For the first time, Back to Back Theatre talks disability onstage

For a company that specifically employs actors with disabilities, Back to Back Theatre has historically shied away from showcasing disability in its content. “Disability is one of the things that sets us apart from other theatre companies,” said Bruce Gladwin, artistic director of the company in a December phone interview, but “because we employ actors with disabilities, there is often a perception that the content we make is only about disability, or that we are some kind of benevolent social company. Which [it] is not; our purpose is to make great art.”

This is set to change with The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes. In Shadow, the group grapples directly with disability, confronting the audience with a conversation about language, identity, and who becomes disabled in a technical world. “It’s a territory we haven’t been through as a company, so I thought let’s just embrace it. In terms of empowerment within the ensemble, it was a territory they really wanted to go,” Gladwin shared.

On a set designed to evoke a public meeting between activists, each of the onstage actors, during an early moment in Shadow, engages in a conversation about the terms of disability––perceived, intellectual, nothing at all. This language, Gladwin told me, is script that actually came from a conversation about marketing, which the group transcribed live. That sort of moment isn’t unusual for the company, which works back and forth between actors and directors to create all of its content.

Writing collaboratively, Gladwin said, opens up “new aesthetic territory,” in Shadow, where the characters of activists can say “what they need to say” and which may not otherwise be said. The script, too, is meant to seem a bit “unscripted”; subtitles which play throughout the piece intentionally show mistakes, and at some point the performance “feels like a feedback loop of possibility,” described Gladwin, who asks: “are these actors really performing a script, or is the script being made as they are performing?”

The piece is highly locational, representing a very small community in Australia, where the group is from. And Gladwin noted that because of this some “global issues” get cast aside. In fact, one thing the actors have in common with off-stage activists is, ironically, a lack: Shadow, as ambitious as it is, neglects to talk about race. “This may be a flaw in our processing and thinking,” Gladwin admitted, “but our focus I don’t think was really about questions of race in the making of the work.” This follows a long history of disability movements failing to take account for people of color, indicted by scholars like Christopher Bell, whose 2006 paper “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal,” sent a shock through the disability studies community. It’s telling that, 14 years later, it’s even possible to make a work about disability without addressing the way that race informs how disability is constructed in the western, colonizing world. But Gladwin assured me that Shadow does, at least, “acknowledge that disability is just the start [of what might be a larger topic].”