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I Am, You Are, We Are

November 2013

  • Jane Goodall

The challenge and triumph of Back to Back Theatre.

‘I am, you are, we are Australian,’ goes the chorus of Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton’s song, which has become something of an alternative national anthem. ‘We are one, but we are many’ is its message, although not all of us feel that way, much of the time.

Our conditions separate us: 20 percent suffer from mental illness, half a million are indigenous, 14 percent of us are old, 28 percent are clinically obese, 300,000 are of Middle Eastern appearance and 18 percent have a disability. And what about all those who are accused of being ‘un-Australian’? The problem with sentiments of unity is that they almost always fall back on an instinct for exclusion. A sense of social unity carries with it tacit assumptions of normality, and requires to be maintained through practices of category identification. The battle lines are drawn up through pronouns, as tensions arise between me and you, them and us.

The performers in Back to Back Theatre share the outsider experience of being excluded from the norm through being perceived as people with a disability. They know what it is to live with the burden of a category identity, and to be perpetually aware of how this can turn nasty. And they have a way with pronouns. The dialogue is strung between statements harping on what I, you, he, she, we and they are about.

Sometimes this has the effect of introducing an edge of unease, emphasizing how all relations here are unstable. ‘You have to trust me.’ ‘I want people to see me.’ ‘We’re all living in a very different world.’ ‘I don’t know what they’re scared of.’ ‘We feel we are doing the right thing.’ ‘They get very upset.’ ‘He’s the kind of person I deal with.’ The tension ratchets up when the address is more direct, pushing towards interrogation. ‘Excuse me, I am speaking.’ ‘Show me your hands.’ ‘You know what the difference is, between you and me?’ ‘Are you sure?’… ‘Where do I know you from?’ And then there is the outright attack, where ‘you’ becomes an insult in itself, spat out, like a poisoned dart. ‘What are you?’ ‘Look at you!’ ‘You are fat.’ ‘You stink.’ The members of the audience are not spared. ‘You people have come here because you want to see a freak show.’

Dialogue is typically quite sparse in Back to Back Theatre performances. A recurring technique is to stage a deliberately slow and laboured exchange, in which one character will cross the floor between two others, relaying a statement, and returning for confirmation or clarification. Movement, too, works in extended time frames, and on a stage that is an ocean of space, where coloured area lighting throws moving shadows, sometimes turning the figures into semi-visible silhouettes. Nothing is clear here. When momentum gathers, it’s always bad news because the energy is generated by aggression born of false assumptions.…

Questions of identity and category judgement are opened wide in ways that resonate with the largest themes in the history of drama, and the biggest questions we confront as a species. The genius of live performance is one that knows nothing of human taxonomies and the stage, that eternally strange and most ancient zone of human occupation, recognizes the elusive gift of presence regardless of any categories of identity. There is a scene in Ganesh Versus the Third Reich when David Woods, playing the role of director in the play-within-the-play, addresses each member of the cast with a succinct endorsement of their personal qualities. He turns to Simon Laherty: ‘Simon, when I say sharing truth, you are doing that. Beautifully. That is the essence of your being.’ It’s an uneasy moment, because the director is acting the fascist in more than one frame of the performance, and his manner is both imperious and patronizing. Yet, in this instance, what he says is immediately recognizable as truth. Laherty has an extraordinary candour on stage. With his deadpan delivery, his unflagging control of timing and his self-contained uprightness, he is one of those performers who share truth and nothing but the truth. The same may be said of each of his peers in the ensemble.

It is not easy to write about this work without falling into some untruths of one’s own, however unintentionally. Inevitably, the lens must be turned back from the performer to the audience… What kinds of thoughts, emotional responses and sheer gut reactions are being generated during the performance, and what kinds of after-image does it leave in recollection and reportage? The figure of what [co-editor Helena Grehan] has called ‘the unsettled spectator’ hovers at the margins of discussion, sometimes coming in for direct scrutiny.

This is an edited extract from Jane Goodall’s Preface to Back to Back Theatre: Performance, Politics, Visibility, edited by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall (Performance Research Books).

 

Back to Back Theatre’s Super Discount shows at the Malthouse Theatre, Sturt St, Southbank from November 13 to December 1.

malthousetheatre.com.au

Images
All Photos by Jeff Busby

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