Disabled groove to the beat on stage

IT takes a while for you to organise your thoughts while watching Disabled Theatre. Is this a revelation of mentally challenged people - or a freak show? Is this a celebration of humanity in all its diversity, or an exploitation of performers with disabilities? Are we supposed to applaud or be appalled?

The Singapore International Festival of Arts has offered some remarkably challenging works so far - and this work by Theatre Hora is no different.

Conceived by the cutting-edge choreographer Jerome Bel, it puts a group of mentally challenged performers on stage to introduce themselves and then perform a dance which they choreographed themselves to a music piece of their choice.

The dances are remarkable not because the choreography is polished; it isn't - but because watching mentally disabled performers lose themselves in music reveals something so fundamentally human, intimate and common about their experience that one is taken aback.

Here, the mentally disabled are taken out of the arguably frequent context of appealing to your sympathy. Instead, they want you to see them on their own terms, as empowered creative individuals capable of making deep and powerful connections with music and expressing them.

The results are eye-opening, invigorating and unforgettable. You're forced, in 90 minutes, to confront everything you think you know or fear about the disabled. It is especially bracing if your experiences of interacting with people with Down's Syndrome and other mental disabilities are fairly limited.

In the final count, there's nothing demeaning about what choreographer Bel has done. He carefully avoids any suggestion of exploitation and, conversely, glorification by keeping the work spare and direct.

The stage is bare-bones: There are 11 chairs on it, one for each performer. The translator Chris Weinheimer sits by the side to translate the performers' Swiss-German words into English.

The clothes the performers wear are their own, and they have not been advised at all on what to wear. They each take turns to perform their solo routines. But they're allowed to stand on their seats and dance when it's not their turn.

Yet within this simple and unexceptional structure, humanity blooms.

The Singapore International Festival of Arts is now on till Sept 21. Visit sifa.sg for the programme