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.
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- 1.
Geraldine Song. “Mosaic”. In To Thee Do We Cry, Poor Banished Children. 2010. (Sydney: Horizon Publishing Group, 2013), 39–95; in genetic terms, a person with Trisomy 21 Down syndrome has every cell in her or his body affected by the extra 21st chromosome. According to the International Mosaic Down Syndrome Association, however, a person with ‘Mosaic’ Down syndrome (also known as MDS) has only a small percentage of cells afflicted with Trisomy 21. Thus, it is not visually apparent that he or she has a disability.
- 2.
Geraldine Song. To Thee Do We Cry, Poor Banished Children; this section contains a partial adaptation of the Director’s Notes for Mosaic, 41–43.
- 3.
Michel Foucault. “Seeing and Knowing.” The Birth of the Clinic. 1963. (London: Routledge, 2003), 134.
- 4.
Carrie Sandahl. “The Tyranny of Neutral.” Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Eds. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2005), 262.
- 5.
According to Sandahl, the human body is imagined through the medical notion of ‘cure’, which seeks to correct any physical or emotional defect on that body: “Bodies are considered damaged physically and emotionally from the process of living, and those bodies capable of cure are suitable actors. Disabled bodies, though, cannot be cured. They may tremor, wobble, or be asymmetrical” (262). In this sense, the disabled body is always already abnormal.
- 6.
Sandahl. “The Tyranny of Neutral”, 262.
- 7.
Examples of Hollywood movies that feature able-bodied actors playing characters with physical or cognitive disabilities include Forrest Gump, Rain Man and The King’s Speech.
- 8.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. Extraordinary Bodies. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 347.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Telory Davies. “Mobility: AXIS Dancers Push the Boundaries of Access.” Text and Performance Quarterly 28.1–2 (2008): 59.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Simi Linton. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 12.
- 13.
Sara Tulloch. “Ableism.” Reader’s Digest Oxford Wordfinder. (New York and Oxford: Reader’s Digest Association and Oxford University Press), 1993.
- 14.
Linton, 11.
- 15.
Ibid., 13.
- 16.
Garland-Thomson, 6.
- 17.
Susan Bordo. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 67.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare. Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. (London: Continuum), 2002, 3.
- 20.
Alex McClimens. “From Vagabonds to Victorian Values: The Social Construction of a Disability Identity.” Learning Disability: A Life Cycle Approach to Valuing People. Eds. Peter Goward, Gordon Grant, Paul Ramacharan and Malcolm Richardson. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 37; writing on the social construction of disability identity, McClimens notes that “individuals who have an extra chromosome (Trisomy 21) have Down’s syndrome and inevitably inherit a degree of intellectual impairment”. Thus, he contends that it would be difficult to decouple the biological facticity of disability from the social construction of disability identity, especially when the disability in question is visually apparent.
- 21.
Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex.’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 49.
- 22.
Ibid, 270; emphasis in the original.
- 23.
Deanna L. Fassett and Dana L. Morella. “Remaking (the) Discipline: Marking the Performative Accomplishment of (Dis)Ability.” Text and Performance Quarterly 28.1–2 (2008): 150.
- 24.
Ato Quayson. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 36.
- 25.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 6.
- 26.
Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, eds. Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 2.
- 27.
Sigmund Freud. “The ‘Uncanny’”. 1919. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. Ed. James Strachey. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 220.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Petra Kuppers. “Deconstructing Images: Performing Disability.” Contemporary Theatre Review 11.3–4 (2001): 26; emphasis in the original.
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What is Mosaic Down Syndrome? Research and Information: MDS Facts. International Mosaic Down Syndrome Association. n.d. Web. 21 Jan 2015.
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Fernandez, S. (2016). The Mosaic Body: Interpreting Disability in Performance. In: Ade, W., Ching, L. (eds) Contemporary Arts as Political Practice in Singapore. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57344-5_5
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