Strictly sign dancing

Deaf performer David Bower played Hugh Grant’s brother in Four Weddings and a Funeral but Kelly Mullan finds he’d rather talk about his dance company and the disability arts movement than gossip about the celebrity connections he has built up through his film work

Hugh who? I’m not really his brother – I was acting,” jokes David Bower, reluctant to cover old ground when there’s exciting new work on the horizon.

But he does concede that it was a progressive move to cast a Deaf actor in Four Weddings. “The producers thought it would slow down filming and cost too much but Richard Curtis pushed for a Deaf actor. It shows a certain maturity. We should see more of that in the film world but when it veers towards tokenism it lets down the quality of the material.”

He still works as an actor but David’s real love is dance. He teamed up with his collaborator, disabled dancer Isolte Avila, 21 years ago, and developed a visual language mixing improvised dance, sign and film in a spirit of anarchy. Unlike other disability dance companies, they only use disabled choreographers.

Avila says: “Disability dance isn’t athletic: we value even the small movements individual to each person. It’s about expression.” “And,” David adds, “it’s poetry of form”.

In a shopping centre café, sporting glasses held together with Sellotape, wearing scruffy jogging bottoms and looking like one of the more serious kids from Fame, David earnestly expounds the creative credo of Sign Dance Collective (SDC). He explains the idea of sculpting the space: each performance is adapted to suit the venue, so Sign Dance pieces are always works in progress.

He says: “Oh God. I sound like a hippy. But it’s a different language: a way of saying things with words that haven’t been invented yet. Choreography is a total sign language. The whole body is a brain and its language is dance: the full body physicality, the impact. The whole body is thinking and experiencing,
not just the head.

“I can’t hear recorded music but live music is different. I can engage with it. Live music is not just an audio thing. A lot of Deaf people make that mistake but it’s something that we can see and feel: it’s a universal medium.”

Avila says that musicians in workshops don’t realise Bower is Deaf and remark on his musicality.

She quotes an observation that David is a musician trapped in the body of a Deaf man. He disagrees. “I don’t feel trapped,” he says.

He explains how he uses his impairment to enhance his performance and how this epitomises disability arts.

“I have tinnitus, so I hear constant sound and I use that in dance. My body is always communicating with me. Disability art is a conversation with your disability and [it’s about] using it in creative ways. The
disability art movement is investigating the creative potential disabilities suggest. It’s not a ghetto for people who can’t make it in the mainstream. It’s a mistake to think that. It’s avant-garde.

“The UK has a unique disability and Deaf arts movement: it’s dynamic and fresh. Adam Reynolds [the disabled sculptor, who died in 2005] kick-started the disability arts movement and was a major inspiration for SDC. He was a mentor and a driving force and a guide. We miss him a lot but we want to carry on our work in the spirit he suggested. It’s important that people don’t forget what he and others achieved. We are able to do what we do today due to them.”

David talks about “the disability arts movement” but then corrects himself for leaving out the word “Deaf” and explains his stand on the question of deafness as disability or culture. “Deaf people are a language group with a distinctive culture but all disabilities are different and Deaf culture is not unique in the disabled community. We can have a dialogue and petition disabled artists to learn sign language, so we can have more interaction and more understanding.”

Last month, David became the first Deaf actor to play Quasimodo for Graeae’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame for BBC Radio 4. Proud of his performance, he says: “Quasimodo isn’t a negative portrayal of a disabled person, he’s an iconic archetype, he’s everybody. He’s honest, compassionate and loving. And it’s very well adapted by two disabled scriptwriters.”

Now plans are underway for SDC to tour in the spring. Their new production Three Films + One has been two years in the making and is due to go on tour in the spring. One of the pieces, Listen, is based on David’s experience of tinnitus and uses sound-wave technology to build a landscape.

SDC started combining film and live performance so larger audiences could see their signing but David says that film and choreography have evolved together over the past 100 years and they’re tapping into a stylistic convention championed by Bertolt Brecht.

David relishes the chance to tour internationally and plans to return to festivals in Slovenia, Bangalore, Tunisia, Greece and Belfast. Although social isolation is a major theme of his work, the aspect of travel that gives him the biggest kick is striking up conversations with strangers. His openness and frankness, he says, are part of his Welsh roots.

Like any artist worth his pinch of salt, David has his own way of looking at the world. When he comes back into the café after taking a breath of air, he tells me he has just seen a bin bag hanging out of a bin. “It looked sleepy and happy,” he says. “I wanted to be that bin bag.”

He has plans to take part in the cultural Olympiad and has aspirations to open the 2012 Paralympics. Inspired by some royal command disablist humour, he says: “Watching Prince Charles’s birthday celebrations, I was shocked at the disablist rot that experienced comedians like Monty Python and Robin Williams were resorting to: making fun of the Paralympics. We should invite Monty Python to pretend to be disabled to open the London Paralympics, then we can come on and gaffer tape them into a cage for the duration of the Games. I think Prince Charles would enjoy that.”