On my last evening at the 2023 Oriente Occidente festival, I saw Sharon Fridman’s excellent Go Figure. It somehow relieved a kind of unresolved tension that had crept up on me during my stay: after a couple of days of discussing accessibility and disability, I felt that I had no easy answers as to how to write or make art around disability; I didn’t know whether I had my disability story ‘straight’.

Go Figure is a duet for a disabled dancer (Shmuel Dvir Cohen who uses an electric wheelchair that is featured in the work), and a non-disabled dancer (Tomer Navot). The whole piece is built around the tension of seeing performers precariously counterbalancing with each other, supported by slowly morphing music and lighting. It’s a score that involves movement and sound and light. If it has any drama in it, it is created purely by the tensions of shifting bodyweights. The work invites us to look at a disabled person simply as a dancer who happens to be disabled. It’s a piece preoccupied with beauty on the most granular level, and in that very straightforward sense, on that warm September evening in Rovereto, it invited us to challenge our expectations of disability – which it did without us even realising it; without selling us a story.

Something like a sense of relief came over me during the performance and in the ensuing Q&A, and I thought I could hear it in others in the satisfied sigh that came over us when Fridman told us he that, as far as disability went, he just thought Cohen’s body was objectively beautiful and that that was what he was most interested in. To me, the relief resonated with something deaf artist Diana Anselmo had told us earlier that day.

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Rovereto is a border town in the north of Italy, and the story that people there enjoy telling about it is that it was Austrian until a hundred years ago, when it became Italian. The city is nestled tightly at the foot of Alpine peaks that loom over the city like brilliant green tsunamis. The streets are clean, in the way affluent places like Geneva or Fitzrovia (in London) are. It’s a charming, romantic place, whose historical narrative, and its historical narrative gives weight to the elegance with which the city seems to hover above its mixed cultural heritage.

Another story about Rovereto is that it was an industrial town until it became a cultural city, when, almost by decree, at some point in the 1980s, the powers that be decided to build a massive museum in the middle of it. ‘I can’t really tell you why it’s so big,’ says Luisa Filippi, who works there and seems as surprised as my group is at its scale. The museum is called MART, which stands for Museum of [Modern and Contemporary] Art of Rovereto and Trentino, and it’s a beauty, with several permanent collections, which often exhibits well-established international artists. The city also has beautiful theatres (Zandonai Theatre was built in the 18th century) and around thirty cultural organisations, which isn’t bad for a city of forty thousand people that decided one day to proclaim itself a beacon of culture. I sometimes wish I too could reinvent myself like that.

We Springback folk were in Rovereto in early September to attend Oriente Occidente Festival’s 2023 edition. Oriente Occidente was established in 1981 as a cultural organisation with a mission to bring together East and West (during the Cold War, no minor feat) through dialogue and through dance, and this mission soon went on to encompass difference of all stripes and to ‘overcoming boundaries: of language, ethnicity, gender, age, culture’. We were there to think and write about dance (bien sûr) but also, disability, accessibility, marginalisation – all subjects I had the complicated fortune of knowing absolutely nothing about, and, consequently, felt nervous about discussing in a group.

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Earlier that day we’d been to a performance lecture by Deaf artist Diana Anselmo about how society at large is geared towards ableism (meaning geared in favour of white, cis, straight, non-disabled males like – well, me). During a Q&A afterwards, there was a heated debate among us as to whether Pina Bausch was guilty of cultural appropriation. The point of contention was a solo in Bausch’s Carnations, where a dancer performs a dance in sign language (or so we thought!) set to George Gershwin’s The Man I Love. Anselmo pointed out that the sign language in the solo was about as authentic to sign language as (her words) ‘aqua gym’, which raised the interesting question of whether it would be ethically ok to do that today. Some people in the room were quietly appalled. Why wouldn’t it be ok? Isn’t it after all an artist’s job to lie whenever possible?

I never think of the right questions at these things, or if I do it’s several minutes or days too late. As a white, cis, straight, non-disabled male, the most obvious reason it is difficult for me to come up with anything constructive to say about disability and marginalisation is that I feel unqualified, and I simply don’t want to offend with my ignorance.

Another reason is a fear of appearing, or being, insincere. There’s something a bit daft about my saying, ‘I really think the arts and the world should be more accessible,’ although that is what I think. From a position of relative privilege, the stakes are close to zero – ‘an investment of almost nothing,’ as Joan Didion once put it when writing about white student activists in the 1980s.

The third reason is harder to articulate and has something to do with the stories we construct about the world and about ourselves, and the problem is that, generally speaking, I find it hard to articulate stories about myself, which is a cardinal sin these days, and I therefore sometimes feel a disconnect from people who are moved to tell theirs with such urgency. I remember an American ballet teacher asking me once what I preferred to be called, and she was actively offended when I told her that I didn’t mind whether she called me Dom, or Dommy, or Dominic; she just couldn’t understand how a person couldn’t get such a fundamental aspect of their being figured out. As if without the proper label for myself I was somehow less whole.

I distrust the stories I tell about myself, and, to an extent, the stories other people tell about themselves, not because I think they’re untrue but because I’m not sure they’re always relevant. I feel that the arts, perhaps above all dance, should remain a space in which we are encouraged to shed our personal identities, not just share them. I worry that, in the age of the trauma story – where trauma is the kernel at the centre of any form of art or entertainment, from BBC TV mega productions to Sadler’s Wells’ main stage – we close ourselves off to other forms of imaginative experiences. In more unkind terms, and as New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff once wrote in a 1988 review of Carnations, ‘Not everyone’s experiences, when screamed out, are of interest.’

I don’t mean to downplay the importance of autobiography and personal story here – prejudice against disability is alive and well. I am also aware of how easy it is for someone with in-built visibility like me to say they distrust stories. But when stories have so widely been co-opted by corporate interests (after all, what brand doesn’t have its own story these days?), I worry that the sum total of personal stories aggregates into an insurmountable wall of noise.

And so, I never know quite what to say because I don’t want to add to the noise.

Anyway – the good news is that I felt a door open. The thing Anselmo said at her lecture-performance which clicked for me after Fridman’s performance, occurred when someone asked how Anselmo would recommend writers and artists approach the topic of disability. Her answer: ‘Meet us’. By which she meant, elaborating further: challenge what is expected of disabled or marginalised people; don’t reaffirm conventions on the stage or on the page; be creative.