Back to Back Theatre: Power, Visibility and Politics

A lecture by Professor Helena Grehan, Vice Chancellor's Professorial Research Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Back to Back is the only full-time professional acting ensemble in Australia. They are also the country’s most awarded company. They have won both the Ibsen Prize (2022) and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2024), as well as numerous Australian awards. Their works draw on universal themes including life and death, love and vulnerability, power and visibility and on how we perceive and treat one another. Each work is exquisitely staged, in ways that expand the possibilities of the imagination, while often pushing the boundaries of form. At the core of the company is an ensemble of performers who are perceived to be disabled or neurodivergent. However, the work they make challenges and problematises conventional understandings of ability, technique and talent that are already complex and contested in the field of contemporary performance. This talk explores the ways in which these themes, when rendered so powerfully by Back to Back, raise important political and ethical questions about form, aesthetics and responsibility. Helena Grehan, Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Australia. She writes about performance, ethics and spectatorship, new media dramaturgy and theatre and politics. She is Deputy Editor of Performance Research. Arts in Action is the flagship public arts, performance and creative engagement programme of the Institute for Creativity at the University of Galway.