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That was in the days before Daryl trekked 220 miles across the Nicaraguan jungle for Ö÷²¥´óÐã TWO's Beyond Boundaries, the reality TV show cum documentary which followed 11 disabled people on a gruelling 28-day expedition across Nicaragua.

Nowadays, people might be less surprised to hear that the 30-year-old Londoner's latest project involves performing as a trapeze artist and dancing with Zimmer frames and crutches.

Before the general public start to suspect that he has a serious deathwish, Daryl is keen to point out that the experience of being patronised on the tube is precisely what has inspired his new one man show, Moments in Motion, which forms part of this year's Xposure Festival of disability art.

"Those people on the tube were obviously fascinated by seeing me creating a form of movement that they'd never seen before, so I started to wonder how mobility aids might be used to create different styles of moving," he explains. "People think that if you have a mobility aid it means your movement is restricted, but actually the point of them is to help you move. I started thinking: how far could I push myself on a pair of crutches? I began playing with different sizes of crutches, oversized ones, undersized ones, leg braces which make your legs rigid - to discover forms of movement that were different from the norm. And at one point while I'm moving across the stage I just continue up onto the trapeze."

It might not sound like the obvious next step for someone with Spina Bifida, but Daryl found that the upper body strength he has built up by years of using crutches helped him master the trapeze fairly quickly. It also helped that he had done some circus skills training in the past, particularly acrobatic tumbling. But, he says, he had always been taught those skills without crutches, and wanted to see what would happen if he threw them into the equation.

"Funnily enough, this idea of doing something around mobility and movement was one I'd had for a while, but then a couple of years ago at Liberty [London's disability arts festival] I saw an American guy called the Crutchmaster do this amazing breakdancing on crutches. I thought - damn, someone's got there before me, I better get going."

Daryl started working with director Georgina Lamb from the company Frantic Assembly, whose style of mixing text and movement was an inspiration for Moments in Motion, and doing conditioning exercises with a trapeze artist. "I only started the trapeze earlier this year, but I absolutely loved it and really got into it," he says. "It's a static trapeze, so it doesn't swing from one side of the stage to the other, but I do swing on it, and climb up the ropes. It's quite comical and clown-like, even though it's intercut by a story which is very dark at times."

The narrative of Moments in Motion follows a young gay man looking for Mr Right, and spending anxious hours by the phone waiting for the guy he meets in a nightclub to call. The experience triggers flashbacks to childhood experiences of waiting on cold hospital trolleys for operations and spending nights on the wards alone.

They are experiences which spring from Daryl's own life, both as a gay man living in London now, and as a child growing up in Nottingham who was in and out of hospital until his late teens.

But by the age of 14, Daryl had already started acting with Central TV, landing small parts in various children's TV shows. He went on to do a theatre degree and has since performed at the Nottingham Playhouse, in shows with disabled theatre company Graeae, and in a Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 sketch show.

His first taste of masterminding a theatre show came in 2001, when he was appointed associate director of Half Moon, the young people's theatre company. Among the productions he directed there was When Snow Falls, the company's first to integrate British Sign Language into a performance.

After leaving to pursue his ambition to create a one-man show, he was snapped up for Beyond Boundaries, which has just finished screening on Ö÷²¥´óÐã TWO.

"I was wondering exactly what I was going to do next, and it was perfect timing," he admits. "And I wanted to go into a jungle."

The show famously had its fair share of arguments and fallings out, and Daryl was one of only seven who completed the trek. But he says it was the catfights that probably did more to challenge disability stereotypes than the horse riding and white water rafting. "The way that Beyond Boundaries changed people's perceptions is actually the seeing people crying, making up, being bitchy, snotty and all that stuff," he says.

Moments in Motion is likely to do the same, and that is something Daryl is looking forward to. "I like exploding people's ideas about what I can and can't do, playing with their perceptions. I tease the audience - I pose the idea of the weak, disabled person who can't do anything, lull them into a false sense of security, then boom! It all goes manic."

But is the trapeze really necessary?

"As a disabled person who works in theatre, you're going to be challenging some people's perceptions just by walking on stage. But you might as well play with that and have real fun with it."

• Moments in Motion, by Daryl Beeton, was performed at , Archway Road, London on 18-19 November, 2005.