Jerron Herman,

Kinetic Light, New York City.

Jerron Herman is an interdisciplinary artist creating through dance, text, and visual storytelling.

 

His performances have begun to shed light on an often overlooked niche of performance.

 

He currently sits on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA and is a proud member of The Disabled List and WITH, brain children of innovative thought leader, Liz Jackson.

 

As a writer, Jerron was a finalist for the inaugural Lark Play Development Lab/Apothetae Playwriting Fellowship.

 

He was recently nominated for the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in Dance.

 

Naming

 

My left foot, flexed, lifts in the air to swipe perpendicularly from my torso ala a Capoeira student. My body, compact, shifts at the shoulders and my right hip sinks down toward my shin. My head drops. All the while, my left-hand _______(constricts? Tightens?) pulses (spasms aren’t static, after all) against my chest. This might be an example of my explaining my body in movement.

 

The aspects of language that I’m most concerned with are clarity and imagination. Can I help someone feel what I’m saying as there are various ways we see, hear, and feel the dance?

 

This might take ten minutes to write, it might be twenty if you consider what’s unhelpful jargon or an outdated term; what about his facing? And we haven’t even considered emotions. This might be the last step in a creative process – the synthesizing step where you’ve first thought this movement up, rehearsed the composition, ensured consistency, and can now relay artistry to others. It is really this step that illuminates a commitment to disability artistry and how one practices disabled art.

 

For one thing, it is integral to an audience that requires varied access.

For another, it is integral to an audience that requires a deep experience like any audience.

It’s in the naming of certain experiences that millions share.

It’s naming the quiet nerves and not so quiet muscles’ travel pattern create a work of art.

Societally, we’ve been naming this community without credit for centuries and it’s time to recognize.

The coming surge of disability genius in mainstream art is nothing more than evolutionary.

 

Organize

 

Knocking on my door won’t get you in immediately.

I hear the knock:

a well-meaning grant application, funder,

critic coming to ask about process or politically correct language. They’re knocking, but

I have to organize my body to get up from this spot.

 

You might have heard the password at the last task-force meeting

and you got excited –

there’s nothing like access. You might even use the password correctly, but

 

I have to organize my body to get up from this spot.

 

You might have taken the path here after work, after the board meeting,

after Marketing told you something new.

You might have just stumbled on it or heard it in the keynote address at that last conference.

You might have travelled far, farther than me to that door, but

I still have to organize my body to get up from this spot.

And so, you wait until I can answer you. Answer you.

 

I read deadlines as impatient.

 

Though I would never deny someone wanting what they want,

when they want it,

I know why you set that pace.

 

For those who wait for the door to open, you’ll see the luster inside.

You’ll see language transformed, you’ll sit easier, you’ll reset.

You’ll sit. You’ll sit. You’ll sit.

You’ll learn that a chair is a limb and a gesture a soliloquy;

you’ll be transported by touch

 

and pressure if you wish.

You’ll sit.

You’ll never be out of the loop.

Others will try to include you. We will fail at being 100%.

We are not afraid of failure.

…and the Holy Ghost

 

The third section title, though cheeky, is something I feel deeply when I think about the disability community – divine.

 

Without being overly simplistic, the kindred spirit I share with so many artists who have disabilities makes me very aware of any activity beyond me.

 

There’s something orchestrated and deep about how the community is devised. I think about my first performance as a dancer. It was twilight on the Lincoln Center Plaza pavilion and we’d just taken our bows. While drinking champagne in the middle of summer, I noted how divine the setting was and my being placed within it.

 

A well-meaning “crip elder” stopped me short to say, “No, there’s nothing divine about this. You did this.”

 

And while I appreciate the redirection, it seemed to miss the utterly beautiful way two things can be true at once. While I had prepared rigorously for this dance performance, I was still a benefactor of grace. Nothing in my own imagination could have divined that thing to happen. Up until very recently, I’ve only imagined as far as I could go, alone. But I will tell you that just as I believed in my Pentecostal upbringing, I believe the spirit seems to move.

 

There is now a ‘we’.

 

We can now imagine a host of things.

 

We’ve filed under the same tent and became daring in our declarations so that Presidents sign proclamations and school syllabi change.

 

We’ve felt the fire and excitement of our imaginings and we threw our bodies around until curb cuts were created and restaurants made larger bathrooms.

 

Maybe it was a tent, maybe it’s now a dance floor and the moshing has commenced: the bustling halls of a transformed downtown space where chairs, crutches, and wobbly limbs abounded. Hiccups and shouts wafted up the walls as people read captions and ASL interpretations of art pieces onstage.

 

It was my first experience of a truly crip space at Performance Space in New York, coordinated by them, Arika UK, and The Whitney Museum, guided by several disabled artists. And like an access check to the fiery mosh pit, we tossed our bodies around in a slower timbre. And at its apex, after hearing prophet-poets magically direct your brain to images you’d never thought of, after learning about ancestors, after hugging or waving to your fellow reveller, after imbibing sweat, you watch a mandala of bodies circle inward to match touch – implicit consent, implicit language – and speak to each other, recite to each other, create images from fingers like air painting and you feel the fullness of the activity beyond you. You see a host of threads vibrating as you watch and wave and wobble.

 

This is the beginning of disabled art in America.