In 1987, months before she was to perform in her first Broadway production, Kitty Lunn, an actress and former ballet dancer, was on her way to a date when she slipped on a patch of ice and tumbled down a flight of marble steps.
The fall shattered vertebrae and damaged her spinal cord. She spent the next three years in acute care, undergoing a series of major surgeries. Dancing again seemed impossible.
“I couldn’t point my toes. I couldn’t hold my stomach in,” Ms. Lunn recalled in a 2020 interview. “Nevermind that I couldn’t stand up.”
Yet when Andrew Macmillan, her date that fateful night, asked what was stopping her from dancing again, Ms. Lunn said something that surprised even her: “The answer to that question was fear.”
In 1995, Ms. Lunn went on to serve as a founder and artistic director of Infinity Dance Theater, devoted to breaking down barriers in dance by training and mounting performances featuring dancers both with and without disabilities. She died on Aug. 18 at her home in Manhattan. She was 76.
The cause was cardiovascular disease, a representative from Infinity Dance said.
Ms. Lunn performed in hundreds of productions with the company, translating principles of ballet and modern dance into movements designed for dancers with a variety of physical disabilities, and using a lightweight, nimble wheelchair modified by Mr. Macmillan, whom she married after her long hospital stay. (She signed her name Kitty Lunn-Macmillan, but maintained Kitty Lunn as her professional name.)
She performed around the world, including at the first Cultural Paralympiad, a showcase of the talents and experiences of people with disabilities held at the 1996 Paralympic Games in Atlanta. She also performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2000 and 2004. Among the notables who trained with Infinity was Alice Sheppard, the dancer, choreographer and founder of the disability arts ensemble Kinetic Light.
“Without my chair, I’m really an invalid,” Ms. Lunn once said. “I never refer to myself as wheelchair-bound — that sounds like I’m in chains. I’d rather describe myself as a dancer who sits down a lot.”
Kitty Morrison was born on Aug. 5, 1950, in New Orleans, the youngest of three children of Hugh Morrison Jr., who owned an insurance agency with his brother, and Beatrice (McClung) Morrison, a real estate agent and interior decorator.
Her fascination with dance started at 8, when her grandmother took her to see “The Red Shoes” — the heralded 1948 British ballet film starring Moira Shearer.
“I looked up at that beautiful redheaded ballerina, and I wanted to be her,” she told the website Stance on Dance in 2019.
By her midteens she was dancing principal roles with a regional New Orleans ballet company, which led to a scholarship to the Washington School of Ballet, where she studied with the renowned teacher Mary Day and the ballet master Edward Caton. Along the way, she also performed in classics like “Swan Lake” and “Giselle.”
She was drawn to ballet roles that required a degree of acting, and eventually decided to pursue a career as an actress. At 20, she moved to New York and studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where Diane Keaton and Eli Wallach had trained.
In 1984, Ms. Lunn took a job as a radio producer at WABC while waiting for her big break in acting; she finally earned a role for Frank Langella’s Sherlock Holmes in “Sherlock’s Last Case” on Broadway. Then came her accident. “Two seconds and one piece of ice,” she recalled in a 2018 video interview with National Geographic, “and my whole world changed.”
During her years in the hospital, Mr. Macmillan’s suggestion that she might dance again initially seemed absurd. “I was a noodle,” she recalled in a 2009 interview with The Brooklyn Rail. “I couldn’t sit up by myself, wash myself, feed myself or anything.”
But after seeing an American Ballet Theater production of Tchaikovsky’s “The Sleeping Beauty,” the “movie in my mind led me to believe it would be possible,” she told The New York Times in 1997.
Ms. Lunn worked with Shaw Bronner, a physical therapist and former dancer, five days a week, five hours a day for five years, she told The Brooklyn Rail. By the early 1990s, she felt ready to embark on her reimagined dance career.
Even so, “no one would let me take a class,” she recalled in a 2020 interview with John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, where she had earned a degree in legal studies in 1995. She went to one studio armed with a copy of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and insisted that it was against the law to bar her admittance.
“I was told that if anyone complained, I would have to leave,” she said. “My response was simple. I said, ‘I can promise you that I will not run into anyone, but I cannot promise you that they will not run into me.’”
She appeared as a guest artist in a performance featuring dancers in wheelchairs in Cleveland, and eventually started Infinity with the dance veterans Robert Koval, Christopher Nelson and Spider Duncan Christopher.
In doing so, she adapted traditional ballet movements, as well as those pioneered by dance luminaries like Martha Graham, to be executed from a seated position, using the arms, head and core to perform actions typically involving the legs.
“I started transposing the technique of classical ballet,” she said. “When you transpose music into a different key,” she added, “you’re not losing any of the notes.”
A review of a 2001 performance in Manhattan by the magazine New York Dance Fax noted that she “sensitively and dynamically danced with her wheelchair spins and gorgeous torso extensions,” praising her “rolling movements on the floor around the chair, reflecting her feelings about her disability and changed life.”
In a review of the same show in The New York Times, the critic Jack Anderson described Ms. Lunn’s artful gyrations to the music of the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry: “While Burke J. Wilmore’s lighting created the illusion of a snowfall, Ms. Lunn slipped on and off the chair, tilting it, tipping it over and responding to its presence as if it had a personality all its own.”
She is survived by a brother, Randy Morrison, and a stepson, Ross Macmillan. Her husband, an actor and television and radio news anchor, died in 2016.
She eventually returned to acting, appearing in various stage productions as well as securing roles on the soap operas “Loving” and “As the World Turns.”
As for her second chapter as a dancer, it proved an unlikely reflection of something the dance visionary Agnes de Mille had told her in school when she was 16 and bemoaning her lack of an ideal willowy ballet body.
“Miss de Mille took my face in her hands,” Ms. Lunn told The Brooklyn Rail, “and said, ‘Kitty dear, you have to learn to dance in the body you have.’”
The post Kitty Lunn, Who Expanded the Boundaries of Dance, Dies at 76 appeared first on New York Times.
