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\u201cTransforming Spaces\u201d is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.<\/em><\/p>\n When Chelsie Hill dances in her wheelchair, her face tells you everything. She is absorbed in the moment beyond the stage, in the emotions she\u2019s conveying, in her power to hold the audience. Her wheelchair is an intrinsic part of her silhouette, one she manipulates with power.<\/p>\n Ms. Hill, 27, is the founder of the Rollettes<\/a>, a dance team for women who use wheelchairs that formed 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<\/a>. In late July, the event attracted 250 women and children from 14 countries to Sheraton Gateway Los Angeles Hotel for dance classes, showcases and seminars.<\/p>\n More than a decade after she started the Rollettes, Ms. Hill\u2019s story has spread far beyond the group to include mentorship and education for anyone with a disability who is seeking community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShe changed my life,\u201d said Ali Stroker, the actress who made Broadway history in 2019 when she became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award<\/a>. One of Ms. Hill\u2019s close friends, Ms. Stroker won the Tony, for best featured actress, for her role as Ado Annie in the Broadway revival of the musical \u201cOklahoma!<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Stroker, who was paralyzed from the chest down after a car accident<\/a> when she was 2 years old, said that, growing up, she never had friends who also used chairs. Ms. Hill, she said, is changing lives by extending an invitation to wheelchair users that goes beyond dance.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause of her, so many young girls who are recently injured, their lives are changed,\u201d Ms. Stroker said. \u201cIt\u2019s more than dancing. You\u2019re part of this sisterhood, this family. How she can bring people together is out of this world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nearly 14 years ago, Ms. Hill was a 17-year-old 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Hill has always felt 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI was passionate about having teenagers understand that someone could go from walking to not after making a wrong decision,\u201d Ms. Hill said.<\/p>\n Growing up in Northern California\u2019s Monterey County, Ms. Hill\u2019s early life was defined by a sense of security and belonging that she said made her feel invincible. She began competing in dance competitions when she was 5.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to tell how good a 5-year-old is, but every year I would always win a trophy and make my family proud,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n As a hands-on, physical learner, she found concentrating on academics more difficult. Dance, she said, was her world and priority.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As a freshman, she had a ready-made group of friends on her popular high school dance team, The Breaker Girls. \u201cThere\u2019s just something about dance when you\u2019re on a team, you\u2019re just so in sync with people,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After Ms. Hill\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThey all sat in the chairs, and I got to perform with them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Carina Bernier, one of Ms. Hill\u2019s close friends who was also part of the Breaker Girls, recalls it being \u201creally challenging to figure out but so cool and so fun.\u201d Ms. Hill, she added, helped the group choreograph the routine that day.<\/p>\n But for a long time after the accident, Ms. Hill was in denial about her injury.<\/p>\n \u201cI always thought that I would be that miracle that gets up and walks again, like you see in the movies,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t struggle to fit in to someone who now had a visible difference.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt a sense of being so alone in a way that I never, never had before,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Becoming a person with a disability, and understanding herself as such, radicalized Ms. Hill, she said. 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cA lot of people don\u2019t realize what\u2019s going on in the world until it affects you,\u201d she said, adding, \u201cIt\u2019s made me a stronger person. It\u2019s made me a critical thinker. It\u2019s made me an innovator. But it\u2019s still hard, you know?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Reclaiming her story as both a dancer and a wheelchair user meant finding others like her. The first step was when she joined the cast of \u201cPush Girls<\/a>,\u201d an unscripted reality TV program about a group of ambitious women who use wheelchairs in 2011, a year after her accident. The show broadcast for two seasons, from 2012 to 2013, on the Sundance channel.<\/p>\n \u201cThey became my role models,\u201d she said of the women on the show. \u201cThey became the girls who I\u2019d be like, \u2018How 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?\u2019 They all taught me how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n In some corners, though, the show was criticized for its shallow treatment of people with disabilities. A critic for The New York Times wrote<\/a> that the premiere episode lapsed into \u201cYou go, girl\u201d mode, and that it used \u201ca tone that subtly demeans.\u201d<\/p>\n But on a personal level, for Ms. Hill, the show taught her to have a \u201cthick skin at a very young age.\u201d She loved every moment of it, she said \u2014 \u201ceven the hard times.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2014, four years after her accident, Ms. Hill moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a professional dancer.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was very, very hard breaking into the industry here in Los Angeles as a person with a disability,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople looked at me like I didn\u2019t belong. Choreographers didn\u2019t give me the time of day.\u201d<\/p>\n But she kept going to classes, she said, \u201cbecause I was like, \u2018My passion for dance is so much stronger than what your opinion of me is.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As a performer<\/a>, Ms. Hill 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She 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. In January, she and her husband, Jason Bloomfield, a financial adviser, became new parents, naming their daughter, Jaelyn Jean Bloomfield.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Hill is aware that people view businesses like hers as charities, unable to acknowledge the Rollettes through the lens of success. \u201cI have these older men that I have to convince that my company is worth something,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n But still, she 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<\/a>, \u201cGrace,\u201d which is set to feature a dancer who becomes paralyzed.<\/p>\n The film could bring more visibility to the estimated 3.3 million wheelchair users in the United States, a community that often feels invisible. It almost sounds like yet another retelling of Ms. Hill\u2019s story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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