'Sand in an Oyster,' A Dancer for the Disabled

Ballerina Rossana Penaloza spent six months in a wheelchair and wrote a play that has brought new attention to attitudes toward the disabled in Mexico. (Edgar Blancas - For The Washington Post)

"People -- especially here in Mexico -- don't realize that the disabled often experience sexuality just like anyone else," Silva said in an interview. "It never gets talked about, and you certainly never see it on a stage. It was powerful."

Even the music is searching, questioning, inconclusive.

"Quizas, Quizas, Quizas," the Latin classic by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés that repeats "perhaps, perhaps, perhaps," jumps out of the speakers as Peñaloza hurtles toward the end of the stage

For all her grace in the wheelchair, Peñaloza's performance strikes some of its most powerful notes when she is still. That is when the audience starts to feel the heat of her artistic statement.

"Will you play with me?" she asks, her eyes boring into those of one person in the audience after another.

"Will you be my friend?"

"Will you give me work?"

Then she waits. And waits.

Invariably, those who come under her gaze begin to squirm. They fiddle with their rings. Brush lint from lintless shoulders. Stare at their shoes.

Few ever want to play.

And that's the point, Peñaloza said one recent afternoon at a cafe in Coyoacan, a neighborhood whose beloved cobblestone streets presented a nightmarish obstacle course during her months of preparation for the show. The anger, frustration and sadness that inform Peñaloza's show rose quickly to the surface and overflowed. She seethed about Mexican schools too often segregating students with disabilities and lamented the "paternalism" of Mexican society and families that she says often isolates young disabled people.

"My work is a grain of sand in an oyster so that all this will change," she said.