Dan Daw arrives on the stage, his name up in lights, as if his latest dance is showbiz as usual. But few in the audience are likely to have seen a performance begin with as honest an introduction as this one does. To many people’s astonishment, and perhaps alarm, the Australian-born performer explains that, over the next 90 minutes, they will see him get dominated.
It’s easy to imagine the underground fantasies of kink, with its far-out role play, being too much for some. The Dan Daw Show, which opens at Dublin Fringe Festival next week, is an unprecedented duet for another reason: it presents Daw, a disabled dancer, submitting to a nondisabled dancer.
This radically personal production comes from a place of liberation. Daw originally set out to make a performance about “inspiration porn”, as the disability-rights activist Stella Young described the objectification of disabled people’s everyday lives for the gratification of nondisabled people. “When I take the stairs I’m an inspiration, but when I ask to use the lift I’m a burden,” Daw says. Either option seems designed to be a trap.
The idea for the dance then pivoted in a different direction. “We started out on this journey exploring what that burden was,” Daw says, “but we got to a point where I didn’t want to make a piece that ‘inspires’ others – I’ve been doing that my whole life. I wanted to make a work that would inspire myself. We looked at the key moments in my life when I feel freedom and joy, when I feel sexy and powerful, and I realised I feel those things on stage. I also feel those things when I’m f**king.”
The long arc of Daw’s career traces a search for authenticity, including his establishment of his dance company, Dan Daw Creative Projects. In the beginning, integrated companies cast him in productions that featured disabled performers alongside nondisabled performers. During rehearsals for his professional debut, Present Tense, a postmodern work from 2005, he confided in the choreographer, Larissa McGowan, that he felt insecure about his legs and feet. “She said to me, ‘Dan, you have better feet and legs than I have.’ It was a real light-bulb moment. I really did have the right body to be a dancer.”
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That discovery, and a related decision – “My body is different, and I am going to exploit that” – has informed a lot of his performances since then. He believes his casting was not tokenistic but essential to the art of integrated productions such as The Age I’m In, the dance-play from 2008 by the Australian company Force Majeure, which aimed for a diverse, big-picture view of society’s attitudes to ageing. A revival of the Trisha Brown masterpiece Set and Reset, produced by the London company Candoco, stayed true to that dance’s improvisation-based process, allowing Daw’s idiosyncratic movement to become part of its fabric.
Over the past 18 years, Daw has discovered the benefits of the integrated-company model, but he has also learned its drawbacks. “It works best in settings where the experiences of the disabled people in the company are centred. When the access of disabled people in the company isn’t centred, it becomes about disabled people trying to keep up and move in a normative way.
“I think integrated dance is really special when it’s clear the choreographer has spent time working with the disabled dancers and their idiosyncrasies, and how to use those bodies in an empowering way on the stage, rather than having the expectation that disabled dancers should be able to move the same as nondisabled dancers, which is false,” he says.
He is upfront about his time with Candoco, which he moved from Australia to work for in 2010. The professional relationship sounds to have soured over time. “I was deeply unhappy there, and I hated my body because they expected me to move in a normative way. I developed a lot of body issues that I didn’t talk about because I didn’t have the language to have those conversations.”
Daw moved towards producing his own dances, and realised the possibility of self-portraiture in his art. Beast, a solo from 2015, became a kind of response to that unhappy work environment, transmuting ableist expectations of his body into striking displays: making Daw’s body look ambiguous as a perfect sculpture, and putting him through fault-finding tasks such as trying to steadily hold a tray of fragile teacups. To create the stark world of the dance, he looked to the extraordinary black-and-white vanitases of the American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose still lifes are elegantly macabre. (“I wanted to push against the expectation that work by disabled artists should be rainbows and lollipops.”)
Since premiering last year, The Dan Daw Show has toured to places as diverse as Sadler’s Wells, the London dance venue, and Sydney WorldPride festival. Daw says the company will be organising a kink party to coincide with an upcoming date in Hamburg.
“People often picture kink as this violent, nonconsensual thing. It was important for us that we showed the beauty of kink and how much care is involved. It’s not all ball whips and chains. For me it’s about getting to know a body and understanding there are so many ways of pleasing a human being. It’s not just penetrative sex – there are other ways of being intimate with a person,” he says.
In the duet, Daw and his fellow dancer Christopher Owen perform a submissive-dominant relationship as a kind of conversation about care, consent and power. When they were just starting to develop the show, they spent each morning improvising role-play scenes while their director, Mark Maughan, and movement director, Sarah Blanc, scribbled images that stood out. Together they shaped a performance that begins with Owen playfully preparing the stage for Daw’s arrival before featuring profoundly intimate exchanges between the two. The production also involves the paraphernalia of kink fantasy; at one point Daw is seen restrained inside a gigantic latex vacuum cube, a black, sheeny bondage device.
Daw says that making the dance has been revelatory in terms of unpacking his own internalised ableism. Although he had reason to be frustrated with the world, he realised he was holding himself back in certain ways. “It’s a piece about how I be in my power and how I continue to feel sexy even when I’m having a hard time. Even in the face of all I have to deal with, I can still feel these things, and give those things to myself and have them for myself.
“I don’t think we’re very good as humans at talking about desire and the bodies we want, because that feels indulgent. This is a piece that dares to explore what I want from this world, and uses the sub-dom relationship to talk about how I want to be in the world.”
Daw says the idea of creating a submissive-dominant relationship onstage was a big ask for Owen, with whom he has danced several times over the years. “He said, ‘I’m a straight man. I’m not kinky. I’m none of the things you’re asking me to do.’ That felt important to me in the context of the work, because it was about finding his own version of dom. I wanted a gentleness and kindness, and a sense of us both finding our way in the world.”
He singles out one sequence that always makes him emotional: a role play where he’s asked to drink water from Owen’s navel. “It’s a really powerful moment – he’s really letting himself go there. That always takes me by surprise, how we perform it. It’s really beautiful,” Daw says. It’s as if, beyond reality, in the latex-shiny fantasy of kink, there is a level of intimacy beyond ordinary comprehension.
The Dan Daw Show is at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, on Friday, September 22nd, and Saturday, September 23rd
