By Njabulo S. Ndebele for
The Times in South Africa:
On the night of the World Cup eliminator between Spain and Portugal on Tuesday in Cape Town, I took time off from watching the soccer on TV to indulge my artistic and human curiosities over an unusual production at the Baxter Theatre. Extra-Ordinary is a dance production performed by renowned disabled British actor David Toole, who has no legs. South African choreographer Lucy Hind would dance with him on stage. But how?
The invitation from the British Council to witness a performance described as "Dance. A duet. One with no legs. One with no clue" infected me instantly. So did the picture of David in a basket attached to the handlebars of a bicycle. His pink hands hung casually over what remained of his legs. His face, equally pink, looked remarkably calm under his hood. He looked intriguingly "cool", while Lucy, just behind him, stood astride the bicycle, holding the handlebars that bore her cargo. She looked like a pleased and innocent schoolgirl. It was irresistible. I will sacrifice Spain and Portugal; take leave of a euphoric nation in order to indulge my curiosity and contemplate an artistic moment.
It was to be a moving and memorable experience.
When we first see Lucy, she connects with the audience immediately with her bold innocence. She announces that, far from the impression the advertising flier might give, there will be no bicycle.
Finally, she calls out to David. When I see him power himself onto the stage in his wheelchair, my personal journey for the evening begins.
I try to ignore that small adult in the wheelchair. "That is an actor, not a disabled man," my practised tolerance tells me. But I really can't. David makes his move. His facial expressions are extraordinary. They capture instantly delicate fleeting moments of mood and thought. A slight twist of facial muscles tells an entire story.
Uncomfortably, I acknowledge this achievement. This disabled man can act! Wow! He has earned my acknowledgement. But why do I feel condescending? Why can't I just acknowledge outstanding acting without rationalisation? It's the disability, stupid! Disabled people are not human enough to be that good. Disturbed, I sit back and watch the performance unfold.
Suddenly, unassisted, David climbs down from the wheelchair. His arms are strikingly strong. He walks forward with an intriguingly beautiful side-to-side gait. I think of the easy agility of an orang-utan. His arms are his legs; his hands, his feet. Often, he balances his entire body on his left arm. Intriguing! I picture a Masai man on one leg. And so it is that the movements of this disabled man on the stage have absorbed my attention at the expense of the story. I must behave and refocus. This is a normal performance. I try to pick the story.
Lucy has been opportunistic. Seeking to make a name for herself as an actor, she figures that an association with a famous disabled actor may be good for her. She over-interprets the significance of a backstage visit to David, who grants her an autograph, fleetingly telling her a bright career is ahead of her. She never forgets that.
David, on the other hand, is not entirely satisfied with his career. Is he really good, or is he good because he is a curiosity? Do audiences come to a theatre or to a circus to witness the antics of a disabled actor?
And so we have the makings of a drama: an inexperienced actor wanting to make it; and an experienced one, profoundly uncertain and dissatisfied.
There they are on stage before me in what looks like a play within a play. They improvise a dance in response to unpredictable music from a radio. They land on a station whose music allows David to insert his hands into tap-dancing shoes for tap dance, while Lucy does cabaret moves. The sequence is competent but uninspiring. At the end of it part of the audience applauds; another does not; while yet another, to which I belong, is uncertain: two hands brought together to clap and then sheepishly withdrawn into the safety of warm armpits. We are all about to be lashed at humiliatingly by David.
He is unhappy about this performance and swipes at Lucy. "You're so bad, you do not need feet to be a good dancer." Or something to that effect. Eish! Ja! "You wanted us to get together so that people might have a good laugh?"
I sense profound uneasiness among the audience. I'm shocked and disturbed. We have been found out! Have we colluded with Lucy to express condescending appreciation for talented deformity? Are we also the target of David's outrage? At that moment I remember the movie Temple Grandin, in which the autistic heroine is described by her mother as "different but not less". The lesson hits home. I believe it does for the rest of the audience.
In a fit of fury, shoes are thrown around and the radio broken. David begins to fix it. His course in engineering years ago comes in handy. Soon the radio is reassembled. David finds the next station.
When David and Lucy begin their next and last dance, I have set aside learned distractions. I have accepted both David and Lucy as they are.
Freed from social stigma or any other inhibitions, the last dance is extraordinarily beautiful. Before me is neither deformity nor normality, only the rules of art that have created a world that had just remade us.
If David reassembled the radio, the last dance reassembled his relationship with Lucy, and internally reassembled with new knowledge an audience torn up with shame, anguish, and anxiety yet eager to be saved and liberated from their pasts. Never again would I feel uncertain in the presence of the disabled. Now, like learning a new language, I have the gift to enter another world.
Never have I been confronted in this intensely personal and subversive manner on the issue of disability, as when I was pushed to notice it, to contemplate it, and to accept it - not in a concessionary manner, but because the world view of the disabled had become accessible to me beyond ethics and morality. It was a world with its own meanings and reference points: within that world there was a "normality" of struggles, failures and achievements. How many such worlds were there around us? How would our awareness of them expand the genuineness of our interactions with others?
For quite a while after David and Lucy had bowed to thunderous, genuine and grateful applause, we remained in our seats, reluctant to stand as if to do so would wash away the magic of the fresh eyes given to us by David and Lucy.
And so, I returned to the festival of soccer, carrying the magic of transformation with me. Portugal and Spain were still at it when I got back home just before the first half ended.
When the game resumed, it did not take me long to see the difference between the two teams. Spain was a complete team, engrossed in the art of their game. They played the game. They lived in it. Portugal remained outside that world, absorbed in self-conscious strategy: disproportionate defence and sporadic attacks. That is why they collapsed after Spain scored their first goal. Portugal lived not in the game, but in their calculations of it. Yielding to desperation, they disintegrated as Spain danced in David's and Lucy's last sequence.
By Njabulo S. Ndebele for The Times in South Africa:
