Dancer With Wheels
When she dances in her wheelchair, her face tells you everything. She is absorbed in the moment beyond the stage, in the emotions she’s conveying, in her power to hold the audience. Her wheelchair is an intrinsic part of her silhouette, one she manipulates with power. She is the founder of the ‘Rollettes’, a dance team founded in 2012 for women who use wheelchairs.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Chelsie Hill (CH) was born in California. Her mother and father have always been emotionally supportive of their daughter, who became financially independent in her early 20s following settlement of her car accident legal claim, since supplemented by income from a business she started as an adult, to be described within her story which follows.
EDUCATION
CH is a high school graduate – despite being unable to attend school for three months of her senior year while recovering from a serious automobile accident.
CHILDHOOD FUN BUT ONE BAD MISTAKE
Growing up in northern California, CH’s early life was comfortable within a sense of security and belonging that made her feel invincible. Her mother signed her up to take a dance class when she was just 3 years old. She began competing in dance competitions when she was 5.
“It’s hard to tell how good a 5-year-old is, but every year I would always win a trophy and make my family proud,” said CH.
As a hands-on, physical learner, CH found concentrating on academics more difficult. Dance, she said, was her world and priority. As a high school freshman, she had a ready-made group of friends on her popular school dance team, ‘The Breaker Girls.’ “There is just something about dance when you’re on a team, you’re just so in sync with people,” she said.
At age 17, CH was a champion dancer. But on a night in February 2010, her life changed in ways she could never have imagined when a serious car accident left her with severe spinal injuries and unable to move her lower body. Soon she would realize that she was paralyzed from the waist down.
While CH was wearing a lap belt in the car, the force of the collision caused her to suffer a ‘flexion distraction’ injury in which her upper torso flexed over her waist and her head struck the center console, fracturing her lumbar (low back) spine.
CHALLENGE – DENIAL ABOUT PERMANENT PARALYSIS
For a long time after the accident, CH was in denial about the permanence of her injury. “For a very long time, I thought that I would be that miracle that gets up and walks again, like you see in the movies,” said CH.
Even so, in the years after the accident, she threw herself back into dance and eventually came to accept the realities of her injuries. She came to understand that she had gone from being someone who didn’t struggle to fit in, to someone who now had a visible difference. “I felt a sense of being so alone in a way that I never, never had before, “ she said.
NEW GOALS WITH A WHEELCHAIR – MOVE AHEAD AND HELP OTHERS
Before being transported home from the hospital, CH felt personally compelled to share her story, framing it as a warning. As a teenager intent on becoming a professional dancer, she was haunted by the decisions made on the evening she stepped into the car with a drunken driver. She told her parents from a hospital bed a few weeks after the accident that she wanted to organize an event to discuss it with her classmates. “I was passionate about having other teenagers understand that someone could go from walking to not, after making one wrong decision,” said CH.
After CH’s accident, it was with The Breaker Girls that she danced again for the first time. Her father, she said, gathered wheelchairs from around Northern California and brought them to a studio with her able-bodied dance team.
“They all sat in the chairs, and I got to perform with them,” she said. One of CH’s close friends who was also part of the Breaker Girls, recalls it being “really challenging to figure out but so cool and so fun.” CH, she added, helped the group choreograph the routine that day.
Becoming a person with a disability, and understanding herself as such, radicalized her, said CH. Until her accident, as a White, middle-class, able-bodied young woman, she had not really understood or recognized the fights for equality and disability rights.
“A lot of people don’t realize what’s going on in the world until it affects you personally,” said CH, adding “It’s made me a stronger person. It’s made me a critical thinker. It’s made me an innovator. But it’s still hard, you know?!”
Reclaiming her story as both a dancer and a wheelchair user meant finding others like her. The first step was when, a year after her accident, she joined the cast of “Push Girls”, an unscripted reality TV program about a group of ambitious women who use wheelchairs. The show broadcast for two seasons. “They became my role models,” said CH about the women on the show. “They became the girls who I’d be like, ‘How do I wear heels? How do I date? How do I get my chair in the car? How do I live a normal life as a young girl with a disability?’ They taught me how to do that.”
Among some show observers, though, the show was criticized for its shallow treatment of people with disabilities. A critic for The New York Times wrote that the premiere episode lapsed into “You go, girl” mode, and that it used “a tone that subtly demeans.”
But on a personal level, for CH, the show taught her to have a “thick skin at a very young age.” She loved every moment of it, she said – “even the hard times.”
Four years after her accident, CH moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer. “It was very, very hard breaking into the industry here as a person with a disability,” said CH. “People looked at me like I didn’t belong. Choreographers didn’t give me the time of day.”
But she kept going to classes, she said, “because I was like, ‘My passion for dance is so much stronger than what your opinion of me is.”
CH founded the Rollettes, a dance team for women who use wheelchairs, in 2012. They perform all over the country and host an annual empowerment weekend in Los Angeles for women with disabilities, called The Rollettes Experience. In July 2023, the event attracted 250 women and children from 14 countries for dance classes, showcases and seminars.
SOCIAL MEDIA
When social media began taking off, CH started following other dancers who were creating fun videos and dance challenges. CH thought, “Why can’t a person in a wheelchair dance and make cool videos? I don’t see why not, so let’s create it!”
Along with the Rollettes, CH started making their own videos, purely to see what was possible. “I feel being able to show the world what you can do through social media is so amazing because we are so lucky to have that type of voice now. We have the power to show the world what we can do on our own terms.”
As a performer, CH makes extensive use of social media, recording her dancing, making concept videos and vlogging. Many of the women who are now Rollettes initially reached out to her after having seen her online, writing letters and recording videos of themselves dancing, too.
CAREER SATISFACTION
More than a decade after she started the Rollettes, CH’s story has spread far beyond the initial group to include mentorship and education for anyone with a disability who is seeking community.
“She changed my life,” said Ali Stroker, the actress who made Broadway theater history in 2019 when she became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony award. One of CH’s close friends, Ms. Stroker won the Tony, for Best Featured Actress, for her role as Ado Annie in the Broadway revival of the musical “Oklahoma!”
Ms. Stroker, who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident when she was 2 years old, said that, growing up, she never had friends who also used chairs. CH, she said, is changing lives by extending an invitation to wheelchair users that goes beyond dance. “Because of her, so many young girls who are recently injured, their lives are changed,” Ms. Stroker said. “It’s more than dancing. You’re part of a sisterhood, this family. How she can bring people together is out of this world.”
CH has achieved what she set out to do, creating an unrepentantly girlie sisterhood that supports others. Through the Rollettes, she has made a tight circle of friends, performed around the country, and highlighted support spaces for women with disabilities while building her own.
CH is aware that people view businesses like hers as charities, unable to acknowledge the Rollettes through the lens of for-profit business success. “I have to deal with some older men who I try to convince that my company is worth something.”
Still, CH perseveres. She has ambitious plans for the future of the Rollettes and is keen to continue sharing her personal story. She has even been asked to be a consultant on a new dance drama film being developed by Disney, “Grace,” which is set to feature a dancer who becomes paralyzed. The film could bring more visibility to the estimated 3.3 million wheelchair users in the U.S., a community that often feels invisible. It almost (?) reads like yet another retelling of CH’s story.
In January 2023, CH and her husband, Jason Bloomfield, a financial adviser, became new parents of a daughter.
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This career story is based on several sources including a news article written by Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, published by the New York Times on 11/9/23, updated 11/12/23 plus internet research including Wikipedia.
