Photos: Amy Purdy performs during 2016 Paralympics Opening Ceremony in Rio
Las Vegas Paralympics star Amy Purdy wowed the world with her 4-minute solo dance that she performed during the 2016 Paralympics Opening Ceremony on Wednesday night. Her stunning showcase at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, also home of the recent Summer Olympics, was broadcast across North America on NBC Sports.
The rave reviews for her powerful and complex dance were unanimous from broadcasters around the world. It explored the boundaries between humans and technology. Amy wore a 3-D printed dress designed by Danit Peleg, and her “dance partner” was Kuka, an industrial robot used as an automotive arm.
Amy lost her legs, amputated just below the knee, after contracting bacterial meningitis when she worked as a massage therapist at age 19 here in Las Vegas. The infection led to septic shock, she lost her kidneys, and her spleen was removed. Doctors said she was seconds away from death and gave her less than a 2 percent chance of survival.
Now 36, Amy overcame all the odds and proved that you can take the girl off the dance floor, but you can’t take the dance floor away from her. Her courageous battle to live is detailed in her remarkable book “On My Own Two Feet: The Journey From Losing my Legs to Learning the Dance of Life.”
Amy won a bronze medal for Team USA in the 2014 Winter Olympics snowboarding in Sochi, Russia. My interview with Amy in Rio was posted last Friday. Our thanks to Filipe Costa for his photo gallery from the Opening Ceremony performance. Journalists said, “Amy rocked with her running blades,” “she stole the show” and “a breathtaking performance.”
In a sense, the dance was a game of seduction. The robot and Amy gradually reached harmony showcasing the connection between technology and humanity. The robot challenged Amy in her dance to risk more complex movements, and she accepted by replacing her tippy-toe prosthetics for more powerful, high-performance blades.
Amy returned the challenge and invited the robot to a complex dance. Kuka stayed within its limitations and ultimately surrendered to her. Amy’s dress was created by Danit, a fashion designer based in Tel Aviv, Israel, who gained notoriety in 2015 when she unveiled the world’s first 3-D printed fashion collection created entirely from home.
Custom made to fit Amy’s body, the dress was nude colored and part of a new collection that she unveiled today. Danit used a soft material called Fila Flex and flexible patterns to print a lace-like textile that moved and bounced as Amy danced. To design the dress in 3-D, Danit used Accumark, a pattern-making software developed by Gerber Technology, for printing at home.
The technology is evolving so fast that it took approximately 120 hours to print the dress, half the time it took Danit to print the dresses in her last collection. Amy stays on in Rio as an on-camera host of the Paralympics coverage for NBC.
