France Geoffroy

By Sujata Dey

The passionate flourishes of the accordion accompany piano keys beating out the 4/4 rhythm of the tango. In her wheelchair, France Geoffroy glides beside co-dancer Isaac Savoie to make the traditional tango pose: head straight, eyes defiant, her face close to Savoie’s face.

Unlike most tangos, there is no footwork per se, but oh, can she glide! The wheelchair floats seamlessly to the tango music.

It isn’t your average ballroom tango – it is experimental – but it is emotive and definitely striking. Often, she gracefully collapses in her chair to the rhythm.

Geoffroy, a 29-year-old Montreal dancer, is trying to create a new language of dance – one that incorporates the strengths of a body with a disability. Geoffroy teaches and performs integrated dance, a style of contemporary dance in which people who use wheelchairs dance with people who don’t.

Integrated dance is not about trying to adapt people with disabilities to do ballet, jazz, or tango, for that matter, but it’s about inventing a new style of dance that exploits the movement of the body with a disability.

“I want to give a different image of the wheelchair – try to put it on a wheel,” says Geoffroy. “Try to get rid of the image of a static, utilitarian wheelchair that takes you from Point A to Point B. For me, my wheelchair is a continuity of my body; it is my legs, and in some places my great challenge is to re-appropriate this wheelchair that dances with me.”

From a young age, Geoffroy wanted to be a dancer; as a child, she would choreograph moves with her friends in her parents’ house. At 17, she was accepted to study dance at Montmorency College. Her classes were set to begin August 22, 1991, but on August 17, a twist of fate led her in a completely new direction. A dive into shallow water resulted in quadriplegia. To her, it seemed to be the end of her dream of being a dancer.

“I couldn’t imagine how I could eat, let alone dance. But I heard people talk about a company in London... and there were people put in my way who helped me to develop as the dancer I am today.”

She says that while the accident may have given her more depth, it hasn’t affected who she is, nor her desire to dance.

Geoffroy went back to Montmorency College to finish her dance diploma and has trained at the CandoCo company in London, England, a company dedicated to integrated dance. Together with Isaac Savoie and Martine Lusignan, she founded Corpuscule Danse, a professional company in which she performs and teaches integrated dance. Featured in several Radio Canada documentaries and having performed at l’Espace Tangente and l’Agora de la Danse, Geoffroy has earned a reputation as the only professional dancer with a disability in Quebec.

For her, dance is an overwhelming passion.

“Often I say that my commitment to dance is my commitment to life. I don’t know how to live without dance. It’s innate and inside of me. When I dance, I feel wonderful; I escape. It’s at the level of feeling. I think that the movement is in the heart.”

She says people always throw around the idea that this is “courageous.” She says she is simply doing what she loves; even if she were tied to a stretcher, she would dance – even if it were just inside her head.

“When we have a passion, we do anything in our power to realize our dreams – to realize our passion.”

In dancing, Geoffroy is slowly challenging cultural stereotypes of disability – attitudes like those of La Presse columnist Pierre Foglia, the shock jock of Quebec journalism. He recently got overwhelming support for a column in which he said people with disabilities have just gone too far. He writes: “I will repeat this, they cannot jump to the perch or dance the tango. They are handicapped, understand? At a moment, their rights start to confront their handicap itself – or a reality which would be completely unreasonable to turn away from.”

But don’t tell France Geoffroy that she can’t tango.

“I think he has to come see my show. I think that it is ignorance. Of course, someone in a wheelchair cannot dance the tango the same as a person who walks. If you asked me to do an arabesque or a grand plié, I can’t do it because of my legs. But at the same time, we need to give the message that it is possible to move in a body that is different, and that it is not less valuable.”

One of the non-disabled dancers with whom Geoffroy works tries to replicate a drop of the arm which only people with certain disabilities can do. She explains how contemporary dancers have been toying with ways of trying not to dance in preconceived motions, but to deconstruct them to find new movements. Because people with disabilities do not have the same muscle control, the movements that they come up with are often innovative.

For Geoffroy, Montreal is a vibrant place for her to experiment with integrated dance.

It wasn’t always this way. After the accident, people would come up to her and say things like, “My God, how do you live like that?”

She dismisses these comments, saying that she is far from the image of pity.

“They are two entirely different things: to watch the girl at the corner of the street beg for money and then to see a disabled person on stage who takes care of herself and who blossoms in doing what she loves.

“The image of a wheelchair on stage, I think that it is an evocative image. There is something that transcends a force and a weakness at the same time. I have an open heart and I show my limitations. People can easily see that I don’t have mobility in my arms. I am limited, but when I go on in my life anyway, that touches people.”

Geoffroy’s dancing, for some, is a way of making disability look powerful, beautiful, even sensual.

“For sure, for certain people, I could be very sensual. In some cases, a man could see me and find me desirable, or a woman could look at me and find the same idea that I could have a sexual life like anyone else. When I dance, I don’t think about that. I give off what I give off.”

Geoffroy is private about her personal life, but her former partner Yves Charlebois – musician and ex-technician from the well-established company Carbone-14 – was quoted saying that he had once made a list of everything he sought in a woman. Geoffroy corresponded to everything that he wanted. Only, he didn’t know that the woman of his dreams would arrive on wheels.

Geoffroy has since moved on to new boyfriends – and new projects, such as a trio with a choreographer from Carbone-14 at l’Espace Tangente for next fall. And then there is her teaching. Geoffroy hopes to expand her classes to working with children and going to schools.

In her class in the gym in the Lucie Bruneau Centre, Geoffroy brings out a poem and asks students to interpret it. Her eight students, with and without disabilities, transform it; one with sweeping motions, others with more syncopated motions.

Maggie Cross, 29, is one of her students. Twirling her umbrella in her power wheelchair, she looks like she is right out of a scene from Singing in the Rain. She says people are surprised by her interest in dance.

“A lot of people don’t realize people with disabilities can dance. They think that you have to be on two feet, which is a big misconception. Using your hands, your facial expressions, is very important.

“For me, [dance] is very important. I dance a lot to escape. It gives me the ability to express my feelings.”

Whether there will be more dancers with disabilities coming out of the class is unclear, but France Geoffroy is teaching Quebeckers that it is possible for her not only to dance the tango, but to do so with zest.

(Sujata Dey is a freelance writer living in Montreal, Quebec.)