A Dancing Bridger

As a child, architecture wasn’t on my mind. Being born with cerebral palsy in 1984, I primarily lived with my punk mom, who, consciously as well as unconsciously, had very little acceptance of her daughter having a disability. Along with a lot of willpower and courage to make herself and me do things, we lived in a second-floor home with no lift, a lot of steps, no mobility aids, and no personal assistants. I got my first manual pink wheelchair at the age of three. Until then, my mom carried me around everywhere on her hip. When it was time to enroll in a school, there was not a shred of doubt in my mother’s mind that I should attend a private, creatively focused one instead of a conventionally built one where a PA would be assisting during some lessons.

Nothing in my childhood environment mirrored my bodily premise or physical needs. Thus, I learned and accepted that “there are stairs in the real world”, as my mom always liked to remind me. Except for the apartments that my family and I moved into and out of during my childhood and youth, I honestly didn’t give the possibility of accessible public buildings or spaces very much thought. In other words, I accepted and internalised inaccessibility as my premise. This was definitely also because I, as a person born with a disability, did not have the privilege of sufficient physical assistance in my everyday life from a very young age until moving away from home. That assistance came into my life during high school, when I moved into my own accessible home at the age of 16. 

I grew up with beauty and fed on it. My mom was a master at decorating spaces that were lively, theatrically, and always homey. She always put colours and self-made collages on our walls, and fresh, colourful flowers in beautiful vases, alongside soft and colourfully patterned bookshelves, mirroring the warmth of every handmade carpet and sofa cushion. She dressed and carried herself and me as actively created art pieces, whether shopping for groceries or lighting up a theatre stage at work.

How mind-blowing it was to me – and still is – as a highly aesthetic person, to have recognised only three years ago that beauty and pleasure can and should also be an incorporated centre point when I encounter and inhabit architecture!

Architectural Beauty, a Useless Luxury… Or so I thought!

Today, it’s a bit choking for me to contemplate that it wasn’t until Copenhagen was announced the Capital of Architecture in 2023 by UNESCO and UIA that I, by chance, got to properly think about and try to connect myself with the bricks, boundaries, and aesthetics that we call architecture.

I was invited by a friend and, at that time, programme leader, Louis Mølsted Andersen, to speak publicly and engage with my daily – until then rather unconscious – encounters with bricks, pavements, staircases, curbs, shelves, desks and doors, elevators out of order, and lack of disability parking.

I started getting in contact with architects and activists who asked me questions about which spaces I found pleasant and beautiful. I’ll never forget the first time an architect, sociologist, and dear friend asked me that. My jaw dropped, and I immediately replied that I really didn’t know, “because to me, even as the super aesthetically rooted person I have always been, enjoyment and beauty are always secondary to functionality,” I blurted with a forceful tone. Getting out of bed, out the door, into my elevator and car, when they aren’t out of order due to weather conditions or other force majeure – these life-sustaining, external help-dependent practicalities have been what I first and foremost have to contemplate, solve, and overcome, often in my autopilot mode. By forcing myself up and down a staircase when there is no elevator. By tensing my body even more when balancing on a slippery, but aesthetically beautiful, disabled toilet with no handles on the wall, and too tall a seat for my short legs. Or when I try to do the everyday mental exercise of converting all the little cracks in concrete pavements and curbs that constantly challenge my sit bones and balance, into a pseudo-pleasant massage. These personal “mind games” of mine play out several times a day when thinking of and interacting with any kind of public space. To integrate enjoyment or beauty in these everyday, simultaneously conscious as well as unconscious calculations instinctively felt like a ridiculous and useless luxury to me.

Showtime Runs in the Family and in My Veins – and Paves My Spaces and Ways!

I come from a family of quite a few theatre technicians, costumiers, directors, and actors. Both my parents have worked passionately as theatre technicians for a lifetime, with late working hours as their and my everyday rhythm. Consequently, I grew up watching and listening to several great stage production rehearsals and soundtracks, with adult late-night parties and backstage rooms smelling like home.

In 2007, I got the chance to participate in an integrated dance film, heartfelt thanks to a choreographer and friend, Ingrid Tranum-Velasques. Since then, I have been passionately bitten by a dance bug, as telling stories in black boxes still smells like a meaningful, relational home to me. For a number of years since then, I have been privileged and tenacious enough to work with several Danish and international choreographers, dancers, and teachers, by dancing and performing in stage productions myself, co-founding the union of integrated modern dance in Denmark (FIMD), and contributing to its working methods and activities.

I’ve also taught workshops and co-created a Butoh stage performance (a Japanese dance form, connecting the dancer to chosen, often natural, elements and, in a listening, meditative manner, letting one’s body learn and be moved by these elements), titled SPLASTIC. After that, I created and danced my first dance solo piece, MotherTree, in collaboration with my friend, who is a singer and composer. In addition, I speak and have spoken publicly about spreading the word and practice of integrated dance, a dance form including and valuing every body and their premises as they are, with or without disability, in class or on stage, here in Denmark.

To me, whether being in the audience or on stage, dancing and performing have always been a place of communication, connectivity, remembrance, development, curiosity, and potential. A place to explore my own physical and emotional capabilities, passions, and preferences. Simultaneously forgetting myself, my bodily boundaries, and daily struggles, and instead immersing myself in exploration, storytelling, and relating – to myself, my dancing and/or stage partner(s), as well as to the audience. My body and I have always had things to express, but the important and mutually moving fun is sharing the messages. With You.

Dancing: Free from Societal Shackles

It took me so long on my self-taught dancing path to connect the dots. These dots came together as a dance film project Ingrid and I are working on and have been since October last year, set to premiere in November 2026. This film centers on tangibly reinforcing my bodily connection between daily inaccessible architectural and natural surfaces and aesthetics.

Having fallen in love with Butoh when channeling a tree’s, a worm’s, or even a fog’s texture, tempo, and temper, letting their wills and ways take over and move my body. Working with connecting to and letting myself be danced by (natural) elements, regardless of outer eyes and assessments of abilities, efficiencies, measurements, and beauty standards. I contemplate why it took me a full circle to reconnect and work together with (previously mentioned) friend and choreographer Ingrid, within her strong, completely trusted and agreed vision, framework, and aesthetics for our present investigative collaboration: a sensory-based film exploration of my dance.

Ingrid was my very first teacher and an inspirational source for integrated dance when, in 2007, she invited me onto DanseHallerne’s Laboratory Stage together with our mutual friend, dancer, and then PA, Peter Fønss. Back then, the three of us made a dance film for the yearly Day of Dancing, a film that portrayed the adventurous endeavors of a wonderful character living and imaginatively creating her everyday life, having a tea party dance with autumn leaves at the bottom of a container. Ingrid’s ever-present sense of poetic character work got me hooked on this then new and forever marvelous world of dancing! Her clever work with characters and storytelling made me feel at home and safe from the get-go. And having my friend Peter with me in the dance, and Ingrid’s sweet and talented husband filming us, made our working space both comfortable, beautiful, and exciting.

I threw myself onto my dancing path from then on. And now, since November 2025 and throughout this year, Ingrid and I cross and co-create artistic paths in dance once again. We ask: What is my dance? What is it when it’s not constantly internally as well as externally compared to something or someone else – something or someone “other”? What role does accessibility, or the lack of it, play in my premise and sense of dancing my own dance versus dancing on my own (like no one is watching) - Both behind closed doors and out in our everyday lives and shared spaces.

Bending Reality Through My Sensory Presence

Ingrid and I set out on that journey together in October last year. We share a belief in the value of slowness and elongation as a doorway to and practice of presence, in dancing as in life. So far, we have discovered that I, being the sentient woman I am, instinctively take to my sensory, Butoh-rooted inquiry when encountering both obstacles and new grounds for my own, uncomparative dance: 

Can I meet the surfaces of our world’s closed doors with such presence, patience, and compassion that I might, at some impossible point, melt myself through the glass in those doors? The glass, structured and shaped from once completely soft and pierceable grains of sand (though, when wheelchairing through it, still heavy and impassable).

Can I caress the original, sandy nature of a glass window, or find and feel the ancestral mineral nature of an unopenable metal door in such a whole bodily listening manner that it might, even for just a split second, bend to my peacefully entering will?

Can the water inside my molecules slide my way up and down a stony staircase?

Can the concrete cracks ‘n’ bumps in every pavement that always find their harsh way up my wheelchair-supported spine make new pathways for my rootfeet to grow and sit, stronger and more stable every day?

Now, Ingrid is documenting my quest with caressing concrete, cobblestones, and staircases, shaking their cracks with my body to let the light get in, moving behind the metal bars of my home terrace, finding rest in the embrace of forest trees and soil that carry me, to re-gather all my findings and forces when coming back to man-made lifts out of order and the orderly human praise of hostile, exclusive, and seemingly quite costly materials and makings…

Nowadays, I often feel supported and revitalised by forest floors and ocean roars – though I still don’t seek them very often, ‘cause their pathways are often paved with winding soil, stubborn twigs, and sneaky sand, wheelchair-blocking and eating away at the nuts inside the wheels that spin my day’. Consequently, I often and unwillingly shy away from this nurturing nature that you and I have just now begun to make more accessible. Instead, I prefer to stay in the city architecture my mom and family also, and understandably, live in and found it easiest to raise me in. I follow our concrete root network of impermeable steel, tension, and sweat, as my body tenses and toughens up:

My body knows how to survive here, in the smooth and calculated friction-heavy city. And it chooses to! Inhaling car pollution from the front row has become a “small sacrifice” when always turning to the faster and more comfortable branch of our insidious sidewalks - ah, the relieving bike paths: a brief pause to relax my cramping handgrip in my wheelchair handles, to release my incessantly tensing thighs a bit, to lower my shoulders, and to let my neck soften. A time to look up at the possibly aesthetically pleasing blue sky… until there comes yet another gut-shaking, downwind cellar shop pair of stairs in the real world. A cobblestone afternoon shopping stroll, a cobblestone drainage, exhausting every fiber in me unless I transform them into imaginary kidney stone prevention. Another mind game of mine. A traffic light drive-up, a graveled roadwork, a lake trip, or a driveway. Wake up, you Shakin’ Cath!

Dancing as a Try at Minding and Mending the Gaps Between Architecture and Beauty 

I am the one having to mind and mend the gaps between our common architecture and pleasurable aesthetics. I am trying to bridge it: The curbs that walking bones meet without a strolling care in their world shake the daily vulnerability of my hand-grab to sitbone, my often one-legged balance. They meet my eye with their small diamond-stone blinks that glitter in the sun if I lean and look closer. My city’s step-sprinkled shop entrances make my will and abdomen grow strong, another mental and bodily perk of my choir-singing practice. Walking sideways up a railed staircase used to be a short-breathed, muscle semi-collapsing marathon (now no longer doable for my tense muscles). At the same time, my motivation for reaching the top of these endless indoor and outdoor mountain tops was the thought of free exercise for becoming a stronger integrated dancer.

The only way to keep my focus on an expensive but deadly, slippery marble floor in any kind of toilet is to imagine myself as a skating ice queen, carving the ice as slowly and gracefully as possible. The same skating image gets me through the weekly bathroom threat of bathing on a wet floor, leading to an obligatory steep metal drain: If I send the fire of my soul down into the roots of my feet, maybe I can melt its metal and float together with it all the way out into our common Mother Ocean? All of these daily meets, some cuter than others, make me notice and feel the beauty of these materials’ origins. They bring my body to remember the peaceful being in and of these materials before the efficiency of human hands turned these connective, natural elements into troublesome, insurmountable, and majority-rooted architectural obviousness. But alas, this able-bodied obvious eye seems blind to my daily paradoxical beauty focus on the little things, with their inherent whispers of survival. I hear them. I feel and transform them. I mind and mend these gaps through and with my dancing body. In celebration of the Try. And the Why.

Because no one else, architect or able-bodied person, is doing it for me. Or for us, the People with disabilities. We, with our diversely bending bodies and premises, stretch and grow to meet and greet the daily don’ts of this man-made world and its too-narrow doorways and horizons. Our bodies know. Our bodies remember. Our bodies do the work. They have no other choice but to be constantly alert and on their toes – even when sitting. Because very few “others” notice. Very few “others” are present. And very few “others” do the advantageous math and implement the changes to meet people like me, people like us.

I Try. Every second of every day. You built this city on rock. I roll it. With my Why in my body.

Because it’s my private Pride & Joy. Because I was born a Dancing Bridger.