For those of us who are privileged enough to use our vision to orient ourselves and comprehend our world, John Berger claimed in Ways of Seeing that ‘to look is an act of choice’: we choose when and where to look both by opening and closing our eyelids, by turning our heads (towards or away) and moving our bodies in space. Yet this process of selective looking is a choice that sheds light on certain aspects of our environment while turning others invisible. But what happens when we lose agency over what we see because what is offered to look at is obscured, embellished or made invisible? To attempt to answer this question, I will look at two radically different works presented at this year’s Oriente Occidente festival.

Placed in a thematic that concerns the future (perhaps given the young age of the choreographer and the topic he deals with), Nicola Galli’s Ultra is a work unfolding on a dim stage fully covered with earth where invisibility or, more accurately, obscuring the spectator’s vision is an artistic choice. The minimally illuminated stage is envisioned by the choreographer as a dark cave, also assimilating a possible underground world or even a graveyard. In this eerie and rather lifeless world, the choice of aesthetic invisibility as darkness aims to evoke the workings of an ecosystem in transformation that often remains unperceived in everyday life. The presence of the two dancers as dark silhouettes throughout the work does not escape an anthropocentric approach, where their biped verticality and the only source of light (short columns reminiscent of sporadic skyscrapers in a deserted miniature city or light-made tombstones) declare their hegemonic presence. The invisibility, although aesthetic, encompasses a valid preoccupation with a dystopian scenario where the mutated human(oid)s are perhaps the only survivors, both fearless and frightened, needing to stay hidden and yet in symbiotic connection with the only organisms left alive in a destroyed and lightless world.

By contrast, in the haunting and persistent presence of a wheelchair that rotates around the oneiric universe constructed by Shmuel Dvir Cohen and Tomer Navot, Sharon Fridman’s Go Figure becomes a space to overcome physical limits. As the programme notes inform us, Cohen is a body-mind therapist affected by a neurological syndrome that influences the control of his muscles, and Navot a contact improvisation practitioner. Together, they create a movement vocabulary based on contact improvisation that allows Cohen’s neurological disability to become almost invisible. Thanks to a co-created corporeal system of mutual support that also involves crutches, Cohen’s body obtains superpowers that liberate him, even momentarily, from the constraints of his disability. At times he seems to be flying, and other times to find the strength to be a supporter. Under the illusionistic light, the bodies of the dancers dressed with the same leotards often confuse the eye, creating a blurred line between who is disabled and who is not. Go Figure does not intend to trick the viewer but instead to serve as a tool of empowerment and even inspiration for bodies that are self-defined as mixed-ability, and not only.

Fridman’s approach brings to my mind the words of deaf artist and activist Diana Anselmo, who, reflecting on the role of art, says that ‘the stage enables an unexpected use of the self’. In the case of Go Figure, the stage has the power to create an illusionary invisibility (of disability) far distant from ‘disability passing’, a term borrowed from the field of disability studies and introduced by Anselmo during her thought-provoking lecture performance Self-portrait in 3 Acts. Disability passing constantly seeks the deliberate invisibility of an impairment and, as described by Anselmo, is a technique to avoid stigma and appear normative that is often paired with anxiety. Go Figure does not disguise disability but it integrates it in a powerful way by focusing on what a mixed-ability body can do, not what it cannot do. It applies the lens of an empowering gaze in a world that seeks affirmation through the traumatising gaze troubled by the injustice of vision.

‘It’s time, it’s time, it’s time’ is the motto that introduces this year’s festival, and it seems to me that it’s time for aesthetic invisibility to alert us, for illusionary invisibility to fascinate us, and for deliberate invisibility to make us question our gaze.