Last year was a brutal one for dancer Matthew Hollis. In March his knee gave out during a Hedwig Dances children’s show at the Cultural Center. “I kneeled down and it locked and popped,” he says. When X rays didn’t show any bone damage, his doctor put his leg in a knee brace and told him to take Advil. Hollis worked briefly with a physical therapist and tried massage, but in April he was dancing at Hedwig’s spring concert when it happened again. “I just rolled offstage,” he says. He wasn’t diagnosed correctly until mid-May; he underwent surgery for torn cartilage two weeks later.
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“The thing that affected me the most was the feeling that I couldn’t trust my own body,” says Hollis, 27. “It wasn’t working for me, and I’d taken on this whole hypochondriac nature.” He recovered quickly from surgery but soon had a whole new set of worries. In June he broke up with his boyfriend, moved into a new apartment, and started going to a therapist. “My entire life changed in a matter of a few weeks,” he says.
the two elements. “Since I couldn’t move, it forced me into writing a dialogue between me and another person,” says Hollis. “It forced me into a full-fledged narrative.” In the piece he performed that night, Stitches and Bitches, he sat in his chair and spun a fanciful tale about his appendectomy (and subsequent flirtation with Vicodin) while another performer did the dancing. “It got me into taking tragic events and making them a little more comical.”
