‘It’s just us and who we are.’ The disabled stars redefining dance
Claire Allfree meets the team behind the ground-breaking ‘Artificial Things’ as it comes to TV
The dancer Chris Pavia is taking me through his inspirations for his mesmeric, propulsive 10-minute solo in the dance piece Artificial Things, in which he plays a tyrannical figure having a meltdown inside an empty shopping centre.
“He’s like a cross between Mussolini and Voldemort,” he says. “I’m really into movies and films, so often, when I’m coming up with a character, I put together a scrapbook full of my favourite characters and write down my ideas. There’s a bit of Laurel and Hardy in there too.”
Pavia, who is 39 and lives with his parents in Surrey, has been a full-time dancer since 2001 and has performed all over the world. He also has Down’s syndrome.
“It was a big step forward for Chris,” says Lucy Bennett, artistic director of Stopgap, an inclusive dance company that includes disabled and, more unusually, dancers with learning disabilities alongside non disabled dancers. “Down’s performers tend to get cast as the sweet innocent characters in a piece, never the nasty ones. This was Chris saying to me: ‘People have been telling me what to do for a really long time now; I’d like to take control of it’.”
Taking control is at the heart of Stopgap, and of Artificial Things, a landmark show first performed in 2014 and recently turned into an award-winning 25-minute film of startling, ghostly beauty by Sophie Fiennes (sister of Ralph) that will be broadcast on BBC Four tomorrow. Full of eerie long shots that hint at shadowy presences, the film stars Pavia alongside Dave Toole, the trailblazing dancer and double amputee who died last month, and Laura Jones, who became paralysed after suffering a neural bleed when she was 16.
Toole, Jones and Pavia developed
the physical language of the piece themselves, meaning the non-disabled dancers, Amy Butler and David Willdridge, had to adapt to their movements rather than the other way round. It’s a wondrous piece, full of moments of almost unbearable human intimacy, including a groundbreaking duet between Jones and Toole. “You rarely see disabled dancers partnered together,” says Bennett, a nondisabled dancer who became the company’s artistic director in 2012. “Partly because audiences tend to find a pairing that includes a non-disabled dancer more palatable. When you put two disabled artists together it’s akin to watching the older dancers in Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof: they are incredible but they are not giving you triple pirouettes. You have to read them differently. In their duet, Dave and Laura are saying: ‘We can be ourselves, we don’t need to look like other people’.” That duet, which begins with Jones lying on the floor, surrounded by scattered pieces from a broken wheelchair, is indeed extremely special. The emerging relationship between the pair as Toole seems to float over Jones’s body, propelled by his immense tree trunk arms, is by turns antagonistic, erotic and electrifying.
The loss of Toole, who suffered a heart attack in October at the age of 56 after months of ill health, has cast a shadow over the company. Born with embryonic legs that were removed at the age of 18 months, he was the star of the 2012 Paralympic opening ceremony, had performed with DV8 and the RSC and won an OBE for his services to dance. “Dave was the first disabled dancer to make people want to pay money to watch him because he was so good, rather than because he was disabled,” says Bennett. “He became known worldwide.”
Bennett thinks there should be more disabled dancers in mainstream dance and can hardly contain her disdain when she talks of the “big boys” who’ve dominated dance over the past decade.
“Why doesn’t Matthew Bourne have any disabled artists in his company?” she says. “I can’t imagine working with dancers who all look the same. When you’ve got a group of 20-somethings who all trained in the same place, listen to the same music, who have the same reference points, it’s like an echo chamber. Whereas, when you work with someone like Chris, it shakes things up a bit.”
No one at Stopgap considers themselves disability activists. As Fiennes puts it, there is “no manifesto”. There is just the work. “Disability is not the narrative here,” says Jones. “It’s just us and who we are.” Artificial Things is on BBC Four tomorrow at 11.50pm