You can’t help but be inspired by this amazing group of dancers.
This video features a flash mob put together by Marisa Hamamoto and Infinite Flow, an inclusive dance company.
Briana Shunk recently wrote an article bringing Marisa and her company to my attention. She wrote about four inclusive dance companies, one of which was Infinite Flow.
They are America’s first professional wheelchair ballroom dance company.
Their founder and artistic director, Marisa Hamamoto experienced a spinal cord infarction and was suddenly paralyzed from the neck down during a contemporary dance class in 2006. She miraculously recovered full mobility two months later and was inspired to create something unique. A ballroom dance company made up of people in wheelchairs.
The flash mob features a wide range of dancers (including beginners and children). Keep your eye out for some of the more experienced dancers, the professionals in the company, who show a small bit of what I’ve seen in some of Infinite Flows’ other videos. They are amazing to watch.
The company dancers are strong and graceful and truly embody the attitudes and style that characterize ballroom dancing.
You see just a hint of it here, and as Brianna Schunk points out, “they can execute fast powerful spins, lifts, and dips with one or both partners using wheelchairs. The dancers are able to fully assist their partners in traditional ballroom dance tricks (like floor spins) with only slight modifications for the wheelchair users.”
The most inspiring part for me is how they maintain the intimate connection that makes ballroom dancing unique amongst dance forms.
The intimate connection, along side the fast movements that ballroom dancers create together, requires, and creates, immense trust between partners. It is welcoming to see people with disabilities not relegated to the sidelines, but IN the fray, finding that trust and flow through movement with another human being.
I hope you are as inspired by Marisa and Infinite Flow as I am!
No more excuses.
Big thank you to Brianna Schunk and cr*pple magazine for the original article that brought my attention to this amazing group of dancers.