Dancer Dan Daw is revelling in his “powerful crip joy” on stage.
“I see you looking at me, and I’m going to take ownership of that,” he says. “You can look. I don’t care; I know I look good.”
One of the South Australia-born performer’s recent works, Beast, was about people looking at him as though he were an animal. Now, nearing 40, he is taking control of the gaze upon his body in part by displaying his sexual kinks and expressing a desire to be dominated.
His latest work, The Dan Daw Show, which is coming to Melbourne’s Rising festival after scheduled performances in Europe, deals in consensual power play: on stage, Daw is the subordinate to non-disabled dancer and longtime friend Christopher Owen’s acts of domination.
At one point in the show, Owen treats Daw’s body as a footstool. At another, Daw is encased in a latex box from which the air is vacuumed out. Far from being acts of exploitation, Daw uses kink and the interdependence of a sub-dom relationship to explore his autonomy, transforming his desires as a means to power and freedom.
“This is how I want you to take care of my body in a way society just doesn’t,” says Daw, outlining the show’s message. He speaks with Guardian Australia via video conference from his UK home in Manchester, sporting a ginger goatee, black button earrings and shiny stretch tracksuit.
The show’s broader ambition is to open up verbal expression, to create a vocabulary for the “excavation of self”. This, in turn, might enable people with disabilities to express their wider needs and desires in the world outside sex and be heard by non-disabled people.
An hour before every performance, a “pre-show access drop in” allows audience members to see the set and lighting and where they will be seated, as well as a list of potential triggers and photographs of what will take place.
“The audience enter feeling safe,” says Daw, “because we acknowledge kink is scary for a lot of people. We wanted to make sure the audience felt held, and we weren’t out to scare them, because it’s a piece about joy.”
The show is a way to create Daw’s own ideal sub-dom experience. “Ultimately it shows that kink is not this harsh, violent thing. I mean, there are moments of intensity, but it’s never violent. It shows an audience who maybe isn’t of the kink world that it’s actually a really beautiful thing.”
One reviewer admitted approaching the show in London with trepidation after receiving a trigger warning via email about its content, yet concluded “the overriding emotion I had witnessed was tenderness”.
“The responses from audiences have been quite similar,” agrees Daw. “Audiences versed in the sub-dom world come up and say, ‘Thank you, that’s a really accurate representation of my experience of sub-dom power play.’
“Disabled people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you, I really need to be in my power more. It’s so beautiful to see all this powerful crip joy on stage.’
“The surprising thing is women often come up to me and they say, ‘Thank you, this a reminder I need to take up more space and stop apologising for being a woman.’”
‘I don’t want a work about how I inspire others’
Daw’s conception of the work followed the late disability activist Stella Young calling out those who reduced people with disabilities to “inspiration porn”. The show’s working title was Porno, reflecting how the gaze of non-disabled people on disabled bodies can have an “almost pornographic nature”, says Daw.
The idea of “inspiration” intrigued him. He had seen it applied to himself. “If I took the stairs, I’m an inspiration, but if I took the lift, I’m not an inspiration,” he says. “If my disabled body gets what it needs and does it another way, I’m just a burden on society.
“But I thought, ‘Hang on, I don’t want it to be a work about how I inspired others, because I’ve been doing that my whole life. It needs to be a work about how I inspire myself.’”
Growing up in a working-class family in Whyalla, four hours’ drive north-west of Adelaide, Daw was first inspired to express his needs by his mother, Katrina, and grandmother Heather. Both women had refused to leave the headteacher’s office until Daw was placed in a mainstream class rather than a special education unit.
“They advocated for me quite strongly, so I’ve got a lot of that fierceness, and not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” he says.
Daw went on to perform with the Adelaide-based companies Australian Dance Theatre and Restless Dance Theatre, as well as Force Majeure. In 2010, he moved to the UK citing the lack of opportunities for disability-led performance at home at the time. Today in Australia, however, he sees “quite a different landscape”, with more opportunities for dancers with disabilities at a professional level.
In his latest show, dialogue between Daw and Owen “interrogates” how each of them get to know other people generally. Daw wants to share with the audience how he builds a relationship with someone.
In the sub-dom experience at the centre of the Dan Daw Show, those relationships are built via love, care and consent.
“And also access,” he says. “You’re always having conversations about: ‘OK, I want to do this to your body because that would give me pleasure. How do you feel about that?’
“But we don’t have those kinds of conversations together in the world. We have the tools to tell each other what we want and what we need from each other when we’re fucking, but we find it really hard to get what we need in the outside world.
“That’s what we really wanted to highlight: wouldn’t it be great if we could talk to each other like we were fucking?”
The Dan Daw Show runs at Arts House Melbourne from 15 to 18 June, as part of Rising festival
