Dance

David Toole has no legs, but he's walked away with two of the decade's best dance films. The second, Lloyd Newson's 34-minute The Cost of Living, features the three-foot-two performer as a busker in a British seaside resort. He and a roommate troll for girls on emerald lawns and in a ballet studio; later a cameraman subjects him to a viciously intrusive interview. Newson's DV8 Physical Theatre explores the place of "outsiders" in British culture; this new release is one of its most brilliant productions yet.

photo: Dance on Camera Festival 2005

Big shoulders: Toole and DV8

Details

The Cost Of Living
Dance on Camera Festival 2005
Walter Reade Theater
212.875.5600
Friday at 9, Saturday at 1

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More About

• David Toole
• Lloyd Newson
• London (England)
• Leeds (England)
• Victoria Marks

In the early 1990s Toole, then a postman in Leeds, England, was plucked from a dance workshop by London's mixed-ability company CandoCo. At the same time American choreographer Victoria Marks went to London, hooked up with CandoCo, and with director Margaret Williams made the 15-minute Outside In, in which Toole, a wheelchair-using amputee with platinum hair, exuded an irresistible seductiveness. Aired on the BBC in 1995, the film won a host of international prizes. Toole also played the designer in Sally Potter's 1996 The Tango Lesson. Older now, craggier, still irresistible at 40, he's as much actor as dancer.