We often seek the theatre as an escape from the stress of everyday life. But in YEAR ZERO: Disability Redefined by ART:DIS (Arts & Disability Singapore) and the Singapore International Festival of Arts, the stage becomes a place where the cringe of exclusion is not smoothed over, but scrutinised, inviting us to sit with the very uncomfortable reality of living with disability.

The theatre is rarely a place of silence; it is a place of breath, of weight, and of the inevitable friction that occurs when one body encounters another. In this production for the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), YEAR ZERO: Disability Redefined by ART:DIS, amplifies this friction until we find ourselves in a world where arts, language, and identity have been erased.

This sets the stage for a disabled person’s experience, one where totally new ways of communicating need to be reinvented from scratch. In this way, YEAR ZERO invites audience members to sit with several uncomfortable questions around the lived realities of disabled people.

Here, survival in a broken world is not necessarily about regaining one’s independence. Instead, the importance of interdependence is thrust to the fore.

BE PREPARED TO CRINGE

The creators are explicit: this is “not comfortable theatre”.

As Verena Tay, Researcher, Co-Writer and Creative Narrator notes, “We want the audience to cringe when you listen to certain words being said or watch certain physical actions being done between the disabled and non-disabled communities.”

While still offering moments of entertainment, the show nevertheless is thick with the tension, vulnerability, and exhaustion that comes from constantly navigating normative systems not designed with deaf and disabled people in mind.

Yuki Neoh, Performer-Deviser elaborates: “The discomfort is not there to punish audiences, but to invite deeper reflection and to engage more honestly in this real reality.”

FUNCTIONAL ACCESS OR FUNCTIONAL BAND-AIDS?

While the production utilises creative audio description and built-in sign language, the show posits they could become mere functional band-aids that don’t necessarily move society’s conversations on disability.

If you find yourself asking if all this functional access is really enough, Jade Ow, Co-Researcher and Co-Writer invites us to think a little deeper.

“I think this show will ask the audience to witness how functional access can become immaterial when there is no intention to set aside all our biases and listen to each other.”

It’s a poignant reminder that humans can create as much physical and social infrastructure to help people with disability participate in life meaningfully, but if we don’t dismantle our unconscious bias, the infrastructure remains a hollow framework that facilitates physical entry while failing to achieve genuine social integration.

THE UNSTABLE REALITY OF SURVIVAL AND THE MYTH OF INDEPENDENCE

Even though the show is a creation of ART:DIS and its core theme still rests on the topic of disability, Tung Ka Wai, Performer-Deviser notes, “The show stopped feeling like a statement about disability quite early on. It became something stranger and less stable than that. We are not presenting certainty on stage. We are presenting bodies trying to navigate uncertainty in real time.”

Strangely, this might just be the very element that connects with non-disabled audiences.

After all, aren’t we all striving to survive in an unstable world one way or another?

Furthermore, in this instability a new hierarchy—or rather, a lack of one—emerges. Yuki Neoh identifies interdependence as the most vital survival tool. Within the deaf and disabled communities, this collective strength builds autonomy through mutual support and shared learning. It is a radical challenge to the mainstream obsession with independence—the fallacy that “independence means doing everything alone”.

She continues, “This challenges the mainstream idea that independence means doing everything alone. In these communities and their allies, interdependence actually builds confidence, autonomy, and self-advocacy.”

A REFLECTION ON WHAT IT MEANS TO START FROM ZERO

As the lights dim, we are left with a lingering, speculative tension.

If everything was taken from us tomorrow, if everything resets to zero, what is the one gesture, bodily movement, sound, or piece of human humanity we would fight to preserve? The answer is as myriad and singular as the lives that give it voice.

For Jade, the devising process of YEAR ZERO revealed a simple, yet profound truth: “The highest level of access is when there is no imposition of any one value system or way of life, but simply truly listening to each other. If we end up flattening each other with labels and stereotypes, then we are already denying each other the right to be a complex human being, disabled or not.”

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