Toxic Verticality is a proposal research project exploring chronic pain, dysautonomia, and disability through my practice as an aerial dancer. Combining conversations with those living with chronic illness, pain and disability with medical professionals and embodied movement research, the project will look at how performance traditions, public spaces and art venues privilege verticality-abled humans. By reworking my existing aerial choreography to minimize prolonged time upside down and other shifting capacities, I explore how my work can evolve alongside my experience with dynamic disability while advocating for rest, spaces to lay down in public or performance venues. 
 

The working title draws on my experience of chronic pain and dysautonomia following an acute toxic exposure to hydrogen sulphide. Rooted in necessity, the proposal questions a world designed around standing, sitting, and constant productivity. It explores what it means to rest in public and how performance and public spaces can make room for horizontal ways of being. Through this research, I invite artists and audiences to consider rest, access, and horizontal experiences as shared practices rather than individual accommodations.