Dancer, artist and choreographer Bill Shannon talks about his career with crutches.

WHEN disabled Bill Shannon demonstrated his street dance skills with specially designed crutches in Mexico City, women kept rushing to pick him up whenever he 'fell' to the floor. The 35-year-old says ruefully that he's only ever broken one bone in his life - an elbow while skateboarding - but the sight of him doing breakdancing, bodypopping and freestyle moves sometimes attracted too much sympathetic attention.

On the eve of his UK debut tour to Newcastle and Darlington with a show called Sketchy, the man nicknamed The Crutchmaster says: "These people coming to help me became a joke after a while, but some people didn't react at all and just walked by. You can interpret it as falling over or a dance move involving the ground, people have their own narratives, " he explains.

Bill, who grew up in Pittsburgh, USA, was diagnosed with a degenerative hip condition at the age of seven and thought he'd recovered in his teens, only to suffer a relapse in his early 20s which has left him with walking difficulties.

He tells his life story as part of the Sketchy show, which involves five performers. Although he regards himself as "in the zone between the really disabled and able bodied world" his developing international reputation has seen him work as a choreographer with the famous Cirque du Soleil. "I can walk but I can't walk very far so people see me on crutches and they can see that I can also use my legs. So then they say 'do you really need the crutches or are you faking it?' I tell them my crutches are like glasses. If you take your glasses off you can still kind of see and without my crutches I can still kind of walk.

BUT I'm in a totally different place to a person who has legs that are atrophied and without dexterity to express movement, " explains Bill, who also started street skating and skateboarding in 1984.

"My own perspective is that I have a trio of personal and cultural influences: Street dance, electronic music and urban culture, which all started when I was about 13 years of age.

"Anybody trying to make it in the dance world is up against obstacles but I think it's a case of dancing found me.

It was never really a choice because dance has been part of me since I was a little kid, " he says, adding that street dancing, video installations for galleries and choreography are just as important to him as the growing invitations to perform at festivals and theatres.

A fascinating part of the Sketchy show is that the 'trick moves' of the dancers are filmed and then played back to the audience in slow motion using the Darkfish sports motion capture software developed for the last Olympic diving events.

"We try difficult moves and pushing the edge of what we're capable of. Then we take a look at the trick moves using this instant replay, so it's pretty funny when we start discussing a 1990 because nobody knows it's a one-handed handstand spinning 360 degrees or more. The dancer will try the trick and then we take a look.

"After that we may ask the audience if they want the dancer to try again, it's hilarious. It changes the relationship between the theatre and the audience, " Bill says.

He feels the tour speaks loudest to the generation who have "grown up with skateboards and hip-hop for breakfast, lunch and dinner", but those who don't know anything about the culture also learn a lot.

"I love dancing, it won't be forever but I'll always be making work. I know I've got a hip condition but it's what a lot of dancers deal with. . . you're not young any more.

"Dancing on crutches has amazing possibilities, but there's also a lot of bad dancing done on crutches, but not by me I hasten to add. You're not going to get very far if you're just doing tricks on crutches, " he laughs.