This transcript is from an interview that was first published on 16th of January 2020. This transcript has been edited slightly to help with clarity, the audio of this episode and more information can be found here.
‘We’ve got this false sense of what time is and that it’s just happening to us. But it’s not. We’re in full control of that time.’
Transcripts are a new initiative of Delving into Dance, seeking to make the rich audio archive more accessible to deaf audiences and for educators. These transcripts are paid for through the support of audiences and supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, as well as audience contributions. It would be wonderful to have your contribute to this imitative. You can contribute here.
I started by asking when Dan started dance.
Dan Daw: Dance started for me when I was quite young. My grandmother was a calisthenics choreographer. She choreographed all the Graceful Girls. And my mum, at one point, was the National Graceful Girl champion. So I was always… I remember going into old dance halls when I was a small child sitting up on the stage, watching them choreograph and dance, so it’s kind of always been around me. And I saw… I a call out for young performers living in Whyalla and joined a youth theatre company, and going ‘yeah, I want to try this out’ and I just loved it.
Andrew: What about it grabbed you? Or held you?
Dan Daw: I think at the time it helped me escape my not so great home life and gave me an outlet and way to express myself and to be in a space where I could see myself represented and see other young people embrace their camp and embrace their queerness, even though I guess they weren’t aware of that at the time, to really find a way of accessing that in a small, regional city of 3,000 people and just going ‘oh, there are other people like that in the world, like me’ and ‘yeah, OK, it feels like I’ve arrived somewhere’. And so I think that was the hook, I’m just like ‘I can really relate to these people... I don’t have to sit and talk about cars and motorbikes and the football scores’ because I didn’t care for any of that shit and just like ‘oh, these people I can really chat to’ and really loving hearing girls talking about going dress shopping or buying the right makeup for the show. I really love that stuff. So that was really nice to be around from that early age. I think I was 12 or 13 when I started. So yeah, it felt like I was a part of something, I guess.
Andrew: A lot of people, particularly young, queer… well, they’re not young when they talk about it, but often talk about “finding the tribe” or that outlet or being able to be themselves or express something that they didn’t feel they could in school or in sport or another outlet.
Dan Daw: Yeah, and it helped me to work out who I was, or who I wanted to be or might want to be, because before I discovered dance and theatre I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I mean I was plucking ‘oh yeah, I’ll be a teacher’, but that was because I was surrounded by teachers my whole life and so ‘oh yeah, I’ll just be one of those and its fine, but then this kind of opens up to go ‘oh, there’s other stuff’ and that ‘oh, you get paid to do that?’ then finding my people and starting to really choose my family, even way back then, you just go ‘no, these are the people I want to be surrounding myself with’. (05:57)
Andrew: Yeah, choosing family is pretty important. A pretty powerful moment when you realise you can actually pick the people you have in your life in that way.
Dan Daw: It’s like ‘oh, I’m not stuck. Yeah, I can choose my family. I’m not stuck.’ And that kind of relief to a 13 or 14 who was having feelings he was told that he shouldn’t and being told one thing and then going into theatre class and seeing, so clearly, another thing, and just going ‘I know which one I’m going to sign up to’.
Andrew: So, you started dance and you started thinking that was going to be a career. When was the moment it became a reality?
Dan Daw: The moment for me was when I danced with the Restless Dance Theatre and the Australian Dance Theatre in a collaboration called Vocabulary. And it was the experience of going to class with ADT and it was my first taste of rigour and seeing what my body would do in those circumstances and what it was to really… exploring different ways I could push my body and push my limitations and what would happen if my body something low, started to learn these new practices and just going ‘this feels comfortable for me’. ‘It’s hard’, but I quite relished in that hard work because up until that point my point at Restless and it was lots of praise ‘oh yeah, it’s wonderful, it’s beautiful. Keep working on that part.’ And when working with Garry he was like ‘oh, I’m just wondering if you could stretch your leg a bit more. I’m wondering if you could turn your foot out a bit more.’ or ‘try bending your knee a bit more and it will give you more stability’. So kind of approaching the body in a different way as opposed to ‘your body is disabled. I’m just going to let it do what it does.’ actually someone to then go in and go ‘no, actually I’m going to see if I can get your body in this specific way.’ So it challenged me in a different way and also working with Garry I’m just like ‘oh, choreographers aren’t afraid of my body. Choreographers will go in and go “actually, I need it to be more like this. What’s a version we can work on where we can get you there”’. So that was just like ‘wow, there is a place for me in this’ and I thought it took a lot of courage for Garry to just… because I can always say ‘oh no, sorry Garry, my body doesn’t do that, mate… it just doesn’t’. So then it was cool, you know. We’d find another way and work through it to achieve a similar aesthetic or whatever.
Andrew: And then you moved to the UK to work with Candoco.
Dan Daw: Yeah, I moved to the UK in 2010 to work with Candoco and that came at a point when I was almost ready to give dance away because I was finding it such a struggle in Australia with the landscape over there. (11:02)
Andrew: Landscape in terms of opportunity?
Dan Daw: I would say opportunity because I… in a way I found my experience in Australia a little soul-destroying because I’d come off of amazing projects, because I’m very project-based, you know, my experience with ADT and my time with Kate Champion in Force Majeure. When that ended I’d be so so sad and so so angry, for a time, because that stopped. Monday morning, go down to Centrelink and maybe apply for allowances and pensions and I’d just done amazing things and now you’re asking me to search for 15 jobs a week that I don’t want to do. This is what I want to be doing, but the Australian Government wasn’t acknowledging the value in the arts for your job. I was just like ‘I can’t… I don’t want this for myself’ and I couldn’t see a way in Australia for me to work full-time in a company because we weren’t there and we’re not there yet. And that’s fair enough… sad, but fair enough. And so I went ‘OK, I’ve been following Candoco for a long time. They’ll give me that opportunity.’ So I applied to audition and got the job.
Andrew: And that’s a full-time company?
Dan Daw: That’s a full-time company, yeah. I got there and first day on the job I was learning two new shows and about to start making three new ones. And that was what it was to be in a rep company and trying to learn movement and to that rigour I was talking about with Garry to be applied in training. And I was like ‘yeah, this is what I was… this is what I hungered for and what was missing in Australia’, and that’s why I had to leave.
Andrew: Was it your first time living overseas?
Dan Daw: It was my first time. Actually that’s a lie. I lived in Tokyo when I was 15 for 12 months on exchange to do the whole exchange student thing because I studied Japanese at high school. And I said ‘I really wanna go!’ and then this opportunity came up to apply for a scholarship (14:55)
Andrew: Amazing! Can you still speak Japanese?
Dan Daw: I can, yeah. But I am loosing it a bit now, but it’s still there somewhere in the depths… in the recesses of my mind.
Andrew: Moving to the UK and working in a full-time company must have also brought with it some challenges, right? (15:24)
Dan Daw: [long pause] Yeah, it did. Absolutely. Like, ‘yeah I am living in another country now’ But also, to my perspective as a disabled dancer, I moved for Candoco. I’d been watching things of theirs for years just going ‘wow! One day! One day! One day!’ And I kept telling myself… dangling that “one-day carrot” in front of my face and then actually going ‘no, today’s the day I’m going to do it!’ So then remembering that kind of outweighed any difficulty or struggle I was having living in London because I just thought ‘what was the alternative?’ It always had that kind of balance at the other end of the scale, of me at the Centrelink cue. So there was really no comparison and giving myself a reality check and a good talking to on days when it was hard and challenging, just like ‘this is why you came, this is why you moved over, because you wanted this rigour, you wanted this challenge, this what you told Stephen Petronio in your interview’, you know, ‘come on Dan! This is what you wanted.’ That is what helped me there and held me here.
Andrew: A lot of Australian artists talk about something that is unique to them from either their training or what they learned or the Australian climate or environment. Do you feel like there's anything that you brought that was uniquely Australian, for want of the better turn of phrase?
Dan Daw: I like to not rush things and I like to find my own time and way through things and I’ve built my own relationship to time and space. And that feeds in very much to the work I do. We call it “crip time”. I’m not sure who coined the phrase first, but it wasn’t me. Crip time is just allowing things to take the time they take, and I don’t get stressed about time. There’s no point. So I love to really take my time, just because it does ordinarily take more time than the average bear to do things. I start seeing the world in a very different way. I've given myself time and permission to look up and see the world around me and see how others are choosing to interact with the world and that’s something very special that I fight to hold on to. I like to create time and space in my day. And I get anxious and frustrated when I'm made to hurry, or when I’m on somebody else’s relationship to time, like ‘oh, I don’t have the time’ and I’m like ‘you’re in control of that. No one is in control of your time except you. You’re in control of that.’ It’s true. We’ve got this false sense of what time is and that it’s just happening to us. But it’s not. We’re in full control of that time. In London, it used to make me laugh when people would miss the tube, like ‘there’s one in a minute! I can see the headlights! It’s fine.’ (20:45)
Andrew: I literally have that conversation all the time with people. It's like, ‘why are you running for the tube? There's one right behind. You can see on the board that there's another one coming.’ If the next one was in half an hour or an hour, sure, I can kind of understand why you’d want to run for it. But it’s one minute… just a minute.
Dan Daw: Travelling in Adelaide we have to wait two hours for a fucking bus. They would not be able to cope. So time and space would be the key thing for me. Allowing that room and just refusing to get anxious about it and get angry at people who make you feel anxious about it, because it’s not their right. If they’re choosing their own relationship to time and space then that’s theirs and I respect that they want to run themselves ragged, and that fine, but that’s not what I would sign up for, thank you very much!
Andrew: And does that inform your practice and in terms of how you think about movement?
Dan Daw: It does. It really informs everything I do. I would say it’s probably the core of my practice. The thing of ‘things take the time they take’ and not to rush that and to notice the time things take and to allow things to have space around them. Sometimes, I’m accused of my work being quite slow because it's up against the expectation of someone else’s time. And someone seeing me get dressed over a period of ten minutes, saying ‘oh yeah, I could have done that in three’. Yes, because you have a different relationship to time and your body is not my body. So, I come up against a lot of those conflicting expectations of that’s ability-based and also purely based on choice. You could take ten minutes to get dressed if you chose but you just choose not to. I’ve chosen to take the time to get dressed and I would like you to see this now and I’m quite interested to see what that does to your body, when you see me take the time, and how that frustrates you. That’s why I’m showing you. find that quite fun. Yeah, ‘you're going to watch me do this’, because the probably don’t take the time in your own life to do this’. I know that probably frustrates the hell out of you, but good. ‘We’re going to be in this together. This is a safe space I’m creating. So we're going to do this together and it’s going to take ten minutes for me to get dressed.’
Andrew: Not all performance has to be fast which… sometimes there's an expectation that it has to move quickly or it’s got to have a pace to it. It is like why? There’s no reason why it should. (25:13)
Dan Daw: It is because we are so, I think everything has just become so saturated now and everything is… Starbucks coffee cups tell us we’re busy. The packaged sandwiches tell us we’re busy. The meal deal lunches tell us we’re busy. So consumerism tells us we’re busy. We’re not busy; we’re told we’re busy. So then we’re like ‘OK, I’m busy, so I’m gonna…’ Actually we’re no busier than we were 20 years ago. We’re no busier than we were 50 years ago. We’re still the same. We’ve just got different things around us now and that’s all that’s changed. We’re living this false sense of time, because we’re told that we’re meant to be busy.
Andrew: And “busy” becomes something that people use. Often I feel as if... they're important, like if you're not busy, you're not important or, you know, when you ask somebody, ‘how are you?’ It’s like ‘I’m really busy’. That is not an emotion. ‘Are you overwhelmed “busy”? Are you exhausted “busy”? Are you satisfied? Like what?’ It’s like a catch phrase. It doesn’t actually, when you unpack it, have any emotion about feeling. There's no feeling in that. How are you feeling “busy”? It’s not a feeling. “Busy” is not a feeling.
Dan Daw: It’s not a state, yeah. And that kind of my response to ‘I’m so busy’, but ‘what are you doing here then? If you’re so busy, why aren’t you at work? Or, yunno… go and be busy then. If you’re busy, what you need to do is be less busy. How can I help?’ I almost feel like people say ‘I’m busy’ as like a cry for help. It’s like, ‘what can I do to help with that? It sounds like you’re overwhelmed and you need to change some things in your life.’
Andrew: Crip time. ‘Here’s a bit of crip time!’
Dan Daw: Exactly
Andrew: ‘Let me prescribe…’
Dan Daw: ‘... a dose of crip time!’
Andrew: So, Thank You Very Much, which I saw the other day… you were telling me you’ve been working on it for five years?
Dan Daw: I started five years ago, working in Exeter. I think we spent a week to get initial ideas around what it would be for a group of disabled artists to start delving into Elvis and that world.
Andrew: What I found really interesting about the work was that idea of impersonation and the different ways people impersonate a figure and the replication of impersonation has changed. Recreating has changed what that original was. I don't really know what the question is, but it was just something that really struck me in the work was that sense of impersonation. Each of you had a narrative around impersonation or having to fit in to a particular idea of how a body should move in space, or what a physio wants to do, or whether you should wear high heels, or all these expectations that are not… that are somebody else's.
Dan Daw: Exactly. I really enjoyed working with Claire Cunningham, who made the work, realising it was quite political in trying to be somebody else. It’s a political act and, in my opinion, a bit of a violent act on yourself in attributing that to my experience of physio, making myself be someone framing my body in a way it just would never be… could never be. And then with this kind of physio as a way to be less disabled, or to “fix” me, or to make me “better”... and finding those links between that and the Elvis tribute world, and that was really clear for us in the process. Just going ‘oh, OK, we’ve actually been told we’ve got to try to be like someone else our whole lives and this work is where it stops’, that ‘we’re not gonna do that anymore’. And Claire found beautiful, poetic ways to say that we’re actually going to be ourselves and we’re not going to apologise for who we are and for taking up space in the world anymore. We’re just not. And we’re not going to try to be less disabled, or less crip. No, not anymore. It’s quite phenomenal that a work about Elvis tribute can even bring you to that point to just go ‘actually, it’s less about the tribute and more about what we’ve been trying to do to fit in and make people feel comfortable with who we are’. And that has to stop.
Andrew: It sounds incredibly liberating.
Dan Daw: It’s liberating, empowering, sexy. It’s a very sexy work. And to really feel like we own it. I definitely feel like I own my part of the show… just going ‘this is me. This is my body.’ In the work I wear a pair of short shorts and it’s taken me a long day to be comfortable showing my body off in that way because of all the shame I’ve accrued over the years and just to acknowledge that and also start letting that shit go. Just going ‘this is my body. Fuck you, this is my body, and I’m not going to apologise for it anymore.’
Andrew: There’s a moment in the piece where you talk about making your physio do obstacle courses that he would set up for you first because you were so aware that actually your body was always the one being judged or looked at by other people. That really stuck out to me as a moment of… the body is space seen and observed by other people in ways that they don't have that understanding or it's not their embodied experience. That, for me, really stood out essentially in how people expect the body to be something for them.
Dan Daw: Vicky touches on it in the work, that kind of “who are we doing it for?” and just applying that to performance as well and in my own practice: who do I do it for? Do I do it for me? I think so. But I know I also do it for the audience, otherwise why do it? So lots of questions around performance and practices… aware that, through my life, when I walk down the street that's performative because of the way I’m looked at. It’s performance. And I’ve always been performing. I’ve always been on, but haven’t keyed in and then getting angry and pissed off that I’m always being stared at and judged and compared. And now I’m getting to the point where you just let go and go ‘well, let them look. Just let them be in the uncomfortability or their comfortability or whatever they’re experiencing.’ I guess trying to find ways to kindly not make their experience of my body wrong. And to just go ‘OK, that’s happening. Cool, I still know who I am. That’s fine. They’re just unaware or whatever or they’re curious.’ (36:42)
Andrew: ‘Because I’m fabulous!’
Dan Daw: ‘Because I’m hot! You’re looking because I’m hot!’ And just having that in my head and just going ‘actually, they might not be looking because of my cripness. There are other things you’re probably looking at.’ And coming to that awareness too and not making it so heavy and loaded, because that was quite a weight for a number of years and I’m finally starting to lift that weight from my shoulders.
Andrew: It must be truly amazing.
Dan Daw: It’s empowering to just go ‘I’m not gonna carry your shit… you’re going to carry it.’ Because the moment, I say something or speak up, I take it on and I’m just like ‘I don’t care about your shit and I’m not gonna be the one to educate you. I’m just heading out.’ or ‘I’m just having dinner. I’m not really the one to educate you about why I’m drinking wine with a straw. Thanks! Have a nice night.’
Andrew: ‘I’ve got a lot of other things happening in my life right now.’
Dan Daw: And also, me saying something kind of makes it an issue. And me saying something like… me drinking wine through a straw and nobody says anything it just starts to become the norm. And somebody’s gawping at it and I just keep on as it is normal for me and that person goes ‘OK, that happened. It was a thing but I didn’t make it an issue.’ I think age as well is coming to play with that and just not giving a fuck. I’ve got bigger fish to fry than to change the perception of someone I’ll never see again. I can’t be bothered. And I picture that as kind of “choosing my battles”. A friend of mine said to me once, quite recently actually, she said: ‘Dan, you don’t have to change the world every day. You don’t have to be an advocate every day. Pick your battles. Cut yourself some slack.’ I don’t have to be a change-maker every day when I just step outside the house. I just don’t. (40:00)
Andrew: When having a glass of wine you can just have your glass of wine.
Dan Daw: ‘I just don’t wanna change the world right now, thanks!’
Andrew: So, you stayed in the UK. Is the UK very much home now?
Dan Daw: It is, yeah. I’ve built a life for myself here and networks and connections and so it’s very much home. I still go back to Australia about once, maybe twice a year, because I’ve been working with the lovely Sarah-Vyne Vassallo on Murmuration as the associate director… building that in Sydney. So that’s taken me back to Australia a few times over the past five years. It feels great to be based in the UK but starting to branch out to Australia again… reconnecting… reconnecting on my terms. It feels really nice.
Andrew: What do you mean by “your terms”? Like in terms of…?
Dan Daw: Because when I was living in Australia, I felt trapped and isolated. And I guess it means I’ve got space around that now. I’m not locked into that now. And also, I’ve got a truer sense of who I am in the world now, whereas… I’m much better at calling people out on stuff now, and that’s what I mean by my “own terms”, actually. In Australia, when people would say something, I’d kind of go ‘oh, maybe that’s wrong. I shouldn’t be doing it in this way.’ That was me then, but me now would actually be calling them out on that, and, again, not giving a shit if they’re laughing at me on the dance floor.
It reminds me of when I was in Sydney, I think last year, or a couple of years ago. They had a thing called “blind dancing” or “dark dancing”. It was a room and they switched off all the lights. It was very low-lit so that people didn’t feel judged for the way they danced, that would only happen is Australia. As a culture, I think Australia is quite judgy and quick to make things “wrong” and quick to make things that are different to us “wrong”, and I think that was my main struggle, just like ‘I’m not like you and I’ll never be like you’ and them saying ‘why are you behaving in that way?’ and just me kind of calling that out and just letting them be them and going ‘OK, you can just crawl up into your own asshole and slowly die. Good luck, mate! But I’m not gonna help you dig yourself out of that one. You’re on your own.’
Andrew: ‘You’re on your own in your own asshole!’
Dan Daw: ‘I’m just doing my thing! Leave me alone. This body does not give you permission to comment.’ It doesn’t give anyone permission to say anything, to touch me, to do any of those things. ‘I wouldn’t do it to you so why are you doing it to me? Stop it.’
Andrew: What are you working on at the moment or what's in the pipeline or things that are interesting you? (45:20)
Dan Daw: I’m working on a new work called The Dan Daw Show. It’s all about me.
Andrew: It sounds like a chat show.
Dan Daw: … looking at my relationship to cripness and queerness and power and shame, and how all of those things intersect in my relationship to self, and how they complement each other but how they also fight against each other. And how I hold on to those terms I was talking about earlier, and just going ‘I’m not going to let you make me feel less powerful’. And so it’s a show about how I take ownership over that and over my body… how I, for the first time, own my body, and just going ‘this is me and these are the ways you made me feel like I’ve lost my power over myself’ and how I get that power back and how I maintain that power.
Andrew: Sounds like really cool work.
Dan Daw: Yeah, it’s therapeutic, because as an artist I was quite scared to make work about my cripness because I always thought it felt indulgent or that I didn’t have the right to. But now I’m just like ‘no, this is the time to actually interrogate my relationship and how I feel about my cripness. Where is that for me now?’ And to talk about that. And I get that the audience struggles with that. But I’ve also been struggling with that. I had ableism built within me too and I had been calling myself out. And acknowledging the different ways of starting to call myself out on my own ableism, just going ‘I understand because I do it too. It doesn’t make it right but let’s work together to not do that anymore and coming to an agreement that we’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to stop making “this me” feel bad.’ And that goes for me as well… I’m going to stop making myself feel bad.
Andrew: Amazing. What's your process for making a work? Obviously, that's one work but there's other works. What’s your preferred way of making a work? (49:43)
Dan Daw: I find my approach changes with each work I make because it needs to be different. So I find myself making in different ways depending… so for The Dan Daw Show I’m working with a theatre director, Mark Maughan, who’s based in London, and so taking a more theatre approach to it, and of course there’s going to be dance embedded within, but very much focused on telling stories and sharing my experience. So that being a very different labour to my other work. And again, going back, I guess a thread in all my work is really find what is inside of me and feeding that in, and that revealing itself through the work in different ways. So that informs the work aesthetically. I think there’s something about rhythm and pace in my work and that informs the look of the work. And of course my body is always going to have the same aesthetic and move in the way it does, so that is the link, I would say, in all of my works.
It started with me looking at inspiration porn. It struck me that, I was performing in Candoco and audience members would quite often come up to me after the show and go ‘Dan, you’re such an inspiration’ and I’m like ‘yeah, but I was with other dancers as well and the idea is that the work is inspiring’. I get that but wjen they are like ‘your really inspiring’ and I’m like ‘how do you know? You’ve just seen me on stage for an hour. How do you know that I’m inspiring?’
Andrew: ‘I got out of bed this morning, had my breakfast…’
Dan Daw: I did get out of bed, that’s true. I just started from that place of just wanting to call it out and going ‘fuck you!’ And that work started four years ago. And then when we came back to it, going ‘actually, it’s not about saying “fuck you”’, it’s the thing I was talking about that everyone comes with their own experience of the world, and sharing my experience of myself and moments of those interactions without finding a way to making that wrong and leaving it for the audience to decide if it’s wrong or not and checking their own moral compasses, in a way, you know, ‘what do I feel about this? Is this OK? Is this not OK? I think if we did “the Fuck You Show” it would just push people away. The message is too important to do that. I think the opportunity is wasted if we go down that whole “I know what you’re all thinking” and just saying ‘oh, poor me, blah blah blah…’ I don’t want to go down that route because I think that can be quite “on the nose” and quite damaging, like how do I know they’re not thinking that? Because otherwise they wouldn’t come in the first place. So why am I telling my audience that? My audience is there because they want to support me and so there is a lot of love there, and that is worth nurturing me as opposed to going ‘fuck you all!’. You’ve just paid 20 quid for a ticket, I’m not gonna say ‘fuck you’ because you’re obviously supporting me because you’re here. So it’s just like ‘this is what’s happening. This is about me. This is what I’ve been struggling with and there are moments where I’ve felt not powerful.’ And it’s a show about stepping into my own power and coming into my own power and what that is. And that being something that is relatable because I’m sure we all, in different ways, have experienced losses in power in our lives. How does that make us feel? And how do we reclaim that? And how do we build a forcefield around that and around ourselves without isolating ourselves completely, and being a hermit in some way because it’s all too much? How do we be with each other in our powerlessness and in our powerfulness? How do we be together and support that and make each other without…? Because what happens is like ‘I’m gonna take your power away so that I can be powerful’. So that we’re switching hats, whereas we just need to make more hats so that everyone can feel powerful. And that’s what we’re not doing, we’re just taking power from each other to make ourselves feel better, when actually we’re not realising that just behind us there’s somebody else ready to take that hat.
Andrew: It’s so hierarchical.
Dan Daw: So hierarchical and insidious and we're not acknowledging that. So, yeah, this is a show that’s going to acknowledge that and like ‘come on, people. We’re not making you wrong, but looking at the systemic structures in our culture and society. We need to make a few changes here… quite a few changes so that we can redress this balance.’
