Dancing gives new life to handicapped shooting victim

The spotlight breaks the darkness, illuminating Vincent Robinson, all 2-feet-7 of him.

The image is stark: It appears the bottom half of a muscular man has melted into the stage floor. A woman in a wheelchair rolls from the wings and dives into his arms. Their bodies silently roll together toward the audience. Robinson punctuates the movement with a handstand over her, then glides into an embrace.

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Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com

Vincent Robinson performs with Jojo Butler during a rehearsal with Full Radius Dance at 7 Stages Theatre in Atlanta. Robinson lost both legs as the result of a shotgun blast.

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Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com

Vincent Robinson, shown with dancer Onur Topal-Sumer, rehearses a scene with his dance troupe Full Radius Dance in Atlanta. Years ago, Robinson was feared on the streets.

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It’s a dance that has drawn tears from an Italian bride and moistened the eyes of a guy Robinson grew up with in a very dangerous place.

Robinson, 36, a product and a casualty of Atlanta’s Bankhead Courts housing project, is a new member of the Full Radius Dance troupe, a collection of dancers in wheelchairs who couple with able-bodied counterparts. The ensemble recently toured Italy and staged three shows this weekend in Atlanta, its home base.

After more than half a year with the troupe, Robinson is still circumspect about his new undertaking. But Robinson, always a driven man, says he’s found in dancing both an intensity he didn’t know he had and a vehicle to fight prejudices and preconceptions — both his own and others’.

Childhood friend Chris Howard said Robinson has never mentioned that he’s become a dancer.

“I guess he thinks, ‘I’m a homeboy. Maybe they’ll think I’m soft,’ ” Howard figured.

Robinson hasn’t gotten soft. But the self-described hard guy has mellowed. He had to. Otherwise he’d be dead.

A deadly confrontation

As a teen, Robinson was fearless on the streets. Early on, he decided to become a player, to be a Somebody in a twisted, violent environment. Bankhead Courts, in northwest Atlanta, was the epitome of social dysfunction. It was so dangerous that in 1988 the Postal Service stopped delivering mail there.

“Growing up, I was small and picked on a lot,” he recalled. “I decided to get a rep. I learned to fight. I worked very hard at that. I didn’t quit. I couldn’t lose. I’d just keep coming, just keep coming.”

He became both feared and respected. At 14, with the illicit income from peddling drugs, he was driving a car. His mother called the cops on her son to deter him. It didn’t. At 16, he got shot and had a rod inserted into his leg. But he just came back harder than ever, dealing drugs, running with gamblers and set on his route toward oblivion.

Then came Mario Leselle Young, another guy from the ‘hood. Young was an acquaintance; their sisters attended school together. Young thought Robinson was trying to steal his girlfriend and, on Nov. 6, 1992, confronted him outside his mother’s apartment. He carried a “Street Sweeper,” an almost cartoonish-looking shotgun with a rapid-fire capacity.

Young fired once and took Robinson down. Then he stood over him and pumped a second blast into his groin.

Robinson survived, barely. He was kept unconscious for nearly a month as medical teams fought pneumonia and raging gangrene. His mother had to authorize operation after operation, 10 in all, to keep him alive. Each took away more of his legs, leaving little below the hips.

“I had a problem with her allowing them to keep cutting on him,” said Terry Davis, Robinson’s older sister. “I lashed out at her. But I realized later that it saved his life.” She quit her job at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to nurse her little brother full-time.

‘Had … to push forward’

Even as he recovered, Robinson worried that Young, who was not arrested for more than a year, would come to finish him off. He worked through rage, pity and thoughts of retribution, ultimately deciding he had to forge ahead.

“I never had a chance to feel regrets. I didn’t have time,” he said. “I had to get out and push forward.”

At the time, he was the father of two small girls. One, Crystal, who lived with him at times, graduated from high school last month and is headed to college. Her older sister, Quanisha, is also at college. Robinson is married to Nafeesah Burson and has two sons, Vincent Jr., 12, and Kobe, 7. They live in East Atlanta.

Since his shooting, Robinson has worked as a greeter at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, as a caseworker for a private pretrial diversion company and as a real estate appraiser.

Before losing his legs, Robinson was an aggressive athlete. He used that trait to throw himself into rehabilitation, showing others he could achieve what was unthinkable.

“I live upstairs and he toted his chair up the stairs and he knocks on my door and it’s just him sitting there,” his sister recalled.

He began playing wheelchair basketball and delighted in the violent collisions. Last fall, when a shoulder injury sidelined him, a fellow player, Laurel Lawson, a veteran of Full Radius Dance, asked him to try out for the troupe.

“I was like, ‘Naw. I don’t want to do that. I’m a male.’ It’s the stereotype. It’s effeminate. Where I’m from, if you dance you must be gay or something.”

Still, he took the leap. It would be a new kind of workout, he figured. But it also meant moving outside his comfort zone, confronting questions of who he was, and the worry of standing out for the wrong reason, of turning left on stage when all others spin right.

From aggression to grace

He was nervous at first. Hustle and aggression don’t get it done in dance. Here, it’s patience, timing and grace.

Getting down the timing of the choreography remains a chore. He finds himself constantly clicking off the counts in his head as he traverses the stage.

“There’s movements — your fingers, your arms, your torso, your head. There’s certain angles at certain times. You have to be on point.”

The team rehearses three times a week, more as performances approach. The work is demanding and exacting. The wheelchairs roll and turn with precision. The other dancers jump into chair occupants’ laps, or even use them as springboards.

When flesh and metal meet, they joke, metal always wins.

For Robinson, there was another obstacle to get past.

“I was cautious of touching females,” he said. “I didn’t want to be inappropriate. In the world I grew up in, touching like that was a sexual thing.”

But six of the group’s eight dancers were women, so he had to get over that quick.

“Vincent has done a great job of facing his own prejudices,” said Douglas Scott, an able-bodied, ballet-trained dancer and choreographer who founded the company in 1995 to battle prejudices and stereotypes. “Every time we take the stage, we’re making a statement about inclusion and acceptance.”

Karin Korb, who joined the troupe when Robinson did, appreciates that the recitals portray positive statements to audiences. But she especially enjoys the sense of accomplishment and mental release.

“Being in a chair, you constantly wrestle with the demons of your limitations,” she said. “This touches places inside that you wouldn’t touch, unless you’re in therapy.”

A new perspective

On stage and off, Robinson rolls around with a lot still bubbling inside. He tries to stay active and on task, to stay away from the what-ifs. In fact, he says Young, his attacker, very well might have saved his life. Someone else would have shot him sooner or later, he says.

He was surprised last week to hear that Young, who was convicted of aggravated assault, could be released from a transitional center soon, as in any day.

“I have no bitterness toward him,” Robinson said, pondering Young’s release. “I don’t know if I’d like to see him. The mind plays tricks. I don’t know what I’d say. I probably wouldn’t be angry.”

He tries to funnel some of his experience toward helping others avoid his fate. He has spoken at detention centers and at alternative schools, but recently has focused on middle school-aged kids. That’s the age, he says, where “I took that wrong road. I show them it wasn’t pretty.”

His dancing brings some beauty to his environment, he figures. And, he admits, being on stage strokes a still-strong ego.

The dance that puts him alone in the spotlight is his favorite piece. “I love attention a lot.”

“The audience sees two people with chairs rolling on the floor. I think it’s an inspiration to people. It makes their problems seem like they are not that bad.”