The Headless Dancer

Scrap Mettle SOUL (SMS) is a community performance group of artists, teens and adults who live in Chicago’s highly diverse Uptown neighborhood www.scrapmettlesoul.org. SMS is a place where people encounter their neighbors and their neighbors’ issues.

The company is comprised of African and European Americans, Latinos, Asians and a spectrum of people from rich to homeless, ages 4 to 93. SMS operates after-school activities and story-gathering workshops in Margate Park where local residents of all backgrounds and ages learn to tell and create Uptown stories for performance. The annual show, staged in the park gym, is the result of four months of weaving together local stories, movement, dance and music.

In 2002, Imagine Chicago worked with SMS on story gathering around health issues in the Uptown. In May 2002, a 75-member cast presented "The Whole World Gets Well". A key character was a community-created scarecrow named Shim.

"When PC Gooden-Smiley stuck a scarecrow in the garden of Buttercup Park and dressed it in Halloween clothing, she didn’t anticipate the consequence of her action," said director Richard Geer. "I doubt that the people who over the next months dressed Shim in different outfits – for Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, Gay Pride – were thinking about what they were enacting. The scarecrow gave them a chance to create together, to be each other’s audience and appreciate each other as they redressed the image to mirror all the different people in the neighborhood."

Almost a year after PC brought Shim to life in Buttercup Park, Shim was beheaded. PC sadly toted Shim’s remains off to the trash. The next day, Shim was found still headless but halfway back to the garden, as if s/he were crawling home. Back to the dumpster for Shim, but the next day, s/he’d managed to throw a leg over the lip of the dumpster. Clearly, Shim’s work wasn’t done.

In the play, headless Shim goes everywhere, and everywhere s/he goes s/he fits right in — because s/he hasn’t got a brain. In the play’s climax, Shim attends a contentious community meeting where many sides are engaged in a shouting match, typical of Uptown. They are fighting for turf and money and the future of this place. It is an important argument, but argument is all this place has been hearing for decades.

In the middle of it all, Shim begins to dance. At first, s/he is an interruption, an unwanted hindrance to an already difficult situation, but s/he persists and someone laughs and someone else begins a little to dance, and pretty soon everyone joins in, singing, shouting and laughing together.

"Yes, we can never all agree, and yes, we can still be connected," said director Geer. "The power of the arts is this deep process that says ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ again, that trusts the capacity of the human heart to be broken and torn open and thereafter to hold more."