Dancing with MS and rugby with wheels

First published:
Wednesday 20 August 2014 3:51PM
Amanda Smith

Being diagnosed with a debilitating disease or having a life-altering accident is always difficult, but for people who rely on their bodies professionally, it can be devastating. Amanda Smith met a dancer and a footballer who have redefined their relationships with their bodies.

It can be difficult when you've grown up expecting to do and be one thing, but through illness or accident the path isn't so straightforward anymore.

From the age of four, Michelle Ryan went to ballet and tap classes in Townsville, and by 19 she was a professional dancer with Meryl Tankard's Australian Dance Theatre.

Cameron Carr grew up playing rugby league. Also at 19, the Queenslander was signed to the Sydney Roosters. His professional playing career was just about to begin.

Ryan, though, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 30 and stopped dancing and Carr was in a car accident the weekend before moving to Sydney; he couldn't look at rugby league for the next five years.

I was quite a show pony as a child and we did spectacular things in my twenties and it was all about "look at me, look what I can do". I think now I'm prepared to go to the darker places that have been informed by my experience acquiring a disability.

Michelle Ryan, dancer

Ryan is now performing again, in a dance-theatre show that's about to play at the Southbank Centre in London. Carr has recently returned to Australia after winning the World Wheelchair Rugby Championship with the Australian team, the Steelers. He's also a gold medallist from the London 2012 Paralympic Games. Both have redefined how they do the thing they excelled at in their childhood and youth.

Ryan first noticed that something was amiss with her body when she was in Berlin, preparing to audition for European dance companies.

'I was doing ballet class and finding that I couldn't feel my calf muscles when I was standing in first position,' she says. 'I thought, "Oh, that's not quite right," thinking that I had a pinched nerve or something like that. It was a really subtle change that I noticed, but it wasn't such a subtle diagnosis, I suppose.'

She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in Berlin after consulting first a physiotherapist then being referred to doctors and specialists and ending up in hospital. Being told you have MS is not easy for anyone to come to terms with, but for a person whose life has centred around physical excellence, it was particularly cruel.

'I had danced professionally since I was 19 so my whole identity was wrapped around my profession,’ says Ryan. ‘It was a very scary moment and a moment that lasted quite a few years actually, to regain that sense of who I was and where I fitted and what I was going to do next. So there was a lot of uncertainty and it was a very difficult time.'

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For Carr, the physical changes to his body were traumatic.

'I was about to head to Sydney and the morning that I was due to drive down I got a phone call from the Roosters to say hold off for a week or two [some accommodation had fallen through]. So while I was waiting, the weekend I had at home I went to a 21st birthday party. After the party I jumped into a car with some friends for a short drive home, but never made it. The driver fell asleep probably 100 metres from the driveway and veered off and rolled the car into a gully. I woke up a couple of days later with a spinal injury and haven't been able to walk since.'

It wasn't the ways things were supposed to go for the teenager whose father, Norm Carr, had played State of Origin for Queensland.

'Rugby league is in my blood, I grew up in rugby league,’ he says. ‘I had aspirations to play in the NRL, I didn't grow up wanting to play wheelchair rugby, to go to a Paralympic Games or win a world championship medal playing wheelchair rugby, but that's the way things turned out.'

Ryan's physical condition changed more slowly. Though her condition mightn’t have been outwardly visible, she stopped dancing because she couldn’t feel the ground. She says her body looked the same physically for more than a year, before she quickly found herself needing a walking stick and then a wheelchair.

‘I had a really sharp decline over a six month period and I then needed to be in hospital and do rehab for a month to learn to walk again,’ she says. ‘I was lucky that I didn't have another episode for years. I had a walking stick but I could still walk and I could still function.'

In that time, Ryan had come back to Australia and was working as the artistic manager for Dance North in Townsville. It was Belgian choreographer Alain Platel who encouraged her to dance again. He was in Australia with his company Ballets C de la B to perform at the Brisbane and Sydney Festivals.

The show always included a local guest artist performing a three minute solo. On the recommendation of Meryl Tankard, Platel wrote to Ryan, inviting her to perform the solo with his company.

'I wrote back to say thank you very much, I just need to check whether you know that I actually walk with a walking stick, thinking that he would say, “oh well, thank you but no thank you.” In fact, he embraced the idea. That was a really changing moment for me, after not performing for 10 years. I was very nervous.'

‘I remember before I went on he said to me, "What are you scared of?" and I said, "I'm scared that I will fall over." To which he said, "Well, wouldn't you just get up and keep going?" Following the performance he really challenged me as to why I'd stopped dancing. He said to me, "But you are a dancer, I don't understand." I hadn't thought of myself like that for 10 years.'

Read more: Traumatic adaptations

Having been an intensely physical and active young man on the verge of a professional football career, Carr also needed to redefine who he was and his goals and aspirations.

'I found it pretty tough, I struggled for the first five or six years, just because I had in my mind what I wanted to do and it wasn't turning out the way that I had planned, and being headstrong, I wasn't willing to concede to my injury. So it took a lot of soul searching and time to come to terms with it.'

Part of his difficulty was reconciling what had happened. 'I had my accident as a teenager, and that's the high risk years, but I wouldn't call myself a risk taker. I’d call it a momentary lapse, a misjudgement, getting into the car. I look at people now and go, “how come you haven't broken your neck doing those sorts of things?” It's luck of the draw, isn't it?’

Carr was first introduced to wheelchair rugby when he was still in hospital, but wasn't interested in it then, or in anything to do with rugby league. Then he started coaching his younger brother’s rugby league team, which he credits for getting him out of the house. Wheelchair rugby followed a couple of years later, as a reason to get fit.

Carr has played with the world champion representative team, the Steelers, since 2005. Has playing wheelchair rugby and becoming a member of the national team satisfied his sporting ambitions? Carr is circumspect.

'I suppose it has, you know, I have no alternative. I had to go with it and had to try and make it work if I wanted to realise the dream of playing a sport at an elite level. Things might alter physically but you still have that mental drive and will to win.'

Ryan, meanwhile, has redefined what a dancer is and can be according to her physical capabilities and disabilities.

'Instead of thinking of your body like I had originally, that it had betrayed me, I actually thought, well, what can my body do? In fact it moves quite differently to traditional dancers, which gives it a really unique quality. So it's a way of moving that no-one else can do, because they don't have my condition.'

Ryan uses a wheelchair in day-to-day life but when she's performing she uses the support of props and other dancers. In the production that's about to go to London called Intimacy, she performs a solo and a duet with Vincent Crowley. The two were members of the same contemporary dance company in their twenties. Crowley is tall and muscular, Ryan is small and slight. Crowley says they've worked hard to find a new way to dance together.

'It challenges your own sense that dance always has to be big and high and fast. You're not going to run and jump and dive and whack your leg up in the air, but be in a world where it's much more sensitive and fine. You can still dance, in all sorts of different ways.'


‘I'm prepared to actually acknowledge the weaknesses, whereas in my twenties, you were only showing off the strongest parts of your body and of yourself. Now I'm quite prepared to show that vulnerable side.'

Professional and elite sport and dance are mostly all about displaying strength and ability. For Ryan and Carr, however, it’s now about displaying a different kind of strength. It’s about the capacity for re-invention.

Focusing on the physical, The Body Sphere is about the ways we use our bodies to create and compete, nurture and abuse, display and conceal.

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