The Mosaic Body: Interpreting Disability in Performance

Abstract

The 2011 production of Singaporean playwright Geraldine Song’s Mosaic represented a serious attempt at integrating a disabled performer with Trisomy 21 Down syndrome into a public theater performance in Singapore. Drawing upon the critical ideas espoused by Carrie Sandahl, Petra Kuppers and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson on disability theory and performance, as well as his own experience with directing the first public performance of Mosaic in 2011, this chapter examines the ways in which the apparent tension between ableist ideology and the cultural symbolism of the disabled body in the play serves to undermine the audience’s presumptive interpretation of the performing body as the metaphor for neutrality and normalcy. The theatrical gaze of the body presupposes a concept of neutrality, which Sandahl calls ‘the tyranny of Neutral’, whereby the idiosyncrasy of the actor’s body is stripped through a systematic regime of physical training. It is only when the performing body is deemed capable of manifesting the neutral metaphor that a character can be built upon it.As persons with disabilities begin to play prominent roles in public performances across the world, a timely interrogation into the ways in which the representation of disability in performance art in Singapore affects the audience’s interpretation of the disabled body is welcome.