Dean, Don’t Dance!

Anna Sokolova
Jan 24
3 min read

Old Fitz Theatre, Sydney, 20-25 January 2026

The review

This show is a winner of the “Commitment & Innovation in Access Award” at the 2025 Sydney Fringe festival. A work which advocates for visibility and not even inclusion, but for removing that sieve of conformity which filters out - way too quickly - someone whose physical abilities do not tick off the long list of expectations.

It is written and performed by Dean Nash, an actor with cerebral palsy himself. The theme brought up is fully owned by the performer, eliminating all possible questions about ethics, boundaries of what is appropriate and what is not, what to discuss and how, bringing freedom to show and trust in authenticity.

It is a mix of semi-autobiographical stories and anecdotes, spoken words mixed with Dean’s own songs, sang and played on a keyboard, talk-style narrative swapped with storytelling.

Acting solo, he is not alone. There is an Auslan interpreter, charming Yasmin Dandachi, who herself is a fun to watch, and an audio describers Emma Bedford & Charley Allanah. Sparky squabbles, which Dean sets up throughout the show with these voices, who are basically his alter ego, are very funny. This works wonderfully to deepen the volume of the performance for those who are lucky to get it all, at the same time, immensely increasing the number of those who can access the show.

There is a deliberately simplified sequence of slides projected to the back wall of the black box of the stage with images serving as an extra accompaniment to the story.

The design and the costumes are intentionally simple. There is no highlighted difference between one on the stage and everyone in the audience, and that reads like one of the messages sent by this work. No obvious difference.

Started as a reminiscence of a set of several auditions, it lays out, like cards out of a deck, examples of rejections. A mood flows between bitterness, irony, lyrical. Travelling to the past swipes by a slowly-paced allegorical tale, boldly illustrated by the images at the back.

Narrative, songs - the gems of the show, punchy, dry-wit jokes, rise to the core of it all, something along the lines: “There are only two kinds of people in the world: disabled people and pre-disabled people. That's all coming to us. That or death. Dead, if you think about it, is the most disabled a person can be, if you think about it. So why not talk about it? ” And then Dean wraps it all around a joke on disabilty and sex, turing the story into an excellently hilarious, akward, spicy stand-up comedy about a one-night stay, where drugs, sex, fun in a comfort of a toilet for disable people (it was something like - from memory - “I am allowed, and nobody said I cannot get plus one”) average hostel are mixed together into a killer cocktail cleverly jazzed up with some churchy jokes.

It is neither a pamphlet nor a cry for pity. Mixed in style, this highly engaging work - the last gig the audience effortlessly (well, those who can sing) sang together, made to send a clear message. The performance theatre world needs a shift in its approach to inclusion and diversity. The hope - not illusional, but pragmatic- is that the conversation started on a tiny stage of the Fringe and the Late Night Program at Old Fitz will keep making its way, reshaping the ridig world of art management. The audience is - evidently - ready.