Introduction — Poetics of Care
[Camera Lucida] is a new performance produced in collaboration between Project YYIN and the National accessArts Centre (NaAC). With four dancers with developmental disabilities, it re-imagines the theatre apparatus from a neurodiversity perspective and confronts the ‘strange and beautiful’ of our togetherness in the here and now.

Synopsis “Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater.”

“For punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole-and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”

- From Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

In the theater, the human body has long been required to be something other than the body. On one hand, the body on stage has been forced to be a sign that truthfully conveys the meaning and content of a theater work. On the other hand, the body of the audience has been forced to be a spirit just blinking in the dark. For the past several decades, so many attempts have been made to give bodies back to the theater. However, what has always been problematic even in the body movements raising issues of the human body has been the “normal” body (the only body that has been considered a body).

The concept of neurodiversity opens a possibility of going beyond the dualistic, pathological approach of dividing what is normal and abnormal. It also invites us to accept “different” bodies with neurological characteristics that used to be considered “abnormal”: mood disorder, ADHD, autistic spectrum disorder and dyslexia. This work is about reflecting on the theater from the perspective of neurodiversity and we call it “Poetics of Care.” As we are all imperfect and finite beings, “care” is given as “our” existential condition and possibility before it becomes our moral duty or ethical responsibility.

“Poetics of Care” leads different bodies to face the theater. Giving back bodies to the theater, we make a play by gathering together the moments of bodies that make a true play and the unique, “pricking” experiences that surpass linguistic meaning. What could a play imagine ourselves to be? This may be a question more important than what we could imagine a play to be. We imagine a play that could imagine “us.”