Renegotiating Theatrical Space through Learning Disabled Theatre

Abstract

This article considers how learning-disabled theatre, and disability more generally, can provoke a creative re-examination of what is meant by performing space. It does so by comparing the creative struggles and affordances of a disabled woman in a constrained space revealed in a documentary film made in Christchurch, New Zealand (2024) with the theatricalization of such creativity and constraint by renowned Australian learning-disabled theatre company Back to Back in Super Discount (2013). The article then goes on to trace the development of Back to Back Theatre’s theatrical aesthetic of indeterminacy with particular reference to the spatial relationship between performance and audience, disabled and non-disabled. This includes the use of a site-specific reversal of audience and spectators in small metal objects (2005), the blurring of theatrical space in the Ganzfeld of Food Court (2009), the spatial coup de théâtre of Lady Eats Apple (2011), the confounding of theatron and agora in The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (2019) and the promise but ultimate foreclosure of a space called home for disabled performers in Multiple Bad Things (2024). This analysis of and response to spatiality in Back to Back’s oeuvre is then put in the context of the author’s twenty years of practical and theoretical research with learning-disabled collaborators of Different Light Theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand.  A practical account is then given of some examples of working with the distinctiveness of learning-disabled theatre artists, in terms of the kairos or good timing of theatrical performance and the physical of the space by the performers. The meaning of performing space is then expanded to include the spaces of collaboration in which the company has more recently participated. The article concludes by affirming the social and creative benefits of including learning-disabled artists whilst emphasising the need to appreciate both the intransigence and potential for the beauty of disability in performing space.