On the banks of the river Adige, Lara, our charming guide from Rovereto Tourist Board, explained that silkworms ‘dance’ for three days to build their cocoons, each one yielding a kilometre of the precious thread that put her city on the map. It was perhaps fitting, then, that it took us three days of dance and discussion at Oriente Occidente to reach the liquid beauty of Sharon Fridman’s duet Go Figure.

In it, dancer Shmuel Dvir Cohen leaned into the possibilities offered by his differently abled body. Draping and swinging from a motorised wheelchair, using crutches as levers – and weapons – and (in collaboration with fellow dancer Tomer Navot) hoisting himself shoulder-high, like a boxing champ celebrating a great victory, he looked limitless rather than limited. For fifty minutes, his cocoon became our whole world, and we were the richer for it.

Our journey to that point had seen us ponder upon some of the festival’s more perplexing high-concept performances; reflect, in casual conversation, on what makes a good dance piece (fyi, a work that makes us think, feel and entertains – or at least does two of those three); and consider, in our programme’s more structured chats, how to write inclusively about dance artists with disabilities.

Here, in Go Figure, we had a performer that convention would label ‘disabled’ engaging us, moving us and challenging us – a feat that none of the ‘able-bodied’ works we saw had accomplished. How ironic that the piece that felt most artistically valid was built around a body that society would brand an ‘invalid’. As the timeless wisdom of Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti would have it: it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.