Having been admitted to hospital with
what doctors thought
was nothing more than
gastric flu, Waterman
found himself virtually cut off from his
own body. He
had contracted a
disease so rare
that the doctors
in Jersey, where
he lived, couldn’t
even diagnose it.
The future looked
grim, with doctors
expecting him to
need the use of
a wheelchair for
the rest of his
life. Even though
he wasn’t paralyzed as
such, he had no control
over his limbs and so
had no chance of being
able to walk.
However, Waterman’s
story is one of courage
in the face of adversity
and, not the type of person to simply give-in;
he started to design his
own program of movement practice to reclaim
his body. Constantly
repeating movement
patterns and focusing on trajectories over the space of thirty years - Waterman
created a new way of
controlling his body. By
having constant visual
contact with the environment he learned to
manipulate objects and
today displays little to
no signs of his impediments. Every move
must be calculated in
advance and planned
out in a vigorous, mathematical way. However,
if he cannot see the
21
position of his limbs
then he cannot control
them, something that
he will never be able to
overcome.