“My Body Is Here” is a theater performance featuring actors with disabilities openly talking about their relationships, bodies, and desires, based on their personal experiences. 

The cast includes Bruno Ramos, who is deaf-mute, Haonê Thinar, with an amputation, Juliana Caldas, who has dwarfism, Pedro Fernandes, who has cerebral palsy with preserved cognitive ability and is a wheelchair user, and Jadson Abrãao, an actor and sign language interpreter.

Directing and playwriting are Julia Spadaccini, who is speaking deaf, and Clara Kutner.

The play “My Body Is Here” brings an original theme: affection and sexuality in bodies with disabilities. It is an unprecedented theme on stage and dives into reflecting on these bodies that are “marginal”, silenced, and socially denied. The body of a person with a disability is rarely explored as an object of love or sex, whether on stage, on TV, or in the movies.

Theater needs to do its part!

My Body Is Here” fiction comes in as a didactic and reflective element, simply because it connects the audience with the similarities that exist between us all and which are covered up by prejudice and lack of knowledge. People with disabilities carry a body and an essence that are alive. People with disabilities don’t need to enjoy their stories in silence, nor be infantilized in attempts to erase them, which go back to cultural and historical conceptions of what is considered “normal”.

The play offers the audience an insight into the intimacy, but above all the vitality and power of these individuals.

It’s a play that prioritizes the intimacy of the subjects dealt with. To overcome prejudices, there can be nothing more significant than the place of speech so the cast of people with different disabilities is the protagonist

The directing goes towards deepening the experiences, like a magnifying glass close to these bodies.

If it were a movie, we could say that the camera would be in close-up, detailing these actors, showing all their dimensions and perspectives on sexuality and bodies. Therefore, everything you see on stage is placed to keep the cast in the spotlight. Being a text and body piece with a focus on physicality.

This is a project where art merges with the idea of inclusion for we want to blur the notions of disability since we are all different! Physical particularities should be more respected in society, and we want the public to see a piece that goes beyond the concept of accessibility. Deaf culture says: “Deafness is not a flaw, it’s characteristic”.

Theater is a great engine of diversity and this is more than making it accessible since art has no bias!