'I lost my hearing – and found a career as a professional dancer'

Professional dancer Cai Glover lost his hearing when he was 8-years-old. Photo / Cas Public

When 8-year-old Cai Glover briefly recovered consciousness the morning after being rushed into hospital with meningitis, he was in a white room with pictures of Donald Duck and Goofy on the walls.

"I thought I had died," he says now. "At that age, I had no conception of what heaven would be like but, seeing your favourite characters on the wall? I thought this must be it."

Then his mother, sitting by his bedside, swam into focus. Glover doesn't remember this but has been told that he said to her, still semi-delirious, "Mum, the walkie-talkies don't work."

At the time, he didn't know what he was trying to communicate to her, and nor did she – but the following day, it was apparent: his parents' swiftness in seeking treatment had saved his life, but the agonising disease, which attacks the membrane covering the brain, had destroyed his hearing.

This childhood disaster, however, did not stand in the way of Glover, now 33, taking on a profession where auditory sensation is at the very heart of both its internal process and outside appeal: he is a contemporary dancer. He performs with acclaimed Canadian contemporary dance company Cas Public this week at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre, in a piece for children and adults, 9, set to a reconfigured version of Beethoven's 9th symphony, which the composer wrote when he himself was deaf.

Glover estimates now that his hearing is around 65 per cent of the quality it was before he had meningitis – but that's when his hearing aid and ear implant are working properly, which they don't do very well when he is dancing because sweat affects them. Thus he sometimes has to depend on visual cues from the other dancers and on his own mental metronome. And for 9, which is in part inspired by Glover's impairment, he removes his hearing aids altogether.

"The nuances that we express in movement, particularly in contemporary dance, can be affected by the cues that we're taking from the music," Glover explains. "People with normal hearing all hear music in a very similar way to each other. I don't, and I'm not programmed to respond to music in the same way that hearing people are. Often, I'm kind of inventing the musical connections that I'm not hearing and filling in the gaps so my nuances and accents are coming from a different place."

Glover was born and grew up in Prince George in British Columbia, Canada. He wanted at different times to be both an ice-hockey player and a basketball player – ambitions frustrated by his hearing impairment. It was when one of his two older sisters cajoled him and his twin brother into taking part in a rehearsal of The Nutcracker at Prince George's Enchainement dance school that he was smitten with dance.

"I loved the idea of being on stage and having people look at me," he says. Having had no prior training, he began taking dance classes, and, as an adult was hired by Atlanta Ballet but, dissatisfied with a seemingly permanent position in the corps and infuriated by an incident in which a ballet mistress asked him to wear a wig to cover up his – her word – "thingies" for a production of Romeo and Juliet, he moved on after a couple of years. In 2012, he joined Cas Public where he struck up a rapport with artistic director Hélène Blackburn. She was the first person in dance to talk to him about his hearing impairment and how it might be – because he hears, and therefore physically interprets, music differently – a positive thing rather than a problem. "In other companies," he says, "I'd been hiding and trying to fit in. But the best part of who you are and how you dance is the part that doesn't fit in."

As for dancing without hearing aids for 9, Glover says, "It was difficult at first because I had … to follow the dancers in front or around me.

"Eventually, we discovered that we could create our own rhythm among the dancers by becoming attuned to each other and our tempo tendencies. We create a rhythm, in breath, in our bodies and in the vibrations on the stage, that we attempt to share with each other. This way we are never following the music, but in a sense, it is following us."

The show has been very well received in France, where Cas Public have been touring it for the last three weeks. And, while it seems a remarkable achievement for someone hard of hearing to not only dance professionally but to achieve both popular and critical acclaim for it, Glover hates the "triumph over adversity" narrative, preferring his work to stand or fall on its own merits.

He and his show are also proving something of an inspiration. "It's great when hard-of-hearing kids come to it and see a hearing aid on stage and they accept that as, like, just another thing that happened," Glover says.

At a restaurant one evening, he fell into conversation with a woman whose 8-year-old son was about to get his first hearing aid. "We got him and his mum along to the show and he ended up being one of the kids on stage," says Glover. "He loved it. Afterwards I had a talk with him and he was worried about being able to play sports with [his hearing aid] on, so I was able to reassure him on that front by doing pirouettes and letting him see that it would stay on. I got a lot of satisfaction from that."