Videos by Tony McCaffrey
Organized by Flore Garcin-Marrou, Anna Street, Julien Alliot and Liza Kharoubi as members of the ... more Organized by Flore Garcin-Marrou, Anna Street, Julien Alliot and Liza Kharoubi as members of the Laboratory of the Arts and Philosophies of the Stage (http://labo-laps.com/), in partnership with the University of Paris-Sorbonne and their research laboratories PRITEPS and VALE, along with CERILAC of the University of Paris-Diderot, ICTT of the University of Avignon, CIEPFC of ENS Ulm and HARp of the University of Paris-Ouest, with the financial support of the City of Paris, the Institut des Amériques and the international network Performance Philosophy. 112 views
Books by Tony McCaffrey
The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research in Theatre and Performance Studies, 2024
This chapter examines how the research methodology of learning-disabled theatre requires a differ... more This chapter examines how the research methodology of learning-disabled theatre requires a different consideration of temporality. Tony McCaffrey draws on eighteen years’ work with Different Light Theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand to show how epistemic inequity between non-disabled and disabled participants inflects the outcome-led temporality of ‘inclusion’. He articulates that shifts need to occur from the rush to emulate non-disabled performance towards more speculative practice. The research methods of this practice encompass a more elastic notion of time, allowing for non-verbal, dysfluent rhetoric and a non-linear chronology of development in order to admit the possibility of learning from learning-disabled artists.
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How Does Disability Performance Travel? Access, Art and Internationalization, 2024
The voices of learning-disabled theatre makers are not generally represented in the academic disc... more The voices of learning-disabled theatre makers are not generally represented in the academic discourse on disability and performance. Using the example of Different Light Theatre in Christchurch, NZ, a company which has been travelling to overseas festivals and conferences in Australia, the USA, and the UK for more than 15 years, Tony McCaffrey questions how non-disabled allies can position themselves to ‘listen learning disabled artists into speech’ (Lipari). How is it possible for theatre to afford learning disabled artists the rigour of artistic challenge whilst still ensuring there is sufficient care and support for the next stage of their journey?
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Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre, 2023
Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre offers unique insight into the question of ... more Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre offers unique insight into the question of 'voice' in learning disabled theatre and what is gained and lost in making performance. It is It is grounded in the author's eighteen years of making theatre with DiIerent Light Theatre company in Christchurch, New Zealand, and includes contributions from the artists themselves.
This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis.
This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic or spectator
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Incapacity and Theatricality, 2019
Incapacity and Theatricality acknowledges the distinctive contribution to contemporary theatrical... more 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.
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Ethics of Alterity: Aisthetics of Existence, 2023
This book speaks directly to me. After my first reading I continue to go back to it. I carry on t... more This book speaks directly to me. After my first reading I continue to go back to it. I carry on the dialogue the book has inspired in me in my present work in theatre making and research. The book is with me as a challenge to acknowledge and respond to the alterity in my work and in what I laughingly call my 'self.' I approach this text as somebody who has been working for 19 years to make theatre with, and latterly increasingly alongside, learning disabled artists. This work constitutes a kind of immanent performance philosophy. I have approached and engaged with the 'other' of my learning disabled co-researchers in a range of ways, informed by a range of supposed philosophies, ethics, and aesthetics in the practical, everyday, common or garden meaning of those terms. Some of these have been half-baked, ham-fisted, caught up in chasing efficacity of various kinds: the professional, the sentimental, the avant-garde, the political in an engagement with marginalized others. This book interests me because for me the meaning of alterity is at once practical and theoretical, it is a matter of poesis, of making, and, crucially, concerns the underpinnings of how and why we make theatre together. The intentions of the book align with my thinking, feeling, and working as they have been formed in response to the alterity in the relationship that continues to form with my learning disabled collaborators and co-researchers. Sternagel characterizes an emergent relationality that goes beyond cause and effect, subject and object, and intention and outcome. His work is located in the interdisciplinary, inter-relational area of investigation that is the emerging and generative field of Performance Philosophy, in his words 'a productive field of tense interplay.' What I particularly like is his formulation that the tensions of broadly, philosophy and performance, are never resolved but go on influencing each other, clashing with each other, braiding and unbraiding. This aligns with my experience that in performance the philosophical confounds the simple and, equally, the simple the philosophical, but that there is a beauty in this confounding. Sternagel's book speaks clearly and provocatively of the confounding, colluding and complication of performance and philosophy, of 'intentionality with performativity…action with processes and events, models with making and experimenting, diagnosis with experience' and in doing so articulates many of the dilemmas, aporia and fruitful contradictions of my research that seeks to understand, acknowledge, and feel the contribution to learning and art of learning disabled artists.
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Out of Time: Temporality in Disability Performance, 2023
This chapter considers the specific relationship between ideas of temporality and learning-disabl... more This chapter considers the specific relationship between ideas of temporality and learning-disabled theatre, drawing on M. Remi Yergeau's concept of autistic rhetoric that seeks to reconfigure the kairos or good timing of effective rhetorical communication. An analysis of Back to Back Theatre's The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (2019) shows how the neurodivergent actors deliberately deploy rhetorical strategies to step in and out of theatrical processes of narrative, meaning-making and the marking of identities challenging the idea of temporality as progression. The transversal quality of such disability performance allows radically different ethical, aesthetic, and political relations to emerge.
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Off Book Devised Performance and Higher Education, 2023
Since 2004, I have been working with Different Light Theatre, an ensemble of learning disabled ar... more Since 2004, I have been working with Different Light Theatre, an ensemble of learning disabled artists, and, latterly, my co-researchers. We are investigating ways of making theatre together which is ultimately about finding different ways of being together. This praxis connects with my work in tertiary education as a lecturer teaching on the Bachelor of Performing Arts degree and postgraduate courses at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Arts (NASDA), Ara Institute in Christchurch, New Zealand. The work with Different Light has led to some twenty public performances within New Zealand and overseas, a book, Incapacity and Theatricality (2019), chapters in books and academic articles. The group has performed at overseas conferences in Sydney and San José and at the Performance Studies international conferences in Leeds (2011) and Melbourne (2016) and is currently in the process of collaborating with me on a second book, Giving and Taking Voice. This institutionally supported research affords opportunities for the group to access spaces, equipment and resources within NASDA, and the research funding that I receive for publications assists with travel and other aspects of the group's development. It also leads to the paradox that the ensemble performs and participates within tertiary institutions to which they would never be admitted as students. The research of the group is to question what is meant by 'theatre' and by 'learning disability'. It is also to examine the terms of participation of the learning disabled artists in what I term the giving and taking of voice in theatre and performance research. Devising plays a central part in this theatre-making and research process. All twenty of the group's performances have been self-devised.
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Back to Back Theatre Collection Foreword, 2022
Foreword to The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, Lady Eats Apple, Super Discount
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Journal Articles by Tony McCaffrey
Creating and Evaluating Impact: A Resource for Creative Arts Researchers, 2024
Different Light Theatre and the impact of creative research.
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Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue, 2022
I have been working for eighteen years helping to create self-devised performance with Different ... more I have been working for eighteen years helping to create self-devised performance with Different Light Theatre, an ensemble of learning-disabled artists in Christchurch New Zealand. In these eighteen years, the company has produced community theatre, dramatic theatre, post-dramatic theatre (Lehmann), has received government funding for creative excellence, appeared at disability-led and mainstream international arts festivals, and explored site-specific, immersive, and environmental theatre collaborations. Members of the company have performed and presented at academic conferences, led discussions at university seminars, and participated in international online panels.
The unique characteristics of the company mean that we have been prompted to develop or to facilitate the emergence of multimodal ways of working, creating, and presenting performance. Members of the company have diverse forms of access to the conventional techne and building blocks of theatre: voice, gesture, and the kairotic use and application of space and time in live performance. Live-feed and pre-recorded video, captions, voiceovers, voice manipulations, and immersive strategies have all been utilized and explored by the company to connect to an audience, and to simultaneously question and problematize the terms of that connection, commonality, and communication. In the group’s performances multimedia approaches are confronted by the need for care and access intimacy (Mingus) and this often results in a mix of ‘intermediality’ in performance (Chapple and Kattenbelt) that renders political- at a fundamental level - the audience’s processes of perception, understanding, and affective engagement with the performers and the performance.
Does the political efficacy of this work consist in the mere presence of learning-disabled artists in these contexts or is it not rather in the negotiation of the terms of their presence and participation? Learning-disabled theatre is often perceived as giving voice to the voiceless or empowering the presence of those marginalized in society but how can this voice and power avoid becoming co-opted by neoliberal, racial, colonial capital merely to produce the entitled, self-possessed, autonomous individuals that late capitalism needs but the production of which is destroying the planet? One answer to this question is in exploring the multimodal negotiation of voice, presence, representation, and mediation in performance as performance.
Contemporary learning-disabled theatre such as that developed by Different Light Theatre or Australia’s Back to Back Theatre seeks to temper the need for the inclusion and emancipation of learning-disabled people with the cries of the planet and inter-relational ecologies of care. Learning-disabled theatre contributes to debates over identity politics that, in the words of Fred Moten, merely critiques ‘non-male, non-straight, non-white identity while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices.’ Different Light and Back to Back explore the political possibilities of learning-disabled artists’ occupation and sharing of the subjunctive spaces and times of theatrical performance. They do so by taking a multimodal approach to the creation, curation, and presentation of theatrical performance. This multimodal approach is determined by the diverse abilities, capacities, and virtuosity of the learning-disabled artists. In the process, fundamental questions are generated about what is meant by ability, capacity, and virtuosity that have far-reaching implications for theatre and arts practice and research.
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Global Performance Studies, 2021
Researching and modelling new ways of being together, Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch and Tony M... more Researching and modelling new ways of being together, Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch and Tony McCaffrey met through the Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research in July 2020. The conference was online, the original, in-person conference in Galway disrupted by the COVID 19 pandemic. Over the past six months, the three of us have continued to talk over Zoom. These conversations inform the video that is our contribution to this special issue of Global Performance Studies. We have reached no conclusions. Rather, what we offer is collaborative thinking in-process, drawing upon theorists as diverse as Mingus (2011), Puar (2009), Yergeau (2017), Bowditch and Vissicaro (2017) and Māori concepts of koha (gift) and mana (honour, respect, right to personhood) as applied to performance. Exploring how we can be together is an essential question for Disability Arts and performance more broadly.
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Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2021
Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch, and Tony McCaffrey met online through the Performance and Disab... more Kelsie Acton, Christiane Czymoch, and Tony McCaffrey met online through the Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research in July 2020. Over the past six months, we continued to discuss our very different disability arts contexts. But we found ourselves asking similar questions about being together. How can we be together? What are the dangers of togetherness? What is the future for disabled artists—all disabled people—in a world where the pandemic has heightened the threat a eugenic, ableist society poses for disabled people? We have no answers. What we instead offer is collaborative thinking in-process, drawing upon theorists such as Mingus (2017), Puar (2009), Yergeau (2017), Bowditch and Vissicaro (2017) and Māori concepts of koha (gift) and mana (honor, respect, right to personhood) as applied to performance. These conversations inform this annotated transcript. As access is an essential part of being together in disability culture, our transcript includes visual description and plain language summaries of each section of the conversation.
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TDR The Drama Review, 2020
Emerging only in the 1980s, the complex assemblage of critical Disability studies and theatre stu... more Emerging only in the 1980s, the complex assemblage of critical Disability studies and theatre studies is still a developing field. There are not enough scholars doing this work, and, with accessible performances only recently becoming standard across international theatre communities, it is unsurprising that there is not much written about performers with intellectual Disabilities. Tony McCaffrey provides close readings of several key case studies in Incapacity and Theatricality to challenge fundamental performance frameworks and principles, including aesthetics, semiotics, and mimesis, through the lens of critical Disability theory. With prose that gently questions the construction , representation, and inclusion of intellectually Disabled artists , McCaffrey suggests that theatre incapacitates such acts of public discourse but yet renders those acts more intense, more open to a range of different modalities of perception and sensing (a redistribution of the sensible) and reveals in the incapacitation or deconstruction of the customary social framing of these acts new and different ways of thinking, acting, and doing. (13-14) Especially integral to critical Disability studies and theatre studies is McCaffrey's assertion that theatre with Disabled performers neither has to be a learning experience for the audience nor does it have to assume the audience is non-Disabled. Rather, theatre with Disabled performers provides an opportunity for dialogue between audience and performer that offers more than reflection: it maintains the potential to challenge and reframe how intellectually Disabled people are perceived and treated off the stage.
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Theatre Research International, 2020
Review of Incapacity and Theatricality by Margaret Ames, University of Aberystwyth
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Australasian Drama Studies, 2020
In 2019, Christchurch Polyfest did not take place. An event intending to celebrate the city’s Pac... more In 2019, Christchurch Polyfest did not take place. An event intending to celebrate the city’s Pacific culture and diversity was derailed by a white supremacist terrorist killing fifty-one people at Al Noor and Linwood mosques. This article is a retrospective account of a journey through the city on 15th March, 2019, the day before Polyfest. This account, at times personal, at times analytical, reveals how various ideas of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the city become deconstructed in the desire to celebrate community as festival. It attempts to show how the social and economic fault lines of the recent quakes remain, and how attempts to reimagine and reconstruct the city have failed to eradicate historical inequities and injustices. The article makes use of Derrida’s paradox of hospitality/hostility as a mechanism to expose what appear to be irreconcilable tensions in the ethnic, religious, and postcolonial mix of Christchurch, the ‘white bread’ city.
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Drama Research Journal, 2019
Review of Incapacity and Theatricality by Paul McNamara for Drama Research
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Australasian Drama Studies Journal , 2019
Seven page review of Incapacity and Theatricality: Politics and Aesthetics in Theatre Involving A... more Seven page review of Incapacity and Theatricality: Politics and Aesthetics in Theatre Involving Actors with Intellectual Disabilities by David O' Donnell in Australasian Drama Studies Journal. Gives an overview of the content of each chapter and an assessment of the contribution to the field.
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Theatre Research International, 2019
This submission by IFTR’s Performance and Disability working group features responses by six part... more This submission by IFTR’s Performance and Disability working group features responses by six participants – voices projected from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Wales, England and Australia – to Per.Art’s production Dis_Sylphide, which was presented on 7 July 2018 at the Cultural Institution Vuk Karadžić as part of IFTR’s conference in Belgrade at the invitation of the Performance and Disability working group. Per.Art is an independent theatre company founded in 1999 in Novi Sad, Serbia, by the internationally recognized choreographer and performer Saša Asentić, the company’s artistic director. The company brings together people with learning disabilities, artists (theatre, dance and visual arts), special educators, representatives of cultural institutions, philosophers, architects and students to make work. This co-authored submission examines how the production responds to three important dance works of the twentieth century – Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz (1928), Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof (1978) and Xavier Le Roy’s Self Unfinished (1998) – to explore normalizing and normative body concepts in dance theatre and in society, and how they have been migrating over the course of dance histories. The shared experience of witnessing the performance provoked discussion on the migration of dance forms across time and cultures, as well issues of access and (im)mobility, which are especially pertinent to a disability studies context.
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Videos by Tony McCaffrey
Books by Tony McCaffrey
This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis.
This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic or spectator
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.
Journal Articles by Tony McCaffrey
The unique characteristics of the company mean that we have been prompted to develop or to facilitate the emergence of multimodal ways of working, creating, and presenting performance. Members of the company have diverse forms of access to the conventional techne and building blocks of theatre: voice, gesture, and the kairotic use and application of space and time in live performance. Live-feed and pre-recorded video, captions, voiceovers, voice manipulations, and immersive strategies have all been utilized and explored by the company to connect to an audience, and to simultaneously question and problematize the terms of that connection, commonality, and communication. In the group’s performances multimedia approaches are confronted by the need for care and access intimacy (Mingus) and this often results in a mix of ‘intermediality’ in performance (Chapple and Kattenbelt) that renders political- at a fundamental level - the audience’s processes of perception, understanding, and affective engagement with the performers and the performance.
Does the political efficacy of this work consist in the mere presence of learning-disabled artists in these contexts or is it not rather in the negotiation of the terms of their presence and participation? Learning-disabled theatre is often perceived as giving voice to the voiceless or empowering the presence of those marginalized in society but how can this voice and power avoid becoming co-opted by neoliberal, racial, colonial capital merely to produce the entitled, self-possessed, autonomous individuals that late capitalism needs but the production of which is destroying the planet? One answer to this question is in exploring the multimodal negotiation of voice, presence, representation, and mediation in performance as performance.
Contemporary learning-disabled theatre such as that developed by Different Light Theatre or Australia’s Back to Back Theatre seeks to temper the need for the inclusion and emancipation of learning-disabled people with the cries of the planet and inter-relational ecologies of care. Learning-disabled theatre contributes to debates over identity politics that, in the words of Fred Moten, merely critiques ‘non-male, non-straight, non-white identity while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices.’ Different Light and Back to Back explore the political possibilities of learning-disabled artists’ occupation and sharing of the subjunctive spaces and times of theatrical performance. They do so by taking a multimodal approach to the creation, curation, and presentation of theatrical performance. This multimodal approach is determined by the diverse abilities, capacities, and virtuosity of the learning-disabled artists. In the process, fundamental questions are generated about what is meant by ability, capacity, and virtuosity that have far-reaching implications for theatre and arts practice and research.
This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis.
This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic or spectator
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.
The unique characteristics of the company mean that we have been prompted to develop or to facilitate the emergence of multimodal ways of working, creating, and presenting performance. Members of the company have diverse forms of access to the conventional techne and building blocks of theatre: voice, gesture, and the kairotic use and application of space and time in live performance. Live-feed and pre-recorded video, captions, voiceovers, voice manipulations, and immersive strategies have all been utilized and explored by the company to connect to an audience, and to simultaneously question and problematize the terms of that connection, commonality, and communication. In the group’s performances multimedia approaches are confronted by the need for care and access intimacy (Mingus) and this often results in a mix of ‘intermediality’ in performance (Chapple and Kattenbelt) that renders political- at a fundamental level - the audience’s processes of perception, understanding, and affective engagement with the performers and the performance.
Does the political efficacy of this work consist in the mere presence of learning-disabled artists in these contexts or is it not rather in the negotiation of the terms of their presence and participation? Learning-disabled theatre is often perceived as giving voice to the voiceless or empowering the presence of those marginalized in society but how can this voice and power avoid becoming co-opted by neoliberal, racial, colonial capital merely to produce the entitled, self-possessed, autonomous individuals that late capitalism needs but the production of which is destroying the planet? One answer to this question is in exploring the multimodal negotiation of voice, presence, representation, and mediation in performance as performance.
Contemporary learning-disabled theatre such as that developed by Different Light Theatre or Australia’s Back to Back Theatre seeks to temper the need for the inclusion and emancipation of learning-disabled people with the cries of the planet and inter-relational ecologies of care. Learning-disabled theatre contributes to debates over identity politics that, in the words of Fred Moten, merely critiques ‘non-male, non-straight, non-white identity while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices.’ Different Light and Back to Back explore the political possibilities of learning-disabled artists’ occupation and sharing of the subjunctive spaces and times of theatrical performance. They do so by taking a multimodal approach to the creation, curation, and presentation of theatrical performance. This multimodal approach is determined by the diverse abilities, capacities, and virtuosity of the learning-disabled artists. In the process, fundamental questions are generated about what is meant by ability, capacity, and virtuosity that have far-reaching implications for theatre and arts practice and research.
Keywords: aesthetics and politics; postdramatic theatre; disability performance; performance and performativity; inclusion and subjectivation
The history of the company is also deeply implicated in the colonial heritage of Aotearoa New Zealand and the fault-lines of inequity exposed in Otautahi Christchurch by the 2010/11 earthquakes, the 2019 mosque massacres, the Covid pandemic, and the climate emergency. We, the learning disabled artists and I, are still coming to terms with what has been gained and lost in this period, how ‘voice’ has been given and taken, and also, ultimately, with the ‘fugitivity’ that constitutes the company’s reason for being. We are still trying to find a way of being together in an untogether way."
Tony McCaffrey is a Lecturer at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Director of Different Light Theatre. He is co-convenor of the Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He is the author of Incapacity and Theatricality (Routledge, 2019) and has published articles in Theatre Research International, The Journal of Dramatic Theatre and Criticism and Global Performance Studies. Different Light Theatre is an ensemble of learning disabled artists. The company has been devising, performing and researching performance for nineteen years in New Zealand. They have toured performances to Australia, the United States, and the UK, and members of the group have recently participated in online conferences in Athens, Helsinki, and Reykjavik.
To find out more about Different Light, please see the video transcription and video of a rough recording of Different Light presentation/performance at the University of Auckland in December 2022.
This is a draft paper for 'voice.' It is a work in progress and not a finished fully coherent and fully referenced piece for publication.
Elasticity University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 4th-7th July, 2019.