Camera Lucida is a work that reimagines the relationship between theatre and the body through the lens of neurodiversity. Created by two Korean artists from Project YYIN in collaboration with Canada’s National accessArts Centre, the piece features performances by four dancers with developmental disability. Departing from conventional stage design, the production incorporates screens and information panels along two sides of the theatre walls. Audience members with varying needs are encouraged to choose seating that feels most comfortable to them—an approach that embodies a commitment to care and attentiveness to diverse sensory experiences.

In theatre, bodies have long been asked to become something “other” than themselves: the body on stage a transparent signifier, the audience’s body a disembodied flicker in the dark. For decades, many have sought to return the body to the theatre. Yet even in works that center embodiment, the problem has often been the “normal” body—the only body historically recognized as the body. Here, bodies are no longer measured against what is considered “normal.” Instead, bodies marked by ADHD, autism spectrum, emotional dysregulation, or dyslexia appear as they are: imperfect, shifting, plural. They tremble, hesitate, collide, and pause. The artists call this a “poetics of care”—not as moral obligation, but as the fundamental condition of our shared, finite existence. Camera Lucida assembles movement, spatial interventions, and layered sound into fleeting moments of tension and proximity. The work poses a question: Is there a theatre that can imagine “us”? A question perhaps more vital than what kind of theatre we can imagine.