Texas Tech University Sponsors Dr. Merry Lynn Morris Research in Dance / Disability Studies

Texas Tech University School of Theatre and Dance sponsors two lectures by Dr. Merry Lynn Morris on Research in Dance /Disability Studies on October 30, 2017 at the Creative Movement Studio Room 108: 12:30-1:45PM & 5:30-6:30PM.  Lectures are free & open to the public.  Texas Tech Article: Ballerinas in Wheelchairs by Amanda Castro-Crist   Texas Tech University

Texas Tech University School of Theatre & Dance sponsors two lectures by Dr. Merry Lynn Morris on Research in Dance /Disability Studies on 10/30/2017 at Creative Movement Studio Room 108: 12:30-1:45PM & 5:30-6:30PM.

Here is the Texas Tech article :

BALLERINAS IN WHEELCHAIRS: TCVPA WELCOMES MERRY LYNN MORRIS

October 26, 2017

By: Amanda Castro-Crist

Morris, the assistant director of dance at the University of South Florida, will deliver two public lectures on her groundbreaking research in dance and disability studies.

Merry Lynn Morris

Texas Tech University’s School of Theatre & Dance, housed within the J.T. & Margaret Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts (TCVPA), has partnered with Student Disability Services to host innovator Merry Lynn Morris, assistant director of the dance program at the University of South Florida.

Morris, whose research focuses on dance and disability studies, will lead several guest lectures and workshops on Monday and Tuesday (Oct. 30 and 31). All events are free and will be held in the Creative Movement Studio located at the corner of Glenna Goodacre Boulevard and Akron Avenue.

Teaching for the International Visitors Leadership Program

Two lectures on Monday are open to the entire Texas Tech and Lubbock communities: 12:30-1:45 p.m. and 5:30-6:30 p.m. in Room 108. Movement for the Performer students may attend a closed lecture from 8-8:50 a.m. Monday, while dance and theater students and faculty are invited to a lecture from 9:30-10:50 a.m., both in Room 108.

Morris also will lead a movement and lecture workshop for Choreography I students from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Room 101. Dance and theater students and faculty are invited to attend the workshop.

Teaching the REVolutions Dance students

“Dr. Morris’s research uniquely and innovatively contributes to the intersections of dance and disability studies,” said Ali Duffy, associate professor of dance at Texas Tech. “She will discuss her creation of a wheelchair for dancers, a project that has garnered international acclaim. She also will discuss her teaching at the University of South Florida and performance with REVolutions Dance, a mixed ability company in Tampa, Florida.”

Morris is a full-time faculty member at the University of South Florida with 20 years’ teaching and research experience, including ballet, Laban movement analysis, research in dance, integrated/inclusive dance and dance kinesiology. Her interest in disability needs was the result of caring for her father over a 21-year period, and she began exploring integrated and inclusive dance in 2002.

She serves on the board for VSA of Florida, the statewide arts and disability organization. Morris has earned five U.S. patents for her innovative work in re-conceptualizing the design of assistive mobility devices, the Rolling Dance Chair Project.

Morris with Rolling Dance Chair Prototype

Courtesy: Jim Lennon

The intersections between dance, disability and assistive technology design are a prominent focus of her creative and scholarly work, which asks how assistive technologies can work with the human body to enable artistic expression and healthful mobility. Morris has been featured and interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday, MSNBC, the Katie Couric show, PBS, CNN, Reader’s Digest and Inventors Digest.

Her invention has been featured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and in October 2014, her research in assistive mobility devices, as well as ballet pedagogy, was presented at the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science Conference in Basel, Switzerland. Morris has been published in the Journal of Dance Education, the Journal of Research in Dance Education, the Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation, and Medical Problems of Performing Artists.

Morris is a member and presenter within multiple organizations including the National Academy of Inventors, the National Dance Education Organization, the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science and CORPS de Ballet International.

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Science Friday - Latest Coverage Rolling Dance Chair Project with Merry Lynn Morris

Science Friday covered the Rolling Dance Chair Project with Merry Lynn Morris in an article by Julie Leibach and a video:  "A Chair Fit for Dancing"   

{ Article with video .... "A Chair Fit for Dancing" by Julie Leibach }

Here is the video & video link:

 https://youtu.be/yM0VCdIvb4U

Here is a copy of the article:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/a-chair-fit-for-dancing/

A Chair Fit For Dancing

by Julie Leibach

Frank Hull is a dancer. His body is prone to spasms, so he uses a power wheelchair to perform as well as to go about his daily routine. By manipulating the joystick, he can move forwards and backwards and pivot on an axis. The chair is sturdy—heavy-duty enough to plow through snow—and it rolls pretty fast when he lays on the controls.

Developing a dance technique using his utilitarian device has been Hull’s passion for more than 15 years. As he puts it, his craft involves developing “ways of relating to the chair with my body artistically—in essence, creating a movement vocabulary that can be turned into dance.”

So a few years ago, when Hull heard that a Florida-based choreographer named Merry Lynn Morris had invented a power chair with dancers in mind, he had to see it for himself.

“I never thought there would be a chair designed for dance,” says Hull, who’s based in Toronto, Canada. “’Course, I had to get to Florida. Didn’t matter how.”

When he finally met Morris at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa in May 2013, Hull found a chair tailored for artistic expression. The device was sleek and compact, its wheels hidden from sight. And it could move in all directions—including from side to side and diagonally, which commercial manual wheelchairs and most power chairs, including Hull’s, can’t do.

But the chair had another attractive feature: It was “smart.” To command the device, a user straps on a portable, wireless control—in this case, a cell phone—to a mobile part of her body, say the head or the upper back. When she leans in a desired direction, the phone detects the movement and instructs the chair to follow suit. (As far as Morris knows, there are no wireless power wheelchairs on the market; she has a U.S. patent on her chair’s technology.)

“[The chair is] absolutely unique; I’ve never seen anything like this at all,” says Mary Ellen Buning, a seating and mobility specialist for the University of Louisville Physicians in Kentucky. Someone with good control of the muscles in her torso, she says, “could really make full use of this chair for expressive dance.” (Buning hasn’t seen the device in person but watched a video of it in action.)

When Hull gave the chair a spin, he was struck by the freedom of movement it afforded him. “I wasn’t tied to my joystick,” he says. “I could feel the dance more.”

Morris calls her invention the Rolling Dance Chair, and she’s been working on it for more than a decade, earning five patents in the process. To her, the chair is more than an accessibility device—it’s an opportunity to explore new dance techniques.

“The exciting part for me is actually when different people get in it with their different bodies and their different dance backgrounds,” says Morris, who’s the assistant director of the dance program at USF’s School of Theatre and Dance. “There’s a lot of different ways the chair could be used as a movement tool.”

Morris can hardly remember a time when she wasn’t leaping and twirling. She grew up in a household “surrounded by a lot of creativity”—her mother is a visual artist and her father was a teacher and writer—and she picked up dance at age 3. She traces the inspiration for her Rolling Dance Chair to that lifelong passion, and to two formative experiences.

When she was 12, Morris’s dad got into a major car accident that left him with brain damage and reliant on a wheelchair. “He had a lot of medical equipment and a lot of different types of wheelchairs,” she remembers. But none of his devices were particularly user-friendly. His standard manual wheelchair, for instance, “kind of boxed him in,” she says.

Helping her mother maneuver her father and observing the strain that his disability put on her parents’ relationship got Morris “thinking about these kinds of devices as interfaces between people, and how can they be more organic, more conducive to human interaction.”

Then in 2001, a few years after Morris was hired at USF, she began working with a group of dancers with disabilities. “Most of the individuals that I was working with were wheelchair users who had not a lot of control in their lower body but had a fair amount of control in their upper bodies,” she recalls, “so I started thinking a lot about how this device was supporting their performance or, in some cases, inhibiting it.”

In 2006, Morris received a grant from USF to develop an accessibility chair designed for dance. The first thing she did was order several Segways for research purposes. The Segway, she says, “seemed to be the closest idea at the time” to the device she had in mind: a chair that moved in response to subtle body cues. If a user’s arms and hands were free, they “would be more available to interact with other dancers or do other movements,” says Morris.

Student engineering groups at USF helped Morris build what she calls a “rough draft” of her concept: a retrofitted power chair with sensors built into the seat that caused the device to move forward when a user tilted in that direction.

For the next iteration, Morris recruited a professional team consisting of a programmer and a designer and fabricator. Together, they built the first real prototype, which debuted in May 2013.

At first blush, the Rolling Dance Chair looks like a sleeker, futuristic version of a power chair. The seat, reminiscent of an Eames design and imported from Italy, is a rounded piece of translucent plastic that “catches the light well,” says Morris. “I think there’s kind of an elegance about it.”

The seat can move up and down and swivel independently from the chair’s black aluminum base, which contains indentations that can be used as handgrips or footholds, and that enable other dancers to interact with the person in the chair.

The base obscures the chair’s four wheels so that “there’s no interference with costume or dress,” says Mark Rumsey, Morris’s designer and fabricator, who’s based in Southern California. The precise configuration of those wheels, combined with rollers on each tread, allow for the chair’s omnidirectional movement, which the user operates through a Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

When a user straps the phone to her back, for example, and leans in one direction, the phone’s motion sensors—a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer—collect data on her position and movement. “We’re tapping into the natural motion sensor technology that already exists in a phone,” says Morris.

A filtering algorithm cleans up the positional data, which is then relayed to sensors in the chair’s base, “where all the magic happens,” says Neil Edmonston, who did all the programming. After some quick, complex computing, the chair deciphers the sitter’s movement and mirrors it.

“For [the chair] to move, you have to move first,” says Edmonston, who runs a consulting service in Pensacola, Florida. But “it happens in such a short period of time that it looks seamless.”

The degree to which a user leans governs how quickly the chair rolls. “For instance, if I move a little bit, I’ll move slowly. If I lean more, I’ll move faster,” explains Edmonston. “So, it allows you to have a very intuitive and fully controllable type of movement.”

The Rolling Dance Chair also has an alternative mode: A bystander—say, a dancing partner—can operate it, either by tilting the phone or by tracing her hand across the phone’s screen, using it as a “touch-joystick kind of control,” says Morris.

Dancer Luca “Lazylegz” Patuelli tested that mode a couple weeks ago, when he was visiting USF for an integrative dance festival called A New Definition of Dance (which Morris founded). Lazylegz is a b-boy (what popular media often calls a breakdancer), and he incorporates crutches into his routines—he was born with arthrogryposis, which is characterized by limited range of motion in multiple joints.

While a partner operated the Rolling Dance Chair’s control, “I was doing some different designs and different angles using my crutches while I was moving,” he says.

Putting the control (quite literally) in a partner’s hands “adds a completely different element for a spectator, but also for the dancer themselves,” says Lazylegz. Not only do you have to trust your partner, “but you also have to trust the technology.”

Morris and her team are now working on a second prototype of the Rolling Dance Chair in the hopes that they’ll be able to license it commercially. “I’ve been in communication with several different wheelchair companies, and so we’re making progress that way from a business perspective,” she says.

Updates entail motorized height change and seat rotation (these features are manually operated in the current prototype), as well as a new set of wheels in an improved configuration that will ensure smoother, quieter rolling across uneven surfaces.

Dwayne Scheuneman, founder of REVolutions Dance, Inc., an inclusive dance company based in Tampa, has helped Morris test her chair since the beginning. Scheuneman, who has a spinal cord injury, prefers his manual wheelchair because it enables him to perform certain modern dance moves, such as tipping over to the floor and pushing back up again.

But for some dancers, he says, the Rolling Dance Chair could be the device they’ve been waiting for. “Any manual chair is not right for everybody. Any current power chair isn’t right for everybody. So, Merry Lynn’s Rolling Dance Chair, it isn’t going be right for everybody,” says Scheuneman. But “there are people who are going to love it, and it’s going to be so useful”—for dance, but potentially for everyday life, too, he says.

As Morris and other dancers explore the Rolling Dance Chair’s possibilities, they’ll add to a growing repertoire that people with disabilities have been experimenting with for a while.

“I do think that improvements can be made in the wheelchair and in other mobility devices for dance for peak performance, and especially if we want to get to higher levels of artistry,” says Morris, “but people are dancing in the things that they have, in the bodies that they have, and I’m very much a supportive advocate of people dancing however and in whatever creative modes they can.”

Article written by:  Julie Leibach

THANK YOU JULIE LEIBACH !

with love,  Merry Lynn Morris

International Showcase Dance Concert Video Excerpts - A New Definition of Dance

Here are the video excerpts from the first (SOLD OUT!) "New Definition of Dance" International Showcase Dance Concert last October 16, 2015.  We are planning for a second incredible dance week for 2016 which will again be hosted, presented and sponsored by:   VSA Florida, University of South Florida and the Rolling Dance Chair Project...... See you there!

The first video is a 7 minute excerpt.  The second video is a 3 minute excerpt.  Both are basically identical and they include each Dance Artist featured from the "New Definition of Dance" week conference / teaching / workshop / performance (10/ 14-17 /2015).  The 7 minute excerpt shows more from each Dance Artist.

VSA 7 Minute International Showcase Dance Concert Video Excerpts:

https://youtu.be/vmbZo-OjLzE

VSA 3 Minute International Showcase Dance Concert Video Excerpts:

https://youtu.be/YLMjRKeYHH8

A spectacular dance week!  And we look forward to more and for year two!

Best and love to everyone !

Merry Lynn Morris  (& Sonshine)

USF News: Unprecedented Dance and Disability Event Hosted by VSA Florida with Merry Lynn Morris Artistic Director

[copied/reprinted from University of South Florida News Channel:  http://news.usf.edu/article/templates/?a=7032&z=220 ]

Unprecedented Dance and Disability Event Oct. 14 – 17

Leading artists coming to USF to perform, participate in workshops and use Merry Lynn Morris’ revolutionary Rolling Dance Chair; Chinese dance star Liu Yan makes her U.S. debut.

p
Hanna Harchakova and Ihar Kisialiou, World and European champions in wheelchair ballroom dancing, will appear at the Oct. 16 concert.

By Barbara Melendez
      USF News

TAMPA, Fla. (Oct. 12, 2015) – A truly unique and groundbreaking dance and disability event at USF promises to help redefine how the world understands and appreciates dance. Dancers of all abilities and those who love dance will encounter some of the most remarkable dancers in the field.

Harchakova and Kisialiou

Over four days from Oct. 14 to 17, VSA Florida’s “A New Definition of Dance: An International Mixed Ability Showcase and Educational Initiative,” presents performances and opportunities to learn from an international array of guest artists. This event honors the 40th anniversary of VSA (the statewide affiliated arts and disability organization is headquartered at the University of South Florida) and the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The main performance takes place Oct. 16, 8 p.m. in Theatre II, 3829 West Holly Drive, and tickets are available at the USF College of The Arts box office, $5 for adults and free to USF students, seniors and K-22 students. For ticket information, visit www.vsafl.org. There is a reception following the performance next door at the Contemporary Art Museum.

This mixed ability dance project, supported through a National Endowment for the Arts grant, brings together a diverse range of national and international performers to perform hip hop, ballroom, African, Chinese classical and modern dance originating from Canada, Belarus, California, New York, Beijing, Miami and Tampa.

Performers include Canadian break dancer Luca “Lazy Legz” Patuelli, renowned Chinese classical dancer Liu Yan making her U.S. debut, West African drummer and dancer, Sidiki Conde, World and European Wheelchair Ballroom Dance champions, Hanna Harchakova and Ihar Kisialiou, and other accomplished artists (see sidebar).

Performers are Tops in the Field Embodying resilience and indomitable talent.

TAMPA, Fla. – A brilliant career in dance brought to a halt by a devastating accident would seem to be the end of a tragic story. Instead it represented a remarkable detour to “A New Definition of Dance,” for Liu Yan, the renowned classical Chinese dancer. 

Her story parallels other dancers in “A New Definition of Dance.” Liu will be joined by Sidiki Conde who lost the use of his legs after being stricken with polio, Luca Patuelli who was born with Arthrogryposis and scoliosis, Dwayne Scheuneman who suffered a spinal cord injury, and Marcie Ryan who was born with spina bifida, in taking the stage along with performances by wheelchair dance stars Frank G. Hull, Hanna Harchakova, Ihar Kisialiou, Sonsheree Giles, Miami-based Karen Peterson and Dancers, and the dancers of REVolution Dance.

Giles, while not disabled herself, “has danced with AXIS Dance Company for 15 years is very well-versed in the field and will be a fantastic contributor to the event,” Morris said. “The duet she performed on ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ with Rodney Bell gleaned a lot of media attention.”

Morris noted that Harchakova is a disability activist and well-known public figure in Belarus as well as being a world and European wheelchair ballroom dance champion. “I met her in the spring through the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program.”

Both Ryan and Hull have served as research participants for the dance chair project, testing the chair and providing feedback to inform the design development. Scheuneman, a Navy veteran and a student at the USFSP College of Education, founded REVolutions Dance, an integrated company based in Tampa. He is performing in addition to being a sponsor of “New Definition of Dance.”

In all cases the dancers made their ability to dance no longer dependent upon their legs, thereby redefining dance within the vocabulary of gesture and emotion aided by wheelchairs and fellow dancers. They have enthralled audiences with their talent and ability to imbue movement with the magic of artistry and self-expression.

Together they brilliantly illustrate human resilience.

In Yan’s case, 12 days before the world was to see her as lead dancer in a performance of “Silk Road” at the Beijing 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, she fell. A malfunctioning moving platform precipitated a thoroughly uncharacteristic misstep paralyzing the brilliant dancer’s lower body. Two years later, Liu established the Liu Yan Arts Special Fund to help provide art education to poverty-stricken children, orphans and migrant workers while working on a doctorate degree in dance theory at the Beijing Dance Academy.

Since her accident, Liu has performed in Paris and her tremendous talent and indomitable spirit will be on display for the first time in the United States when she comes to USF. The Confucius Institute is hosting a reception in her honor and is assisting with translation needs.

“It will also be a debut performance working with the prototype rolling dance chair, which is part of why she is coming here, to work with the chair innovation and me,” Morris said.

The public can observe some of the classes, attend a performance at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital and take part in a REVolutions Dance class. The Confucius Institute is hosting a special invitation-only reception for Liu. For schedule and details, click here.

Many of the artists will try out the Rolling Dance Chair, pioneered by Merry Lynn Morris, USF Dance program faculty member and academic advisor and the primary organizer of this event. Working collaboratively, Morris and Liu will develop a piece of choreography utilizing the prototype chair.

One of the participants, Sonsheree Giles, while not disabled herself, performed a duet on ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ with Rodney Bell and has danced with AXIS Dance Company for 15 years.

A Groundbreaking Event

Motivated by the time she spent as a caregiver for her father as well as her love of dance and choreography, Morris has become world renowned for her research work in dance, disability and assistive technology and the development of the chair project which she began in 2005.

Morris explains that “A New Definition of Dance” is a groundbreaking event.

“When performers with disabilities are brought in as guest artists, it is usually only a single company or a sole individual,” she said. “Rarely will one see this many guest artists with disabilities collectively being brought together to perform and conduct workshops. Regionally, nationally and probably internationally, it is a pretty rare type of event, given all of the diverse layers which we encompass.

“Many technologies now used by the majority grew out of disability needs, such as elevators, ramps, different types of doorknobs, text to speech, closed captioning options, etc.,” Morris reminds us. “Disability actually is a pathway to innovation – it prompts and in fact, demands that we think more creatively about the design of our world as a diverse body of human beings.”

When Morris introduced the idea of such an event to multiple potential collaborators, she received positive responses and encouragement. VSA Florida and Morris applied for and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in order to move forward. From there it was full steam ahead.

VSA, founded by Jean Kennedy Smith, is an international organization headquartered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. with affiliates in many parts of the U.S. and abroad including Austria, Canada, Lithuania, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Jamaica, France and other nations.

“The organization’s goal is to make the arts accessible to people with disabilities and give them professional opportunities and training. It is a pretty interesting non-profit model and USF is fortunate to have such a well-established organization in residence,” said Morris.

Further support has come from USF Disability Services; the USF College of The Arts; the USF School of Theatre & Dance; the USF Contemporary Art Museum; the Confucius Institute; USF World; the USF Department of World Languages' Russian program and the USF Russian Club; the Chinese-American Association; the Gobioff Foundation; Lynn’s Rolling Dance Chair Project; National Seating and Mobility (NSM); Quantum Rehabilitation; Culture Builds Florida; REVolution Dance; A-Ability; and Tampa General Hospital. Quantum and NSM are partnering with Morris on the development of the Rolling Dance Chair.

Morris is very pleased about all the elements that came together to make this event possible. A lot of coordination was called for and cooperation has saved the day.

“While I have been responsible for many aspects of the planning, and at times it can certainly seem overwhelming, it has been wonderful to have synergistic collaborators, including Deb McCarthy from Disability Services and REVolutions Dance. Additionally, sponsors such as USF World from whom I applied for some funding, and the Confucius Institute have been very supportive in facilitating the needs of the project,” Morris said.

“We have a lot of integrative aspects across campus as well as linkages within the community such the VA Hospital, the University of Tampa and several public schools.”

There are multiple goals and layers involved in the showcase.

“There’s the educational aspect – informing our students and the community about disability and the arts through workshops and performances. And I’m coordinating the research aspect – using this opportunity to conduct my own research in dance, disability and assistive technology. And finally, we’re using the opportunity as a means of placing these artists in intersection and dialogue with each other to hopefully spawn more collaborative products in the future.”

One collaborative product is already trying to take shape.

Luca "Crazy Legz" Patuelli  Photo by: Patrick Sansregret

“A student from engineering recently emailed me about having Luca Patuelli test his new crutch design,” Morris said. In the midst of everything, she’s working on connecting IsmetHandžić, Ph.D. with Patuelli. But then this fits in with Morris’ work which is in perfect synch with USF’s research focus. Her reputation as an innovative assistive technology researcher was established at USF with her Rolling Dance Chair Project. So it makes perfect sense that she designed and structured the schedule of events and various surrounding activities to support all the goals and layers.

“I wanted to enable each of the performers to take part in each other’s workshops, this way we can create a more informed dialogue around various teaching approaches and methods for dance and disability curriculum,” she said. “I intentionally sought out guest artists from different dance genres and with differing backgrounds in order to expand the context for understanding what is happening in the dance and disability field – and how we can continue to push the field forward in exciting and productive ways.”

Morris also had many others in mind.

“Although progress has been made with the ADA and initiatives by various disability organizations, prejudice still persists. In the planning of this event, we have tried to be attentive to disability issues with regard to the performance in particular – including options for audio description – for individuals with visual impairment, audio transcription – for individuals with hearing impairment, assistive listening devices and wheelchair accessibility, large print programs, etc. All too often, disability is still placed at the margins as the afterthought in the design of the physical and social world. There is still much work to be done in heightening attention to disability issues including design and accessibility on multiple levels.”

Barbara Melendez can be reached at 813-974-4563

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Thank you Barbara Melendez for this great article for the VSA Florida Event!

With Love and Best to All, Merry Lynn Morris

Here is the actual live piece performed on 10/16/2015 as part of the performances of "Ä New Definition of Dance" / "Concealing-Revealing" with dancers Liu Yan, Cynthia Hardegree, and Merry Lynn Morris, Choreographer and Artistic Director.  The Artwork and videography editing were done by His Sonshine and Ariel Arts with photography and rehearsal footage by David Shelor who also is an engineer working with the Rolling Dance Chair Project and directs from backstage the Dance Chair movements with our wonderful programmer and innovative controller designer Neil Edmonston and his incredibly supportive and beautiful wife, Talia!  Thank you to so many people.... including the wonderful professional photographers Tom Kramer and Jim Lennon who volunteer their time to document the process for the Rolling Dance Chair Project and to document VSA of Florida's cutting edge international dance week event! The performance on Friday was sold out with people wrapping around Theatre 2....! Next time - we plan on at least two performance showings! We are all so grateful for everything and the immense bonding with international dance artists that will no doubt continue - thankfully!


"CONCEALING-REVEALING" Live Performance Video
[ https://realtimes.real.com/s/MycKyY ]
The basis for the piece "Concealing/Revealing" is on the Three Graces - or a "Graces Three Ballet" where face and form interplay with being hidden or revealed and the support in being vulnerable as one may be revealed without necessarily wanting to be.

Here also is a brief rehearsal snippet of Liu Yan's 1st day in Tampa:

https://youtu.be/5SYikzEWjwQ

THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE & WE THANK GOD FOR ALL THE GRACE!

With much love,
Merry Lynn ...... and Sonshine

Belarus (Minsk) Dancers Hanna Harchakova (Anna) and Ihar Kisialiou (Igor) Visit Tampa Florida with Merry Lynn Morris

Belarus  (Minsk) Dancers Anna & Igor Visit Tampa Florida with
Merry Lynn Morris & REVolutions Dance at USF

Visiting Dancers from Belarus, (Minsk) contacted me as they toured the U.S and we collaborated in a beautiful class at USF with REVolutions Dance Company in Tampa, Florida.    (See video below.)

Belarus, (Minsk) Dancers with Merry Lynn Morris at USF
Tampa, Florida

A Belarus Project, brought to you by World Partnerships & the U.S. Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program.

  ( https://youtu.be/cK1dt02MVwM ). 

It was a great pleasure recently meeting visitors from Belarus who are leaders of various disability organizations. We discussed arts and disability programming and opportunities for collaboration. A particular highlight was having Hanna Harchakova, a wheelchair ballroom dance champion, teach a class to the REVolutions Dance students and also participate in the class I taught. A special thanks to the assistants who joined us in the class, Sharon, Laura, Takema and Cara as well as the individuals from Pyramid, Inc. and the parents who were there! This delegation is hosted by World Partnerships, Inc. (www.WorldPartnerships.org), since 2000 the official St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay regional partner of the US Department of State “International Visitor Leadership Program” (IVLP).

The sponsorship of the US Department of State "International Visitor Leadership Program" (IVLP)... is such an impressive act to consider worldwide disabilities and disability in general. As I mentioned at the end of the video segment, "Disability is the one minority that you (everyone) will join if you live long enough."... may we always join the leadership to create the avenues which enable us all!

Beautiful Collaborations ! And to explore the idea of an exchange degree at USF with one of your students !.... I am looking forward to so much more! *

With Love,

Merry Lynn Morris

* on October 14-17, 2015 an incredible collaborative concert at USF Tampa Florida is in the works wiith a grant from the NEA (National Endowments for the Arts) which  I applied for in collaboration with VSA Florida / The State Organization on Arts and Disability. - This concert and workshop will include INTERNATIONAL DANCE ARTISTS with worldwide recognition....(note - I will update here the poster link and bios of all participating ... which will include: Belarus Dancers Anna & Igor.).....