Gregg Mozgala, a 31-year-old actor with cerebral palsy, had 12 years of physical therapy while he was growing up. But in the last eight months, a determined choreographer with an unconventional résumé has done what all those therapists could not: She has dramatically changed the way Mr. Mozgala walks. The choreographer Tamar Rogoff doing “body work” with Gregg Mozgala, who has cerebral palsy and for whom she has created a dance piece.
“I have felt things that I felt were completely closed off to me for the last 30 years,” he said. “The amount of sensation that comes through the work has been totally unexpected and is really quite wonderful.” Cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder in which the brain does not send the proper signals to the muscles, affects gait and other movements. Those with severe cases use wheelchairs.
Mr. Mozgala’s condition is less severe but disruptive enough to have caused him to walk for most of his life like “a human velociraptor,” as he put it: up on his toes, lower extremities turned in, seesawing from side to side to maintain balance. “My knees were going in, my hips were totally rotated inward,” Mr. Mozgala said. “Gravity was just taking me down. So my upper body — arms and chest — overcompensated, curling back and up.”
That is how he looked when Ms. Rogoff saw him in March 2008 playing the male lead in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” by Theater Breaking Through Barriers, a group whose shows mix actors with disabilities and those without. Ms. Rogoff has often worked outside normal dance parameters — with prison inmates, for instance — and knew immediately that she wanted to try to create a piece for Mr. Mozgala. “I didn’t know what I was going to do for him,” she said, “but I just knew he was inspiring to me.”
Originally, she envisioned a simple study, maybe 10 minutes long. Mr. Mozgala’s expectations when he agreed to the project were equally narrow: he said that he thought that she would either merely create a dance that made use of the physical abilities he already had or, after seeing his limitations, tell him, “Thanks but no thanks.”Once they began working together, though, Ms. Rogoff realized that a broader approach was needed.
“Every time he tried to move in a way that wasn’t specific to his habitual pattern, he would fall down or just not know how to address it,” she said, “because he had a certain amount of patterning linked to his C.P., and I was asking him to step out of these patterns. I realized I couldn’t ask him to do that unless I supported it with a lot of body knowledge.”She introduced Mr. Mozgala to a tension-releasing shaking technique, and it was immediately revelatory. “My body just really took to it,” Mr. Mozgala said. “I did that for about 20 or 30 minutes, and when I stood up, I was walking completely differently. My feet were flat on the ground.”
They knew they were onto something. They began doing intensive one-on-one sessions they call body work, Ms. Rogoff using her knowledge of the body and dance-training techniques to help Mr. Mozgala “find” individual bones, muscles and tendons that he had had no command of before.
They started at the top and worked down — sternum, sacrum, knees — with Mr. Mozgala’s body and brain opening paths of communication that had not existed. “There’s a lot of howling, screaming, crying, sweating,” Ms. Rogoff said. But “we often have these huge eureka moments.” The other day, for instance, it was brain, meet lower-leg tendon. “I said today, ‘I can feel my Achilles,’ ” Mr. Mozgala said. “You have to realize, I have never felt my Achilles before.”
(Source: The New York Times)
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