Dancers of diverse abilities provoke and inspire

Colony - A True Colors Project, a Singapore International Festival of Arts commission, is an example of collaboration done right.

- Melissa Quek

DANCE COLONY - A TRUE COLORS PROJECT Various artists Drama Centre Theatre May 30

The clear artistic vision of producer Audrey Perera and artistic director Remesh Panicker weaves together film, dance, music and access tools such as creative captioning into a cohesive story.

The simple idea of how interdependence enables an ant colony to thrive has produced a multi-layered work in which diverse artists from different disciplines, cultures and abilities come together to create a performance that questions the audiences' pre-conceived notions of dance, the body and society.

Dancers leave the stage. A screen lowers and covers the staged tenement for behind-the-scenes footage to appear. The performance has begun. The screen rises, once again presenting a small rundown corner of a city where prejudice and fear divide its inhabitants.

Singaporean dancers Weng Jiaying and Timothy Lee, who both have Down syndrome, and Japanese street dancer Daiki Nishimura, who has dwarfism, are going about their day collecting cardboard boxes when a gang swoops into the space, barrelling through with sweeping movements.