By SAMUEL LEE
alltherage@thestar.com.my

FOR most people, standing on stage in front of a crowd can be very stressful, but that’s not the case for Ho Lee Ching, a local performer at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre. In fact, she finds performing relieving.

The 23-year-old suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, a condition that causes a person to repeatedly make involuntary movements or sounds known as tics. She realised that performing on stage helped ease her condition, and it quickly became a passion.

“I can’t really explain it. But when I perform, I don’t get any tics,” said Ho.

“When I’m mentally, physically and emotionally focused, that’s when my mind and body somehow manage to move towards the same direction, and the tics temporarily stop.”

The tics can be very uncomfortable, hence, Ho avoids crowded places if she is alone.

“Tics feel like an itch, but multiply that by 1,000 times and imagine you have that itch at different parts of your body,” she explained.

Ho took to the performing arts scene in 2008 after leaving school and joined KLPac’s Theatre for Young People (T4YP). Eventually, she got the chance to participate in a musical that same year.

“It was after sitting for my SPM, and I wanted to try something new and somehow, I came across the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) on the Internet,” she said. “I’ve never ventured into this part of the world before, and I wanted to try it out”.

While the condition is suppressible, Ho says that doing so would only make things worse.

“Some people can control their tics very well, some cannot and even when you control them, you have to let it out later on and it will usually become a lot worse.

“It’s like a volcano, so it will still erupt.”

Ho, a fresh graduate who was born with Tourette syndrome, says she doesn’t experience any of the tics that come with her condition when she’s performing on stage.

Indifference can often draw flak from the ignorant, but despite her condition, she claims that bullying was not an issue during her school days.

“I wouldn’t want to call it bullying because I took it quite well. I actually became friends with my bullies,” she said with a laugh.

Friends, naturally, came good for her. As she put it, her friends were very understanding and nice to her, but she wonders why she was never ostracised.

“I’m really glad I have awesome friends – I used to call them angels. They used to stand up a lot for me,” said Ho.

Caught in the act: Theater actress Ho Lee Ching (right) during rehearsals for Life Sdn Bhd.

To further relieve her condition, she takes medication and goes for behaviour therapy. However, till today, there is no proper cure for Tourette’s and no medication works universally for all individuals. Therefore, much lies on trial-and-error.

“In a way, you’re like a guinea pig.”

However, Ho says that performing arts has made her more confident and helped her grow as a person.

“The main thing is, I’m not letting Tourette’s stop me from doing things I want to do,” she concluded.