are gathered in the black-box rehearsal space at Geelong’s Old Courthouse, the base for Back to Back Theatre, on this wintry Monday morning. Stage lights are beaming down, chairs are stacked against the walls. Actor Mark Deans, who has Down syndrome, wraps his arms around Back to Back’s artistic director, Bruce Gladwin, in a hug. He’s as short and round as Gladwin is long and lanky.
Artistic director Bruce Gladwin still remembers the first time he saw a Back to Back production: “What I saw was unlike anything I’d seen … it had a real punk aesthetic.”There isn’t much that’s conventional about Back to Back, but maybe that’s why this unlikely troupe of performers from regional Australia has become one of the country’s most celebrated cultural exports.
If it sounds like a creative high-wire act, it is. “Every day I’m freaking out,” says Searle, one of the two directors guiding the process. “It seems chaotic and messy and all over the place,” adds co-director Ingrid Voorendt, “but we’re trying to let a form emerge that will not answer the questions, but frame them. A lot of what’s been generated so far is quite funny and beautiful.
Cerebral palsy causes her right hand to shake until she tucks it under her thigh. “The depth of what we talk about, the things we come up with, are much more powerful than what the average person would think,” she says. “People would underestimate what may or may not happen in that room, having seen [the performers]. But that could be me putting my own bias on it.
“It really blew me away, partly because my parents would say to me, ‘Don’t stare, don’t look.’ And here, I’d paid $20 to sit and [watch them].”, was based on the true story of two people who’d lived all their lives at Melbourne’s Caloola Training Centre, a 19th-century mental hospital which housed some 500 people with intellectual disabilities until it closed in 1992. The pair became best friends, not knowing they were brother and sister.
In 1999, Gladwin took over as Back to Back’s artistic director with the goal of making great art – and if it happened to challenge prejudices, that was just a happy by-product. When the ensemble told him they wanted to tour the world, he set about making it happen, with provocative, boundary-pushing productions.
If he wasn’t working with Back to Back full-time, he says, he’d be doing “probably nothing – I’d just lay at home all day and get bored”. Instead, he travels the world and meets new people all the time: “We went to an opening-night party and this person invited me over to her table with her and her friends,” says Laherty, who, like the rest of the ensemble, is single.