Kink was the vehicle that let me get to grips with my body: Dan Daw

For all his 40 years, Dan Daw has lived with taunts, misplaced pity and people speaking slowly to him, on account of his slightly wonky walk or the way he speaks. The two places he feels truly free, he says, are in the bedroom and on stage as a dancer, where he knows he is valued for exactly who he is. With a partner, he can see that his body can please someone else. In a theatre, people are paying to see it as art. “It’s liberating to think I’m using my ‘wrong’ body to give pleasure,” he says. “What joy and freedom is inside that! And power, actually.”

Power is a central theme in The Dan Daw Show, his most recent autobiographical piece, in which he is out and proud not only about his body and gay sexuality but also his immersion in kink – what observers may call BDSM – which he hitherto kept quiet as something shameful. “I’m doing this to overcome my shame,” he says. “By doing it in front of people, saying: yes, I’m kinky, yes, I’ve had a hard time loving my body, but kink was the vehicle that let me really get to grips with my body and understand it. And now I’m here.”

The show comes plastered with warnings, including his initial invitation to audience members finding it all too much to go and get a breather whenever they want, but there is nothing graphic or embarrassing in it. No toe-curling infliction of pain. “I’m not interested in pain. Pain gives me no pleasure.” Rather, through dance, dialogue and a couple of bizarre but striking set-pieces, such as the moment he asks his fellow performer KrisX (Christopher Owen) to vacuum-pack him in latex, he shows himself ceding control. He is swung around, turned into a footstool and ordered to climb onto furniture in ways that are risky for a man with shaky balance, but with constant loving vigilance from a partner ready to catch or support him. Far from being threatening, it is the gentlest of pas de deux. For Daw, it is all about “crip joy”.

Calling himself a “crip” is both defiantly in your face – the reclamation of an insult – and usefully generic. Daw doesn’t want to define his disability. “When I think of my body, I don’t think of things not working or having a deficit because that isn’t the case at all,” he says. “I have a hard time with people struggling with disability, because everyone in the world can and can’t do things; it’s a sliding scale we’re all on.” When people are insulting or patronising, he responds by agreeing that yes, he is odd and “isn’t it great? Flipping it to say I’m really proud of who I am.”

It has taken most of his life to reach that place. “As a child, I grew up constantly going to physio appointments and speech therapy appointments so it was like, “Oh, I need to be fixed”. And so I’ve lived a life of slowly unpicking that and going actually, there’s nothing to unpick. I’m actually doing OK.” Daw grew up in Whyalla, the older of two sons. His father left when he was small.

“It was Mum and Grandma, a typical working-class family trying to do what they could to make ends meet and you know, Mum doing the best she could with what she had. And Nan and Grandad being there to pick up the pieces when things went a bit awry.”

The steel city of Whyalla may seem an unlikely breeding ground for aspiring performers, but Daw had an early introduction to dance through his grandmother, who was a calisthenics choreographer. “I grew up sitting on the sidelines watching them rehearse, so I’d always been a part of that world. When I was in high school I heard about drama and dance workshops that were happening at our local theatre in Whyalla. I went along and I loved it.” The youth group devised a play; he was also able to join a program for disabled dancers run by Sally Chance, the founder of Restless Dance Theatre. The moment came later in high school when he told his family he wanted to do this “for real”. They were anxious, but said they knew they couldn’t stop him. “Because I was unstoppable - and still am.”

A stint in the acting program at Flinders University didn’t go so well. “They were moulding us to be a certain kind of actor. I had a hard time because I wasn’t able to hold the whisky glass or the iced tea. I wasn’t able to smoke, I wasn’t able to do all the fine motor skills that came with the kinds of plays they were making.” Dance offered more space for creativity; he also found mentors who told him he had serious talent. So he persevered, but opportunities were limited. “I worked with Force Majeure for a while, but it was sporadic. What I had a hard time with was being part of something so transforming and beautiful and then having to queue up at Centrelink again on Monday morning. That was soul-destroying and I just felt no, I don’t want this for myself.”

In 2010, he moved to Britain and never looked back. Last year he formed his own company, which now has a three-year deal with a venue in Hamburg, and he has a home in Manchester, where we meet.

With his most recent shows, he has found himself returning to drama, albeit as a dance hybrid, because there are stories he wants to tell. “I’m coming back to text because I am able to say exactly what it is I want to say and the audience not being able to misunderstand. Because with dance, ‘Oh yeah, it could be that or it could be that’. It’s up to the audience to make it mean whatever they want it to. But I want them to walk away with this message.”

He has been rethinking theatre, taking his body as a starting point rather than trying to force it to conform to other people’s demands. Acting, he realises, can be whatever he wants it to be. “And I think we’re able to have a more nuanced conversation because we’re getting beyond, ‘Oh, how lovely, there’s a disabled person on stage!’”

Being based in Europe makes it easy to cultivate international relationships. “But having said that, being back in Australia recently at World Pride, I really noticed a big shift there. More opportunities are being given to disabled artists; disabled actors are being taken more seriously. The fact that we got a spot in the main programme in RISING – even being interviewed by someone who writes for The Age - is huge for me.,” he says.

“As a boy, sitting in my loungeroom in Whyalla, I didn’t think this would be possible for me. And I think, well, I was right to want this for myself as a 15-year-old. I was right to want to go to drama school. I was right to go against the grain. Right to have those conversations with my mother and grandmother, saying that while I know it’s hard, this is what I want to do. Because that persistence has paid off.”

The Dan Daw Show is part of RISING Festival, June 15-18, Meat Market North Melbourne. https://rising.melbourne/