- Art exposes, art reveals what's happening behind the curtain.

♪ There's a fire in the freezer ♪ ♪ There's some blood on the rose ♪ ♪ There's a broken puppet on the wall ♪ ♪ I just saw it's eyes glow ♪ I thought it was just a limp machine ♪ ♪ That was damaged by the road ♪ But he's awake now and I believe ♪ ♪ He's a toy no more ♪ Broken puppet with your strings that fall ♪ ♪ Will you show me how you move on your own ♪ ♪ Cut loose like a ladybug ♪ That's climbing out of its rabbit hole ♪ ♪ Free fallin' like a corporate rogue ♪ ♪ Will you tell me how you bleed on your own ♪ When I was about three years old.

I started playing piano.

I actually recorded some music when I was 14 and I was selling it to raise money for my trip to Costa Rica where I had my injury.

I have a C5 spinal cord injury, so I don't have a lot of hand function.

Three years into my injury, found out I could still make music.

Started a band called Treading North.

That band broke up and I started Freaque.

♪ Pinocchio had it wrong ♪ There's no such thing as real boys ♪ ♪ We try and try and try again ♪ But we'll never fit the mold ♪ The illusion of our freedom rings ♪ ♪ Over bodies that have coiled ♪ They're drained of all their agency ♪ ♪ And deflated leaking joy I remember one night I was working on music on my computer, which is usually the way I write, and I was like, maybe I'll go downstairs and play the piano.

It was this sort of cathartic, deep connection that I'd been missing for a long time with the piano.

And so I was able to kind of reignite that relationship through writing, you know, one note at a time and it kind of gave me this new avenue, this new path to create.

And I think since those songs are so sparse musically, I was really able to start experimenting with more poetry and more lyrics.

♪ Broken puppet with your strings that fall ♪ ♪ Will you show me how you move on your own ♪ ♪ Cut loose like a ladybug ♪ That's climbing out of its rabbit hole ♪ ♪ Free fallin' like a corporate rogue ♪ ♪ Will you tell me how you bleed on your own ♪ ♪ Feel on your own ♪ Be on your own We took that idea of one note at a time to the extreme and realizing like, well, what if I do that with my old body?

(suspenseful music) A Cripple's Dance is a live music, live dance production performed and created by people with spinal cord injuries.

I would literally get on the floor on a mat and I would be moving down there and I have no movement below my armpits, so all I was doing was sort of gestural movements on the ground.

And there's something really like really empowering about that.

What they were gonna see was so deeply vulnerable.

I wanted to bring them into that and invite them to be vulnerable themselves.

It's not about letting your limitation limit you sort of, it's more about using the limitation to burst everything wide open and make magic through your limitations.

All right, let's spread across the room and we're gonna do some solo anchoring exploration.

- Cool.

- I started at Young Dance in fall of 2021.

As I started thinking about what we're doing in class and sort of taking a little bit more of a creative role, things have like really started to shift for me creatively.

I think it comes in line with my excitement for more improv-based performance.

- That was awesome.

- That was awesome.

(calm music) - A thing I'm starting to discover about dance and I think it's been a process of discovery over the last few years.

The way that I dance, the way that I move doesn't need to look a certain way, that's not just enough but exciting.

I think similarly that I can make music that sounds good or interesting to my own ears.

You know, my body is so different from the standard and I wanna explore that and tell that story because I think there are so many people out there who are struggling with similar things and it is this sort of like the floodgates are bursting wide open kind of feeling.

And I have no idea what is coming next, but I know something's coming.

(calm music) (calm music) - [Announcer] This program was produced in collaboration with the Center for the Art of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

And funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(calm music)