of them as artistic, rather than accessibility, tools. (Adame restricted the Omeo wheelchair to dancers who are wheelchair users.)

“It is a way of showing how technology that is made for disabled people with the input of disabled people not only benefits us, but benefits society,” Adame said.

Time and funding limitations hemmed in the vision for “Kinematic/Kinesthetic” somewhat. The complicated hexapod robot appears only briefly in the piece. Most of the crutches broke during rehearsals. Trial and error became the name of the game. “Which of course felt very familiar to us as dancers — that’s what dance is all about,” Adame said.

Still, “Kinematic/Kinesthetic” offers a glimpse of a different kind of future for both dance and engineering. Levine said he can see this line of research becoming his life’s work. His longer-term vision is to build more devices that can facilitate “superhuman, species-atypical” movement, he said, upending assumptions about what bodies of all kinds can and can’t do. And he believes that approaching engineering like an artist, rather than a problem-solver, will have profound implications for the field.

“Once we free ourselves of that framework, once we start thinking about bioengineering abstractly and expansively, we unlock so much possibility,” he said. “We can tap into something that is limitless.”