Creative Industries

‘We will look after you’: the radical promise of ‘the time after’ (Rancière) in recent theatre involving actors with intellectual disabilities.


‘We will look after you’, the last words of Back to Back Theatre’s Lady Eats Apple (Melbourne, October 2016) echo in the darkness of a space transposed: the audience on stage, the performers in the auditorium.  The words are spoken by intellectually disabled characters/performers to another who is able but playing disabled.  Intellectual disability in its social and political context underpins the genesis and evolution of the company, but in Lady Eats Apple it is a subject that is placed to the side, referred to obliquely, in favour of a more fundamental questioning of what it is to see, to hear and to be present in (post)theatrical performance, and what efficacy such performance might have.

Throughout the production face microphones and individual audience headphones offer at once the intimacy and alienation of mediatized presence, the audience’s eyes are subjected to pulsating extremes of brightness and darkness, their sense of space is disoriented as successive envelopes of black and white inflatables give way to a final, utterly dislocating, reveal.  Dramatic narrative and characterization are deconstructed in ‘theatricality,’ in Féral’s sense, that wavers unstably between theatre’s representation and performance’s presentation.

After this destabilizing of the demarcations of identity and alterity: of performance and audience, of ability and disability, of mythos and myth, how are the closing words ‘We will look after you’ to be taken? They constitute a performative utterance made by people with intellectual disabilities to look after those without such disabilities: a complete overturning of conventional ethicopolitical relationships.  They also represent the promise of a radical time after current political crises that threaten the eradication of compassion, empathy and egalitarianism. After Rancière, this time is neither utopian nor catastrophic, but that in which we take interest in the ‘sensible stuff’, the ‘material events’ against which hope and despair is measured.

Different Light Theatre Company is an ensemble of actors with intellectual disabilities who have been performing in Christchurch and internationally since 2004. Their most recent performance Three Ecologies of Different Light (2016) was presented at PSi 22 at the University of Melbourne, then in modified versions at an Inclusive Education Summit and at Everybody In, a Teachers’ Refreshers’ Course at the University of Canterbury. Recently members of the group appeared in a 90-minute film: Many Hats: stories from a theatre company (Paul McCaffrey, Stuart Lloyd-Harris) – part documentary, part scenes devised by the performers – shown in a short season at a local cinema in Christchurch.
Where does this type of theatrical performance belong? Does it exist only for a specialized, localized audience as the above production history suggests, or can it have an efficacy that embraces a broader, wider audience? On what terms can actors with intellectual disabilities find a place in secondary education and the academy, physical and conceptual spaces from which they are in so many ways excluded? I wish to discuss these questions and investigate whether the radical efficacy of such theatre is in not belonging, in being continually unsure of the place upon which it stands, and from which it speaks. In the current political and educational environment being an intellectual seems to be about becoming disabled. What commonality is there in the struggle of the disabled intellectual and the intellectually disabled?

Over the past thirty years theatre involving people with intellectual disabilities has gone from a marginalized practice in institutional settings and a therapeutic context to the centre of the stage where Back to Back Theatre and Jérôme Bel/ Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater headline at international arts festivals.  How can the history of this increasingly visible form of theatre be told given the marginalization and exclusion from hegemonic discourses of actors who are deemed to be intellectually disabled?

I wish to examine a number of theatrical performances in specific historical and geographical contexts involving actors with intellectual disabilities. These include John Cassavetes’ 1963 film "A Child is Waiting", Robert Wilson’s collaboration with Christopher Knowles on "A Letter for Queen Victoria", 1974, and "Einstein on the Beach",1976, the performance documented in Christopher Noonan’s 1980 film "Stepping Out": a documentary of ‘the birth of a mentally handicapped theatre’ at the Sydney Opera House and the transversal connections these earlier productions make with more contemporary performance including Christoph Schlingensief’s "FreakStars 3000", 2000, recent productions by Back to Back Theatre (2005 – 2011) and Jerome Bel/Theater HORA’s "Disabled Theater," 2013. 

I wish to investigate how these works from different periods speak to each other: how they intersect with wider histories of theatre and with the history or mythology of the aesthetic and political representation of people with intellectual disabilities as either a teleological narrative of progression toward utopian inclusion or a melancholy mourning of trauma, loss and lack. Is it possible to construct a history of theatre involving people with intellectual disabilities that does not resemble a colonial account of the discovery of newfound, exotic Others? How is it possible to assemble histories of such theatrical performance that do not reproduce the historical exclusion and exclusion from history of people with intellectual disabilities?

The work of theatre companies which involve people perceived to have intellectual disabilities,such as Back to Back, Theater Hora and Different Light, continues to provoke responses inflected by what Rancière has termed the ‘ethical turn’ in aesthetics and politics. Reviews and post-show
discussions reiterate an anxiety over the mediation of the presence and voice of the performers. Academic critical responses seem to validate a particular ethics in the responses of the spectator, usually referencing Levinas’ ‘infinite obligation to the other.’ Is this ethical concern to respect the otherness of people with intellectual disabilities an ethics based on a substantialization of the Other, an ethics on behalf of, but not including, people with intellectual disabilities? Is it predicated on either the desire to mourn the trauma of this exclusion or the belief in a time of equality
and inclusion to come, thereby invoking a theology of time which serves to obscure the broken time of the here and now and the political potential of such performance? One way these theatre companies have responded to such ethical anxiety is by specifically including and playing with
moments of spectatorial uneasiness within their performances, thus bringing back in the political by performative means. This is a tactic of not only reconfiguring these ethical concerns from the subject position of people with intellectual disabilities, but also of making a show of, or showing up such ethical concern, and, more radically, of making a performance of, or playing at, being intellectually disabled. What happens when these performers deliberately play the idiot, or perhaps
the idiotai, those who do not count in a democracy, those excluded from the demos of democratic institutions? By doing so do they disturb a Platonic ethical community.

The article takes as its starting point ‘We will look after you’ a specific utterance and theatrical moment at the end of Lady Eats Apple by Back to Back Theatre in so far as these embody the potential aesthetic and political efficacies of the narrative strategies of recent theatre involving actors with intellectual disabilities. These narratives are first located within the context of the development of such theatre over the last fifty years and then within the particular processes of development of Back to Back Theatre as a company exploring the terms of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière) of intellectual disability within contemporary theatrical performance, specifically in what might be termed the narrativity of postdramatic theatre. An analysis is then offered of how Lady Eats Apple reconfigures what can be said, shown, felt and understood in such theatre through the disorientation of the senses of perception and location of the audience. The analysis concludes that the company’s aesthetic approach proves to be political in ‘the time after’ of performance, in its reconfiguration of assumed binaries of both the construction of the self as subject and of the relationship of care and dependence between people with and without disabilities.


Keywords: aesthetics and politics; postdramatic theatre; disability performance; performance and performativity; inclusion and subjectivation

Article on New Zealand popular culture website on the complexities of 'giving voice' to actors with intellectual disabilities. Refers to the processes of devising Different Light performances The Three Ecologies of Different Light and Still Lives

A response to Per.Art's Dis_Sylphide, a dance performance presented in Belgrade, Serbia, 2018 by the company from Novi Sad. Part of an article to be published in the journal Theatre Research International in collaboration with Margaret Ames, Dave Calvert, Vibeke Glorstad, Kate Maguire-Rosier and Yvonne Schmidt of the Working Group in Performance and Disability of the International Federation for Theatre Research

Incapacity and Theatricality acknowledges the distinctive contribution to contemporary theatrical performance made by actors with intellectual disabilities. It presents a close examination of certain key theatrical performances across a variety of different media, including John Cassavetes’ 1963 social issues film A Child Is Waiting; the performance art collaboration between Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles; and the provocative pranksterism of Christoph Schlingensief ’s talent show mockumentary FreakStars 3000.

Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long- held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty- first- century theatre, McCaffrey’s work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.

Tony McCaffrey is a Lecturer in Creative Industries at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Arts, Ara Institute, Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2004 he established the Different Light Theatre Company, an ensemble of performers with intellectual disabilities.