Bill Shannon, the 'CrutchMaster,' Break Dances on Crutches

Author: Kate Prouty

"How many of you all were thinking — 'does he really need those crutches?'" This was not a totally unreasonable question for Bill Shannon to ask his audience halfway through his performance of "Spatial Theory." Nicknamed the "CrutchMaster," Shannon does what is too often considered unthinkable. He takes physical risks despite his dependence on crutches for mobility. He performs high-energy hip-hop dance routines that include popular break dancing and skateboarding moves. With the combined forces of his legs and his crutches, Shannon is, simply put, a four-legged, hip-hop wonder.

He performed so skillfully at the Flynn Center in the third of four sold-out performances last Friday night that he made people wonder if the crutches beneath his arms were simply props.

As a latent result of osteonecrosis (a bone disease which, for Shannon, means bilateral deterioration of tissue cells in the bones of hips), Shannon has been on crutches since he was five years old. Now 31, he can put weight on his feet and walk, but can not "go for a walk" without the aid of his crutches.

In the middle of his performance, Shannon talked about his medical history. He conveyed his overwhelming exposure to the medical world by casually scrolling through a rapid barrage of medical terms. As he went through the list, the importance of the specific terms he used became less relevant than conveying the fact that this man has spent an exceptional portion of his life behind X-rays.

From years of answering questions about his condition, Shannon concludes that "to validate the dance some need to know the disease is real to define it and explain it as somehow relevant to the creation of art. It is irrelevant, the disease. It is the dancing that is relevant. To see this dance is to see the history of the disease; without the disease there would never have to be this dance. Who without a need for crutches has invented a dance such as mine? No one!"

Shannon is a street artist of the purest kind, self-defined as the "urban dancer, streetskater, kinetic freestyle theorist and artist-at-large Bill Shannon, also known in the club world and battle cipher as CrutchMaster, also known to my people as simply Crutch."

He has been investigating these popular dance forms since 1994 and considers his performance pieces such as "Spatial Theory" to be a "translation off the street." Although the piece retained the raw nature of street improvisation, Shannon admitted to the restrictive nature of the performance space: "skating on stage is like trying to play baseball in a closet."

The performance was divided into four segments: a 30-minute dance piece, an informal talk and showing of video work Shannon has done, another 10-minute dance and finally an improvised freestyle section.

In the first section, Shannon's DJ Richie Tempo soloed by mixing and scratching records for about three minutes before Shannon himself actually appeared through a back entrance. Questions about how this dancer would break-dance while on crutches were thus deferred. The anxious anticipation that the opening time lapse stimulated was heightened by the already ambiguous expectation of awaiting a disabled hip-hop dancer.

Wearing a yellow rain slicker with its hood toggles tied tight, Shannon exposed only an eye and his nose. Presenting himself thus as a masked man perpetuated the mystery that his delayed entrance had already introduced. His costumes, or "CrutchGear," were custom-designed by Catherine Norrie, a designer for Fubu Platinum Line 2000.

The beginning of this segment was characterized by struggle: Shannon's body was slung heavily on his metal crutches and his movement was often labored, as he supported himself awkwardly with the midsection of the crutches rather than properly with their tops. Combined with his hooded guise, this intentionally strained movement quality presented Shannon as a prisoner — perhaps of his disability.

However, his intentional struggle was quickly surmounted by the power of mobility. With the support of his crutches, Shannon is able to do what other dancers could never accomplish: he appeared to float as his feet hovered centimeters over the floor while he let his crutches do the actual walking in smooth figure eights around the room; he "stalled" higher off the ground than any ordinary break dancer could, suspended in the air in multiple "freezes" using his crutches as his support system. A "stall" or "freeze" is a paused position a breaker assumes on the ground during a routine, balancing all of his weight onto his elbows. Using crutches instead of his elbows, Shannon is able to hover much farther off of the ground, intensifying the effect of the position.

Shannon punctuated the pleasure of his routine with huge smiles, grinning for the euphoria of motion. The thrill in this section was intensified when Shannon introduced the speed potential of a skateboard.

After exiting, Shannon came casually back on stage like he was entering his bedroom. He sat down behind the iMac that had been set up for him, to show video clips he had made of his street performances. He also lightheartedly described his medical condition and addressed his perceived identity in relation to disability culture.

In his eyes, there are two ways of dealing with disabilities: medically and socially. The medical approach attempts to physically fix a "problem" through operations whereas the social approach attempts to adjust life to suit your disability. Shannon has chosen the later — to live with his disability in a way that works for him without investing in medical solutions.

This means that Shannon's disability and dance are mutually dependent; Shannon feels that "What is critical to understanding the whole situation is that [his] life and [his] art are inseperable. Interventions without a performance to answer them are interventions stealing [his] life away with each moment spent explaining. Understand this and then see the performance as a mirror, a tool, a time set aside to explore, to recreate and to experiment, to take control of, to reverse the lens."

If you see only the crutches, you are not seeing the CrutchMaster.

For more information about the performer, check out Shannon's Web site: http://www.virtualprovocateur.com.