LOS ANGELES — In a one-room studio tucked down an alley in Burbank, four dancers spin in unison around an orange-walled room. Two on foot and two in wheelchairs. It’s late and it’s hot — the AC is busted. But their unrelenting positivity and persistence are in full force as they prepare for a music video shoot.
They’re members of Infinite Flow Dance, which employs dancers with and without disabilities of diverse identities. The company also represents an array of non-apparent disabilities including chronic illness, deafness, blindness and neurodivergence.
Infinite Flow founder and CEO Marisa Hamamoto has spent her entire life dancing. She suffered a spinal stroke in 2006 during a rehearsal, which initially left her paralyzed from the neck down. She walked out of the hospital two months later with a new grasp on life. “I saw the human body different,” she said. “I saw dance different.” She also realized that there wasn’t enough access for dancers with disabilities. One thing led to another, and she founded Infinite Flow.
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Since opening in 2015, Infinite Flow has performed at more than 350 events, from K-5 school assemblies to 100-person flash mobs. Their videos have been viewed more than 100 million times combined across social media.
From poignant and gravity-defying duets to electrifying group routines, the dancers’ differences make their work uniquely beautiful. Sometimes choreography is adapted to a wheelchair-friendly format, and other times the wheelchair is the centerpiece of the routine. The different ways you can move in a wheelchair — with the ability to roll, spin and keep a lower center of gravity — create opportunities for innovative choreography that would otherwise be impossible.
“When working with such diverse bodies, you by default start to become more innovative and more creative than you would otherwise,” said Phillip Chbeeb, an Emmy-nominated choreographer who has collaborated with Infinite Flow on multiple occasions. “You’re developing a brand new set of vocabulary from scratch, which is a really cool experience as a choreographer.”
Over the last 10 years, Infinite Flow has grown into a change-making behemoth that rests on four pillars: award-winning inclusive dance entertainment, youth education, community building and dance teacher training for disability inclusion.
Infinite Flow falls into step with a long history of disability-driven innovation. The typewriter was invented for a blind woman to write letters in privacy. Email was created so an engineer could communicate remotely with his deaf wife. A software engineer made the touch pad to accommodate his carpal tunnel.
Today, about one in four Americans and 16% of the world population — 1.3 billion people — live with a disability.
The ball first got rolling on Infinite Flow’s development when Hamamoto reached out to competitive paraplegic bodybuilder Adelfo Cerame Jr. via Facebook and asked if he’d be interested in becoming her wheelchair dance partner.
Hamamoto said she was initially terrified to dance with Cerame but quickly realized it wasn’t any different from dancing with anyone else. “When you’re dancing with someone, you see beyond the labels — whether it’s race, color, size, age, disability, sexual orientation,” said Hamamoto. “Dance is the universal language, and it belongs to everyone. We all have different bodies; we all have different identities. We can all coexist together and create something beautiful.”
Infinite Flow initially dubbed itself “a wheelchair dance company” and has since expanded to include “just about anybody,” said founding member and hip-hop dancer Mia Schaikewitz. A spinal AVM rupture left Schaikewitz paralyzed at 15. She said a large part of building the company was figuring out how to dance with all types of dancers and bodies.
Living with a disability, “you learn how to problem-solve,” Schaikewitz said. “There’s really not a limit unless you place a limit on yourself.” After being paralyzed, she went through a trial and error process to “(make) the chair work for me.” After countless trips to Home Depot looking for the right material to secure her feet to the chair’s footplate during dances, “I finally found the perfect Velcro,” she laughed. Because of her experimentation, everyone at Infinite Flow now uses the same adhesive.
Fast forward to today: Infinite Flow is finalizing its latest routine, “Back to the Boyband.” The piece was spearheaded by Danny J. Gomez, actor turned Infinite Flow dancer, as part of the “concept project” initiative, where dancers execute projects with more creative freedom.
After five rehearsals, ample workshopping of the choreography and music (a mashup of boy band hits from over the years) and stretching a bootstrapped budget, the project came to fruition. The routine, Gomez said, came out of his love — and perhaps nostalgia — for boy band culture, but also the lack of representation for male dancers with disabilities. “Most men, when they recover from an injury, turn to sports, not art,” said Gomez, who’s paraplegic.
Fellow “Back to the Boyband” dancer Travis Ammann noted that a lot of talk about the intersection of disability and dance “can be really serious. This is just boys having fun. It’s important for people to see.”
Infinite Flow is proud to be based in L.A., but the Hollywood backdrop has its cons. The industry often dismisses dancers because of their body type, ethnicity or race. Many are accustomed to being told that they simply “don’t look the part,” said Hamamoto.
“I felt bullied when I came to L.A.” Gomez said. But starting at Infinite Flow felt “like I just rolled into this family.”
Infinite Flow has nurtured a tight-knit community and is inclusive in more ways than one. “The dance class culture in L.A. isn’t always very positive,” Hamamoto said. “A lot of these dance classes feel more like an audition. It’s intimidating.”
“We eliminate all of that and say, ‘This is a safe space. If you’ve got a chronic illness and you need to rest, you can rest whenever you want.’ We have a way to teach people with various learning styles,” she said.
There are a lot of dancers in L.A. who want to stand out and be seen, Schaikewitz noted. “We naturally stand out because we are different, but we’re just being ourselves.”
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the group released a video as part of a larger campaign to use dance as a vehicle to advance disability inclusion. Hamamoto enlisted Chbeeb to collaborate with her on a bird’s-eye view video, a format he has been exploring throughout his career.
Hamamoto originally envisioned a top-down view over four wheelchair dancers. Eventually, the “Envision” project evolved into a modern piece inspired by director and choreographer Busby Berkeley — kaleidoscopic and filmed from above, with synchronized dancers forming geometric patterns. Infinite Flow’s version featured nine dancers, four of whom used wheelchairs and five who did not.
“There is really infinite — no pun intended — potential with utilizing wheelchairs in unique, different capacities that I don’t think necessarily have been used,” said Chbeeb. “Particularly on the floor, which was a really fun, different way of approaching aerial view work.”
The dance company is using its anniversary — which also coincides with the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act — as an opportunity to look toward its bright future. “In the next 10 years, I definitely want to expand our filmmaking, our content creation,” Hamamoto said. “On the stage side, I’m always thinking, ‘How can we be the Cirque du Soleil of what we do?’”
The team behind Infinite Flow also has Olympic aspirations. “My hope is that we’re fully immersed and involved in the Paralympic and Olympic opening ceremonies,” said Hamamoto. “At Infinite Flow, we are disability-led, specifically BIPOC disability-led. For anything on (the Olympics’) scale, it’s really important to have disabled people, disabled artists or anyone doing this work, to be at the forefront of making decisions.”
Hamamoto and Schaikewitz share a vision for the company’s future: to get to a point where Infinite Flow isn’t considered a “different” dance company. “I hope all dance companies are as inclusive and so it really won’t be so unique. I see that, hopefully, for the world in general.”
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