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DANCE

Dancing was 'everything' to Napu Boychuk, the world's only Inuit ballet dancer – until a near-fatal accident on a Cuban beach took away the use of his once agile body. Despite a struggle to get him the care he needs, Napu has a more ambitious goal: To dance again

There's a picture taped to the turquoise wall at the foot of Napu Boychuk's bed. It was taken during a performance of Swan Lake, the great ballet by Tchaikovsky it shows Napu wearing stage makeup and tan tights, standing tall and straight and sure of himself, with a wry smile playing across his lips.

There are many photos of Napu dancing: striking a modified pas de bourrée at a cousin's wedding; showing off his "attitude" on the deck of a cruise ship; pirouetting outside a Barcelona church.

The picture from Swan Lake is ordinary in that sense – it shows him in his element. But now, taped to the wall, it seems to map the distance between what is ordinary and what his life has become.

Napu Boychuk lies in a hospital bed in the Cira Garcia hospital in Havana with his father, Dan, and sister, Tuutalik. ERIC ANDREW-GEE/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

On Dec. 13, the Ryerson student was swimming at a beach resort in Varadero at the beginning of a vacation with his father and sister when he says he felt the pull of an undertow. Underwater, his head struck a rock; the blow dislodged two vertebrae, fracturing his spinal column. He nearly drowned.

The accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. After surgery, he began a long, slow recuperation at the Cira Garcia hospital in a Havana suburb of wilting trees, cracked pavement and peeling paint. A feeding tube in his throat prevented him from speaking. And his dancer's body, so strong and assured in the photo, is slowly withering under the crisp white hospital sheets.

Still, Napu, 29, doesn't speak sorrowfully, or even sadly, about his ordeal. By all accounts, he is the only Inuit ballet dancer in the world, and maybe ever – discouragement doesn't come easily to him.

Instead, he's planning to dance again. The way he describes it, this is hardly a choice – dance is "everything" to him, he says.

The picture on the wall urges him on, with its romance and confidence and raw physicality. Asked why it's there, he answers quickly – or as quickly as he can, with his laboured, almost soundless way of talking – by mouthing the word, "Inspiration."



When he was little, Napu lacked his later grace. "The baby worm," his parents called him, for his propensity to shimmy on his belly rather than crawl.

But living in the Northwest Territories as a boy, Napu began growing into his body. Soon he relished physical activity of all kinds, from baseball to tennis to speed skating, his father says.

Mr. Boychuk took a radical approach to raising Napu and his daughter Tuutalik, treating them more or less as his equals. He also believed, fatefully, that children should choose their own interests.

"You're just a facilitator for these new humans," he says. "It's my job to introduce them to the world and discover their aptitude."

That disdain for convention would prove fateful. When his son was 14, two years after the family had moved to Toronto, Mr. Boychuk signed Napu up for an adult ballet class. He was a natural.

One of Napu’s teachers, Brian Blair, describes his old student, shown at left, as having a ‘gentle soul.’ HANDOUT

Dance soon absorbed Napu like nothing else had before. Mr. Boychuk took out every ballet VHS from the library that he could find. When YouTube came along, it deepened Napu's immersion: here, on one website, was footage of every great ballet dancer since the advent of film, from Nijinsky to Nureyev to Karen Kain. Mr. Boychuk knew his son was obsessed when he came home one day to find 15-year-old Napu weeping as he watched Baryshnikov and Makarova perform the pas de deux in Giselle.

The young dancer progressed quickly despite his late start. He was especially in tune with the musical aspect of ballet, able to identify a number by hearing a few notes of its score. "Dancing to the music" became a kind of mantra for him, in contrast with the stiff formality of some classical ballet.

But when Napu applied to join the company of the National Ballet School, where he had been taking classes, he didn't get in. He was told that he had started dance too late, and that his legs weren't flexible enough. Mr. Boychuk was "pissed off to beat hell," he says.

Napu accepted the situation with characteristic serenity. Mr. Boychuk, a high-strung, short-tempered man, recognizes his son as an opposite type.

"Napu is an Inuk. He's a traditional Inuk of a long time ago," his father said. "He's happy with the simple things in life."

‘Dancing to the music’ was Boychuk’s mantra as he progressed in his studies. HANDOUT

Most of all, Napu was happy when he was dancing. To accommodate the long hours of training, his father enrolled him in The Abelard School, a progressive private high school that allows flexible schedules for students with outside interests.

Brian Blair, one of his teachers, remembered Napu's "gentle soul." Mr. Blair said that in an English class, when students were learning a poem by John Keats, Napu not only recognized the poem, but knew it by heart, and recited it verbatim for the room.

That emotional maturity helped him cope with tragedy: in 2003, his mother, Juliana, died of nasopharynx cancer, a genetic disease associated with people of Asian ancestry like the Inuit.

"Through all that, Napu was just wonderfully composed," said Mr. Blair. "Obviously sorrowful, but completely together, and focused on his work. He showed a lot of character during that difficult time."

All the while, Napu kept dancing. On a tour of northern communities with his troupe, appreciative Russian guest workers in the audience gave him his ballet name, "Napushka."

And when he finally auditioned at Ryerson's dance program four years ago, the judges were "very impressed," Mr. Boychuk said, and allowed the new student to skip first-year dance courses.

Mr. Blair saw his former student perform after graduation. "He was wonderfully graceful and poised – like a swan," the teacher said.



On Dec. 12, the Boychuks set off for two weeks in Cuba. "I will try to bring back some cigars and rum," Napu wrote on Facebook.

Of the 1.3 million Canadians who visit Cuba every year, about 75 die – a number of them while swimming in the choppy waters of the Florida Straits at resorts, says Yves Gagnon, Canada's ambassador to the country.

"People doing things in the sea," as he puts it.

The Boychuks planned to stay at the Puntarena hotel in Varadero for three days before spending the rest of their holiday in Havana. The Puntarena sits near the beginning of a miles-long strip of touristy hotels. With its queasy orange colour scheme and faint haze of smoke, it has a 1970s feel.

Early on the morning of Dec. 13, the day after he and his family arrived, Napu went swimming with a Russian he had recently met. While they were still in shallow water, Napu says he felt tugged down by a strong undertow.

"I dove. I felt something on my neck. And I couldn't move," he said from his hospital bed at the end of January. "My face was in the sand. I remember seeing lots of water and sand. And I couldn't breathe. Then I realized I was paralyzed. So I just floated there. And that's it."

Napu had struck a rock under water; his fifth and sixth vertebrae were jolted out of place. Technically, he had drowned. The Russian friend, whose name he can't remember, pulled him to shore.

It was too early for a lifeguard to be on duty, but a security guard spotted Napu's limp body on the beach. He'd earlier cautioned the two men about swimming, believing they had been drinking. Napu's family says alcohol played no role in the accident.

The guard, who thought he was looking at a dead man, started CPR. Napu spat up a geyser of water. Later, doctors would have to pump quantities of sand out of his lungs.

"It's a miracle that he's alive," said Laura Sempe, sales manager at the hotel.

Only later, in the ambulance, did anyone but Napu realize that he couldn't move.

Doctors at a clinic in Varadero soon diagnosed Napu with spine trauma, put him in a neck brace and sent him by ambulance to a bigger hospital in Matanzas, some 40 kilometres away.

The first thing Napu said to his father was, "I'm afraid I won't be able to dance again."



Faustino Perez hospital in Matanzas is a shocking place to visit. Fluorescent tubes are scarce in the overhead lights, stolen by hospital staff and never replaced. Some ceilings leak, leaving puddles. The whole building is dimly lit, dirty, and littered with cigarette butts; rusty oil drums serve as garbage bins. The foot of a body in the morgue was visible down a long corridor during a visit by The Globe earlier this year.

"It's like a horror movie," said Tuutalik, Napu's sisiter.

Napu's trouble at the hospital started as soon as he arrived, the family says. Staff asked to use the ambulance's neck brace. The ambulance refused – it was the only one they had. So doctors improvised: Napu's fractured spine ended up precariously stabilized between two empty plastic bottles.

In the end, Napu got the surgery he needed some 48 hours after the accident.

"It makes me cry for the people of Cuba, that hospital," said Mr. Boychuk.

For the operation that would fuse his vertebrae back together, Napu was sent to Cira Garcia, a more genteel facility where injured expats often receive treatment.

Though it's one of the best in Cuba, it hardly looks like a hospital – more like the embassy of a small country, or a provincial community centre. Its two stucco wings are full of kitschy pastel portraits of revolutionary heroes like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and oddly devoid of patients.

And despite its lofty reputation, it would make most doctors in the developed world shudder. Napu's room in the ICU has brown drip stains on one wall, and Mr. Boychuk has occasionally volunteered to buy extra AA batteries and adult diapers when the hospital runs out.

Still, the care has been exceptional, the family says. Nurses here love their new patient, blowing kisses at "mi Napu."

"My Canadian boyfriend," one nurse calls him. " Es el handsome de la sala," coos one doctor.

The staff knows that he's a dancer and rate him highly for it. Dance is taken seriously in Cuba: Napu's physiotherapist is a former ballerin himself, and talks to his patient about the craft in broken English.

"Napu's famous in there," said Mr. Boychuk. "The finance clerk, the people delivering the food, the janitor. Everyone knows him."

But his family has had to fight to keep Napu here. After the surgery, their insurance company instructed doctors to sedate him so that he could fly back to Canada, the family says.

Dan and Tuutalik sat on the patio of their favourite government-run café near the hospital and decided that Napu wasn't ready to travel. So they called a meeting of Cira Garcia's doctors – not hard in a facility that small – and within five minutes had resolved to keep their boy in Havana. The hospital had the equipment he needed and a caring staff – flying was all risk, as the Boychuks saw it.

In return, the insurance company claimed that Napu's condition no longer constituted an "emergency," and refused to pay his medical bills. After negotiations the family reached a settlement they can't discuss because of a non-disclosure agreement.

Fundraising from back home has helped. Scallywags, the uptown Toronto sports bar where Napu once worked, has raised thousands of dollars. An online fundraiser has raised more than $4,500.

It helps to have legions of well-wishers back home. Napu's Facebook page has become a clearinghouse for get-well-soon messages and expressions of support.

His old boss as Scallywags spoke of Napu's irrepressible sense of humour and flights of conversational fancy.

"He's just a happy-go-lucky guy. He's just always happy," said Roland Michener, manager of operations at the bar. "He had the gift of the gab. He has the gift of the gab."

Napu's father signed him up for dance classes when he was 14. He was a natural. HANDOUT

Perhaps no one back home has been hit harder by Napu's injury than his best friend, Andrew McCormack.

The two of them met at Ryerson and bonded over their mutual obsessive love of dance.

"We'd be walking down the street and just break into dance," Mr. McCormack recalled. "Jumping out into ballet combinations across the street. We'd never not be dancing."

Napu's style was "princely," his friend says. "He has an elegance and grace to his movements." Jumps and spins – the most dramatic, performative elements of ballet – were his forte.

But Napu was no showboat – as a dance partner and as a friend, he was caring and conscientious, Mr. McCormack said. Not to mention single-minded.

"Most stubborn person I've ever met," said Mr. McCormack. "When he puts his mind to something and says he's going to do it, he's going to do it. So when he says he's going to dance his way out of Cuba, I believe him."

Still, Napu is a long way from his old self. His lower body, so precious to a dancer, is growing weak with disuse.

"It's painful for me to look at his legs," says his father. "He had beautiful ballet legs."

Napu, middle, had a ‘princely’ style of dancing, with a strong aptitude for jumps and spins, his best friend Andrew McCormack recalls. HANDOUT

Even for someone as kinetic as Napu, not being able to speak has been the most frustrating part of his convalescence. The lip reading routine that he has with Tuutalik is slow and laboured, though she's a patient interpreter.

It means that his best jokes are filtered through the time delay and chirpy voice of his sister's translation. The dynamic can add levity to otherwise grim conversations, but it also forces him to be terse. So when a reporter remembers that Napu's hearing is fine and apologizes for speaking to him like a toddler, Tuutalik's voice replies on his behalf, "I'm a big toddler inside."

Napu's best medicine may be the sunny disposition he has managed to preserve. Sometimes he feels angry or hard-done-by, he says – "naturally" – but mostly he's "trying to make the best of it."

That involves flashing a goofy sense of humour. Even in his condition, Napu has a dancer's instinct for performance, and delights in an audience. When asked what food he misses most, he smirks and whispers, "Beer."

Another gag involves imitating Marlon Brando playing Don Corleone in The Godfather, with his jutted jaw and puffed-out cheeks, his eyebrows raised in anguish. When a nurse slaps his arm, scolding him in jest, he laughs silently and gives her a mischievous smile.

"He likes to put on a good face; if other people are happy, he feels like his job is done," said Mr. Boychuk.

"Just a day after his surgery," Tuutalik recalls, "he said, 'Hey Tuut, have you had a mojito yet?' When he said that I just started crying."

To keep up his spirits, Napu is also hoarding things to look forward to. He doesn't want Tuutalik to read him Norwegian Wood by the novelist Haruki Murakami – he'd prefer to read it himself one day.

And he says that when he gets out of hospital, he's going to see a ballet in Havana, "for sure." It would be the consummation of a childhood dream; as a young dancer, he modelled himself after the relatively natural style of the Cuban academy, whose members he saw perform The Nutcracker in Hamilton once. His heroes include Jose Manuel Carreno and Carlos Acosta – Cuban stars of an earlier generation.

Lately, Napu has been given reason for optimism. Through physiotherapy, he can now partly lift his left arm, and wiggle his right. He's also regained feeling, and some involuntary movement, in his legs. Since The Globe's visit, he has regained some feeling in his lower back and movement in his fingers.

Napu remains hopeful. To channel that thought, he recites a favourite inspirational message – or mouths it, so that Tuutalik can say it out loud: "Although the skies are dark, and the road ahead is steep; yet with perseverance we can – nay, we shall – prevail."

Watch Napu Boychuk in action

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