In classical dance, the art of imbalance--the pirouette, the jeté or the mere ethereal, alighted walk that alone makes audiences feel they are getting their money's worth--is the purview of the able. In the breakbeat idiom of hip-hop--which enlists not only the legs and feet as supports but the hands and elbows, sometimes the head, as available extensions on which the body pivots, pinwheel-like, everything else poised in midair--imbalance is the centrifugal force that holds often lightning-fast movements together. As long as one or another body part functions and holds its due weight, the expansive, exuberant genre known as hip-hop is possible.

It took a dancer with a disability--a congenital weakness in the hip joints that requires the use of crutches for continuous movement--to draw this further line between two worlds of dance whose differences are by now copiously documented. That is--being able to walk perfectly is not a prerequisite for accomplished hip-hop.

Bill Shannon, who goes by the revelatory stage moniker "Crutchmaster," is a 32-year-old, interdisciplinary performing artist who discovered dance as a boy after he was diagnosed with an esoteric condition that pretty much precluded it, called Legg-Calvé Perthes. Owing perhaps to that innocence that enables children to perceive even lousy circumstance as novelty before tragedy, Shannon turned his 7-year-old's crutches to acrobatic advantage by doing flips, or strides the length of which the longest-legged person is incapable of in normal life. It is not every child who walks with his own personal jungle gym, and in his craving for motion Shannon instinctually developed a vocabulary of necessity. He calls it the "Shannon technique," and it became the foundation for a choreography that both utilizes and eclipses its inspiration in limits, joint stiffness and the jagged-limb look that disability confers.

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