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Winner of the 2007 Mid-Atlantic Emmy
for Outstanding Magazine Program |
Science is proving that the arts can have a beneficial effect on physical health. Their liberating, even cathartic effect on emotional health has long been acknowledged. This episode of State of the Arts explores The Healing Arts, from dancers in wheelchairs to a hospital’s experiment with the drug of music.
| the body you have |
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“The Body You Have” is the winner of the 2007 Mid-Atlantic Emmy for Outstanding Informational Segment.
Wheelchair dancer Kitty Lunn, founder of Infinity Dance Theater, once danced professionally with the Washington Ballet. That was before her accident, the one that left her an “incomplete paraplegic.” Afterward, she learned to “dance in the body you have” – advice given to her years before by the famed choreographer Agnes de Mille. State of the Arts producer Susan Wallner talks to Lunn as she prepared to dance in “Wheels and Bodies in Motion", a co-production of Infinity Dance Theater and Roxey Ballet. This full length concert integrating able-bodied and disabled dancers, had its premiere at New York’s Joyce SoHo in June 2006.
From its beginning in 1994, Roxey Ballet founders Mark and Melissa Roxey have integrated dancers with disabilities into all aspects of both the professional and educational activites of their Lambertville, New Jersey-based company. They have done this in large part by working with the Matheny Medical and Education Center’s Arts Access Program, which has developed communication methods and principles allowing students with severe cerebral palsy and other disabilities to work in different art forms. Mark Roxey further developed these methods to allow students not only to dance but to create original works of choreography. Wallner visits Matheny for one of the Roxey Ballet’s weekly one-on-one dance classes, and talks to some Matheny Arts Access Program resident dancers, including Jess Evans, who says “dancing makes me feel free, like a bird,” and the multi-talented Natalia Manning, an accomplished non-verbal artist and choreographer who speaks through the use of a synthetic voice “talker.”
 Watch a ”wheelchair duet” featuring dancers Kitty Lunn and Alice Sheppard, from “Wheels and Bodies in Motion", a co-production of Infinity Dance Theater and Roxey Ballet at NYC’s Joyce SoHo, June 2006
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Choreographer Natalia Manning (center) with two of her dancers, Leoannis Pupo-Guillen and Melissa Kanavel, both of the Roxey Ballet Company
Dancer Shaleena Tomassini performing in "Mother & Me", an autobiographical piece about her life, with Roxey Ballet dancer Sharon Rudda.
(photo by Lyn Sanders)
Dancer Kitty Lunn in "In Time Like Air" by Peter Pucci
(photo by Ray Block)
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| the healing harpist |
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By
all accounts, harpist Alix Weisz has
a special talent for helping the sick
to heal. And now, the staff at Morristown
Memorial Hospital is conducting scientific
research to prove it. Several time a
week, Alix strolls through the intensive
care unit at the hospital playing for
patients who have just undergone heart
surgery. The nurses record their patients'
vital signs before, during, and after
Alix plays. Preliminary results show
that, even when patients are unconscious,
the soothing harp tones lower blood pressure
and actually help to regulate heart beats.
One patient recalled jokingly that he
had thought he had gone to heaven, but
most remember the soothing music and
Alix's therapeutic presence.
A
life-long New Jerseyean, Alix Weisz
began by playing harp early, but found
her true calling when she picked up
an 11 pound shoulder harp and embarked
on a mission to heal. State of the
Arts producer Eric Schultz follows
Alix on her rounds, and speaks to the
study’s creator, Emilie Rowan,
coordinator of the cardiac integrative
medicine program at Morristown Memorial
Hospital. He also talks to Lynn Emond,
the nurse manager on the Cardiac Post-Anesthesia
Care Unit, who says that even the nurses
have found that Alix's music has a
calming effect on their stressful work.
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Harpist Alix Weisz at Morristown Memorial Hospital |
| art about 9/11 |
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How do you make art about 9/11? This is a question that both artists and the public continue to grapple with. Five years after 9/11, the state of New Jersey is inviting the public into the galleries of the State Museum to see the designs and models for "Empty Sky – The New Jersey September 11, 2001 Memorial.” Next to the planned monuments for Ground Zero itself, New Jersey's Empty Sky, which will be constructed directly across the Hudson River from where the World Trade Center stood, just might end up being considered the 9/11 monument. Other monuments by New Jersey artists are also beginning to dot the landscape. Bedminster artist Sassona Norton's monument to the victims and heroes of 9/11 stands at the Montgomery County courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey artist and Grounds for Sculpture founder Seward Johnson's "Makeshift Memorial" - cast from one of his own pieces that was salvaged from Ground Zero – is located on the Hudson River Walkway in Jersey City. State of the Arts producer Christopher Benincasa tracks the development of the historic Empty Sky project and visits the sites of other 9/11 memorials along the way.
Watch a story about Seward Johnson and his sculpture that became
"Makeshift Memorial" from the NJN News archives
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Designs for "Empty Sky – The New Jersey September 11, 2001 Memorial”
Designs for "Empty Sky – The New Jersey September 11, 2001 Memorial”
“Makeshift Memorial” by J. Seward Johnson
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