Dancer

To dance is to move and to feel moved. There’s no dancing without emotion. In that sense, it doesn't matter how trained or adept you are, how many left feet you have. What matters is whether you feel it. Ian Johnston has learning and communication difficulties, while Gary Gardiner is a classically trained dancer. In this show, the distinction doesn’t matter. 

The marks of co-creator Adrian Howells, who died in 2014, linger here like memory. His mantra—'It's all allowed’—takes on a new shade of meaning. Not so much that everything is permissible, but that it's acceptable for Johnston to dance as much as Gardiner – for an untrained man with learning difficulties to move and express with his body as much as a professional. It becomes so much less about the specific movements and more about the mere unashamed act of moving.

Closeness exists between the pair exists in a way that it's unusual to see. Not just the friendship, an obvious camaraderie which the two play for laughs like a classic double act, but a physical closeness too. With a Nick Cave ballad playing, their simple dance routine is to hold hands and to embrace. In another moment, a quiet bit of ballroom with hands round each other’s waists, Gardiner sinks lower and seems to get heavier while Johnston supports him. 

Gardiner does a lot of the talking, because Johnston is extremely shy, but when the music kicks in—Kylie, Pharrell, Annie Lennox—it’s Johnston who steals the focus. By the end, with the audience on the dance floor, the room has become a space of acceptance, because Dancer has the simple audacity to break a boundary, to let someone tap their toes and twirl their arms and to say that's okay. That's good. That's human.