* One time I was in a waiting room and a guy was looking at me. He was looking at me as if I wasn’t even there. I’m usually quite aware of people staring at me when I am in shorts (and they don’t stare at me just because my legs are naked, but also because they are weird). My body is freaky in a way that most of the time surprises people: you do not get the freakness right away, it’s not a “spotlight-like freakness''; it’s a more subtle one, the one that you do not notice at first but that once you discover you can’t stop looking at. like these meme-images that you do not get immediately but after a few seconds realize what is wrong. Maybe I was just a little tired and I didn’t notice that he had been staring at my legs for a very long time. My friend realized it before I did, and at a certain point, whispering, she told me: hey did you see how insistent he is? He’s been staring at you nonstop for a few minutes now. When I realized what was happening I thought “Who the fuck gave you permit to invade my personal space in this way?” So then I started to look back and when he noticed that I was staring at him, he turned his gaze away very quickly, quite embarrassed and guilty.

I hate and I love those guilty gazes, it’s like when you catch someone doing something they are not supposed to do. Something similar happened another time: a lady on the street was staring at my legs; but when our gazes met, instead of looking away, she kept looking at me and smiled at me in a friendly way. I thought I had found an ally.


* An ally is a non-disabled teacher that takes the responsibility to find alternative ways to do a practice or that proposes a practice that includes a plurality of options and does not let a disabled person do all the work.

An ally is a non-disabled person that does not assume able-bodiedness just because disability is not evident or visible in the room. 

An ally is a director that does not blame a disabled person for not fitting in normative boxes, approaches and methodologies but that embraces the variety and specificity of each body as a way to develop new dramaturgies, aesthetics, languages.