Cape Town, South Africa -- Cape Town’s wheelchair dancers are determined to swing for their supper — no matter the battle ahead, writes Cosmo Duff-Gordon

Most of us dance at some point in our lives. Along with god-consciousness, language, fondness for mood-altering substances and opposable thumbs, dancing is one of those things that defines us as human. Some of us do it well. Others do it badly. Sixteen-year-old Mukhtar Lee never thought he’d dance at all.

Gladys Bullock, 53, can’t resist telling me the story of how she got him onto a dance floor. She began giving dance classes to disabled children at the Eros School in Athlone. Mukhtar, then aged nine, was the only refusenik. “I’d go and pinch his cheeks,” she says gleefully, “but he’d sit in his wheelchair by the door and wouldn’t dance.”

After stomaching a month of increasingly painful cheek-pinching, Mukhtar, a spastic diplegic since birth, finally gave in and hit the dance floor dressed as Michael Jackson. When he told his mum, she didn’t dare believe it. “I said to him, ‘Don’t talk crap to me.’”

Shahieda Lee’s disbelief is hardly surprising: wheelchair dancing is an unlikely sport. She explains how it works: an able-bodied dancer partners with a disabled dancer, whose wheelchair must be specially customised to have two extra front-stabilisers and one back-stabiliser.

It is early February and we are chatting in the doorway of a church hall in Rondebosch, Cape Town. Shahieda talks in a staccato counterpoint of rasped words and pluming exhales of smoke. She points her fag at a fox-trotting Mukhtar: “That’s my son, he makes me proud every time I look at him.” There are tears in her eyes.

Mukhtar has quick hands and hot wheels. He is blowing hard and has a basilisk stare that contrasts nicely with the implied gaiety of his pink shoelaces. He is also holding himself very erect, as befits the reigning SA Wheelchair Dance Champion in ballroom. He somehow possesses the brooding intensity of a young Marlon Brando.

“I’ve pulled him head-first out of his wheelchair before,” says 16-year- old Danielle Matthews with a grin. Her voice lilts with the music of the Cape Flats. It is also really quite loud for someone so petite. “And I’ve had my feet run over loads of times.” She is Mukhtar’s able-bodied partner; they’ve danced together since they were 11.

They, and two other couples, are putting in some serious training for the upcoming Wheelchair Dance World Championships, taking place in Holland over the Easter weekend. This is one of the few sports that South Africa can claim global pre- eminence in. At last year’s World Championships, competing against dancers from 18 nations — most of them First World countries with plenty of backing — Cape Town’s finest were dominant: Christelle Dreyer, 22, won the Ballroom; Mukhtar came second in the Latin.

Tonight, they are under the gimlet eyes of their coach, Bullock — the doyenne of Western Cape disabled dance. Tall, with red-tinted curly hair and glasses, she resembles a driven yet benign school matron. She has been teaching wheelchair dancing for eight years, and single-handedly brought on every person in the room.

We discuss the sport’s quantum mechanics. As with any form of ballroom dancing, kitsch is king — the more rhinestone you wear, the better your chances. Perhaps the qualities most needed, apart from raw ability, are a mazurka of courage and, given the frequency of tumbles out of chairs, a talent for soft landings.

It is also anything but static. Like a sexy angel, Matthews is swinging her hips and shaking her bum to a high- tempo Macarena. Mukhtar possesses a savage flair for the dramatic, and dances in a fluid swirl of movement. Absolutely in tune with one another, they are going for it like borderline- personality Disco Queens.

I first met them in 2006, at the ballroom championships of the SA Dance Teacher’s Association. The Parow air had smelt of hot aftershave and refracted ambition. They were tangoing to a Latin version of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams. Mukhtar’s ruffled black shirt was very John Travolta. His shoes were white, natty and pointed. He was coated in rhinestone.

Matthews, in a diaphanous lilac dress, was all gossamer passion and spinning legs. As a finale, Mukhtar, strong as on ox and pouting extravagantly, tilted up his wheelchair. Matthews swung a leg over his head. When he crashed his wheelchair down, lights flashed and the crowd went crazy.

It seemed a long way from Hanover Park, where he shared a Wendy House with his mother. This is a place anyone would want to escape — a place defined by gang warfare, poverty and drug addiction. Shahieda, small but determined, has not allowed any obstacle to stand in the way of her son’s passion for dancing. Theirs is an unusual love story.

“When Mukhtar needed his first ‘dancing wheelchair’,” Bullock tells me over a cup of tea, “Shahieda went door to door, stood at the bus shelter and pestered the drivers at the taxi rank, to get the money. It took more than a year.”

Sacrifices also have to be made for outfits — a different one is needed for every routine — special shoes, make-up, petrol, a customised wheelchair are all expensive. There is, though, not a cent of sponsorship for the dancers, nor ever any prize money.

“My uncle bought me a Gatsby,” Mukhtar replies with a hungry smile, when I ask him how he celebrated the 2006 World Championships. “It’s very seldom that I buy him a packet of chips these days; he misses his Kentucky,” interjects Shahieda.

In late February there is a full dress- rehearsal for the World Championships in Holland: Bullock is in a black tracksuit; she means business. Fingers are being snapped, toes are starting to twinkle and patent leather-shod feet are beginning to tap.

Bullock is, however, becoming disillusioned at the complete lack of acknowledgement and support. “Nobody sponsors us because, as far as they’re concerned, this is an airy-fairy sport.”

Will they get to Holland this year?

R60000 must be raised by early March, but there is still a forlorn hope that they might make it to the World Championships.

Dreyer and her able-bodied partner, 18-year-old Vinny Coe, are in home- made scarlet and sequinned outfits and jiving up a storm. For someone with brittle bone disease, Dreyer — the Wheelchair Dance World Champion in Latin — seems amazingly robust. She uses her arms a lot and has a repertoire of facial expressions worthy of a silent film star.

The pair got together five years ago and train twice a week. I ask Dreyer why she does it: “I love the dancing, the fun, meeting and talking to people.” She has been trying to generate extra money by designing and selling business cards: “But I haven’t made enough for the plane to Holland.”

Although Dreyer looks sad, Chaelie Mycroft, a 13-year-old cerebral-palsy sufferer, is luminous . This might be because her able-bodied partner, Jesse Randelhoff, 16, moves like a tiger and dresses like a male model; he has donned what appear to be lacy black stockings on his arms.

One of Randelhoff’s favourite tricks is to drop to the floor like a Kung Fu fighter and, wielding his foot, spin Mycroft around him in a circle. They have been together for two years and are the only couple, thanks mainly to private funding, who will definitely be competing in the World Championships.

Mukhtar is taking a breather and beadily looking on from the sidelines. He may have a Latin soul, but he’s nonetheless dressed, to the manner born, in black-tie. “He likes to dress up, that’s why he’ll make a perfect businessman,” Shahieda tells me firmly.

But being able to count pennies has not helped Mukhtar and Matthews save the money needed to get to Holland. They say you have to suffer for your art, but perhaps they weren’t imagining the slog of dancing in Mitchells Plain’s shopping malls.

This is what Mukhtar and Matthews have been doing on Saturday mornings in a desperate bid to raise the airfare. Four hours of straight dancing sometimes only net them R60.

“How does it feel that you may not make it to the World Championships?”

“We think we could win, but it’s slipping away from us,” Matthews says. Mukhtar counters hopefully: “We have come so far that we will surprise them when we go next year.”

Yet, perhaps, wheelchair dancing is really more about taking part than the winning.

It is about daring to dream, transcending disability and, of course, getting in some mind-blowingly brilliant moves. Mukhtar captures its essence: “I enjoy everything,” he says, beaming. “It almost feels like you fly.”

He pauses to choose his words. “Like you fly like a bird.”