MEXICO:ROSSANA PENALOZA has floated across stages in Lima and Havana and Mexico City. She has writhed and winced, spun and darted.
But this prima ballerina, the embodiment of beauty and athleticism, had to sit down to really shake people. Sit down in a wheelchair.
For weeks now, Penaloza has shocked and shamed Mexico, performing a one-woman show that challenges perceptions of the disabled in a country where people with disabilities frequently live cloistered lives because of the social stigma associated with their condition here.
Although Penaloza is not disabled - at 45 her limbs can still send her shooting artfully across a stage - she conceived a startling performance almost entirely confined to a wheelchair. A dance on wheels. For six months before her debut this spring, Penaloza chose to live in a wheelchair. She tried to navigate Mexico City sidewalks that have no ramps or that have broken ramps or ramps so narrow her wheelchair didn't fit.
She cringed as speeding drivers came breathtakingly close to running her down, even when she was on the pedestrian crossing.
But most of all, she watched people's eyes. After years of catching bouquets and taking bows, she suddenly was "the other", a freak, an annoyance and, maybe worst of all, an object of pity. She cried every day. And she was furious.
"And You, What?" - the title of Penaloza's one-woman show - grew out of those frustrating days. Her "grito" - a Spanish word that means emphatic cry - has turned her into an accidental activist, a buzz-generating and provocative voice. All it took was a ballerina willing not to use her legs.
She has earned a following among students at the nearby National Autonomous University of Mexico. One recent evening, scores of them packed an art house theatre to watch her.
On stage, Penaloza transforms her wheelchair from an object that limits her to an object that enhances. She abandons the use of her legs, picking them up and dropping them heavily over the backrest. Then she arches her back, dangling over the edge of the seat and gliding effortlessly.
In one scene, Penaloza touches herself beneath her clothes. Lourdes Silva, director of a Mexico City radio programme staffed by disabled people, was transfixed.
"People - especially here in Mexico - don't realise that the disabled often experience sexuality just like anyone else," Silva said in an interview. "It never gets talked about, and you certainly never see it on a stage. It was powerful."
Even the music is searching, questioning, inconclusive. "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas," the Latin classic by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farres that repeats "perhaps, perhaps, perhaps," jumps out of the speakers as Penaloza hurtles toward the end of the stage. For all her grace in the wheelchair, Penaloza's performance strikes some of its most powerful notes when she is still. That is when the audience starts to feel the heat of her artistic statement.
"Will you play with me?" she asks, her eyes boring into those of one person in the audience after another. "Will you be my friend?" "Will you give me work?" Then she waits. And waits.
Invariably, those who come under her gaze begin to squirm. They fiddle with their rings. Brush lint from lintless shoulders. Stare at their shoes.
Few ever want to play.
And that's the point, Penaloza said one recent afternoon at a cafe in Coyoacan, a neighbourhood whose beloved cobblestone streets presented a nightmarish obstacle course during her months of preparation for the show.
The anger, frustration and sadness that inform Penaloza's show rose quickly to the surface and overflowed. She seethed about Mexican schools too often segregating students with disabilities and lamented the "paternalism" of Mexican society and families that she says often isolates young disabled people.
"My work is a grain of sand in an oyster so that all this will change," she said.- (LA Times-Washington Post service)