Spirit of Survival

On dance as medicine, and medicine as art

Inaugural Onco-Ballet teacher training, February 15-16, 2025. Photo courtesy Onco-Ballet Foundation

How are you doing? Terrified? Me too. But we keep on writing our little letters and making our little arts. If you’re in Chicago next week, stop by the Hideout on Weds. 4/2. It’s the final Soup & Bread event of the 2025 “soup season” and after the food’s gone we’ll be hosting a sewing bee and sign making party for folks to make protest signs for the April 5 National Day of Action against the authoritarian takeover of the United State. Or any other protest, as god knows there are plenty to choose from. More info on that can be found here. In other news, please enjoy this overdue report from last month’s trip to the West Coast.

It rained nonstop for the first two days I was in Los Angeles last month, a symbolic if not literal cleansing of the city from the dry-tinder trauma of the January fires. When the sun came out on the third day, despite the charred hills and the gutted homes, it felt a little bit like the start of something new. I was happy to be there for it.

I went to California to visit my sister, and also to start something new of my own. After a few days in LA, I took the train to Orange County for the weekend, to take part in a teacher training workshop offered by Anna Wassman-Cox’s Onco-Ballet program.

Anna and I first met in late 2023, when I interviewed her about her then-fledgling project of offering free ballet classes to cancer patients and anyone with lived experience of cancer. I was so impressed with her work, and her vision, and though unlike Anna I was never a professional dancer, I reveled in the common ground we shared. Anna returned to regular dance practice at 29 after being diagnosed with a recurrence of breast cancer, and the positive physical and psychological effects were as revelatory to her as they have been to me.

Since then, the nonprofit Onco-Ballet Foundation has taken flight. The program offers regular classes in Orange County, where Anna lives, and has done popups in New York, Seattle, LA, and here in Chicago. Anna’s been on Drew Barrymore (what?) and has spoken with groups on all sides of the “cancer space” — doctors, social workers, patients, integrative medicine folks, fitness professionals, and of course other dancers. She’s developed a curriculum grounded in adaptive dance pedagogy that reflects the specific needs of people with cancer, who often have restricted range of motion due to surgery, may be wobbly from anemia and fatigue, and carry a metric ton of post-traumatic stress in their bodies.

She invited me to this inaugural teacher training after I participated in a class she led in November at the Joffrey Ballet studios in the Loop. I immediately said yes; honestly, I can’t remember the last time I was so certain about anything. But in the runup to the weekend I was nearly felled by the lead blanket of impostor syndrome I was dragging around: This was so presumptuous. I was going to embarrass myself. Who was I to think I can teach anyone anything about ballet?

Thankfully the blanket got left behind with my shoes at the studio door and I never saw it again; maybe it’s in the lost and found.

Of the fifteen workshop participants, maybe half of us had lived experience of cancer. Several others had been caregivers to a parent or a partner. And several more were just dancers keen to add this modality to their teaching toolkit. Over the course of two days we learned from Anna and from the amazing Terry Goetz, a former Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer who’s now director of Seattle’s Creative Dance Center. (I won’t go too deep into the weeds on movement theory here, as I have no idea how interested this newsletter audience is, but the CDC’s Brain Compatible Dance Education method is a holistic approach to dance that fosters neuroplasticity and is of a piece with other somatic movement schools of thought like Body-Mind Centering and Laban/Bartinieff, and is foundational to the Onco-Ballet curriculum.) Marie Miao, an oncology social worker, led a workshop on trauma-informed dance teaching. We did a barre. We choreographed variations. And we did a lot of groovy improv. You can read all about it in this LA Times story, though it may be behind a paywall now.

I’ve put off writing about this for more than a month, because it felt too real, too heavy with meaning. And I’m always a little leery of getting super ginned up in public about something only to let it drop a few months later, to realize my naievete in the face of all I don’t know I don’t know. But I can honestly say, five weeks later, that this workshop ever-so-slightly rewove the fabric of my life in all the best ways. It’s too soon to say how it will all play out, but plans are in the works to launch regular Onco-Ballet classes here in Chicago sometime this summer, and I could not be more excited to see how that develops, and to help as I am able.

What I know today is that the workshop reinforced that it’s important to me to stay engaged in the so-called cancer community. I never got around to joining a support group, and so far I haven’t had much yen for talk therapy (though maybe I should). But in my year as a rower, on a team with other breast cancer patients, I felt that community in my body as we pulled together through the water. Moving together in the dance studio I feel it again. We don’t even talk about cancer very much. It’s just powerful to move through and share that space with others who carry the myriad effects of cancer treatment in their ever-evolving bodies.

Dance as medicine is a growing field, as researchers continue to accrue data on the physical and psychological benefits of movement therapy. I don’t know of any other programs offering dance for cancer patients, but there are robust programs around the country that offer adaptive dance for people with Parkinson’s, for example, including here in Chicago at the Joffrey. But there’s also an artistic value that often gets buried in the well-documented therapeutic benefits of dance. Sick dancers, who carry the full weight of the human condition in their bodies, are keenly aware of the impermanence of health and mobility. Their presence in the dance space offers rich opportunities to disrupt normative ideas about virtuosity, beauty, and grace.

In 1994, the choreographer Bill T. Jones debuted Still/Here, an evening-length work that grew out of workshops he conducted with people living with terminal illness. Jones’s lover and creative partner Arnie Zane had died of AIDS in 1988, at 39. Jones himself, now 72, has been HIV-positive since the 1980s.

The piece was recently restaged at BAM, and this NYT article offers an overview of the controversy it sparked back in the day, when New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce wrote a blistering (and IMO racist and homophobic) essay decrying the work, which she refused to see, as “victim art.” But Croce’s vitriol for the work sprang from her inability to see people living with AIDS, cancer, Parkinson’s, as anything but “other,” a special needs group sharing no common ground with the normies. It was beyond her conception to imagine that sick people, who appeared in the piece on video and whose workshop explorations helped Jones develop the movement vocabulary for the piece, might have agency as artists, could be anything but exploited.

I’ve seen Still/Here on video, and it is deeply moving and dignified; the opposite of manipulative or exploitative. “The profoundest questions that I can ask can be answered by other people who are not in the dance world,” says Jones in an hourlong Bill Moyers documentary on the piece. “Literally the question of life and death: What does it look like? Feel like? Taste like? Smell like?

“My job,” he adds, “is to evoke the spirit of survival.”

I was touched by that spirit in the dance studio in Orange County last month, and I can’t wait to meet up with it again.

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One last thing! I was a little sad that I wasn’t able to go to AWP this year, but if I had gone I wouldn’t have been home this morning when the galleys for the Sinéad book landed on my doorstep. So exciting! It’s all starting to happen. The book is out July 22; look for events in Chicago, NYC, and elsewhere TBD. And, of course, preorders are the juice that keeps the publishing wheels turning; that link is here.