«When you’re an activist, you can just shortcut»
In conversation with Back to Back Theatre
With their documentary and participatory, yet fictional-essayistic approach, Geelong based theater group Back to Back is challenging theatre to its limits. Freelance dramaturg Svenja Schäfer met with director Bruce Gladwin (he/him) and actors Simon Laherty (he/him), Scott Price (he/him) and Sarah Mainwaring (she/her) via Zoom – even though the ensemble agreed on how Zoom «sucked» during their very strict Covid lockdowns in Victoria, Australia. In their virtual conversation the group chats about what they think of Zurich, how activism found its way into the dramaturgy of their play «A shadow whose prey the hunter becomes» and what acting means to Simon, Scott and Sarah. This work by Back to Back is influenced by the ensemble members’ experience of living with intellectual disabilities in a society that strongly holds on to the idea of normativity. «A shadow whose prey the hunter becomes» confronts society’s failure to build up a «New Normal» that lives up to the variety of its members. In the play, Artificial Intelligence sets new standards of intelligence consequently degrading everyone else second-class.
Svenja Schäfer: You’ve been to Zurich before and probably still have an image in your head. What was your previous impression?
Scott Price: The lake, central banks, the lake. People, all like rich people or money, you know? A neutral sort of country and most of it neutral now, but, yeah.
Svenja Schäfer: Is there anything in particular you remember that you liked?
Scott Price: That’s a really good question, I’m actually not sure what I’m gonna say though. I’ve done a lot of Tripadvisor. You speak very high of the whole festival.
Bruce Gladwin: I really like the context of the festival being around the lake and the park. So, as an artist, you could be rehearsing or performing and then finish and walk out and dive in the lake. It’s quite a unique environment and the water is just spectacular. And the audience is just really supportive and interested in…
Scott Price: Our work.
Bruce Gladwin: Our work, or: our challenging work. Or, work that is pushing the theatrical form.
Svenja Schäfer: Simon, you have been working with Back to Back since 2003, Scott since 2006 and Sarah since 2007. That’s a rather long time. What made you keep on acting? What keeps it fascinating for you?
Sarah Mainwaring: I’m curious, I enjoy writing and performing theatre of my own. I also enjoy performing other works that I can just compare and perform. Not as a solo performer, more in an ensemble and within a group. And, I am able to take these works around the world, which also excites me and stimulates me and gives me more…
Scott Price: Pleasure.
Sarah Mainwaring: Impetus and pleasure, and...
Scott Price: (giggling)
Sarah Mainwaring: It fills me with passion and drive, with emotion and my wish to keep continuing my acting work. It’s really, really exciting, I love it! It’s great!
Scott Price: Well said, Sarah, well said. For me, it’s all like perseverance, yeah, perseverance to become an actor. And you know, just the will to stay in the performance, to have the courage.
Svenja Schäfer: It takes a lot of courage to stand in front of an audience, right?
Scott Price & Sarah Mainwaring: Yeah.
Scott Price: And perseverance. Simon, you want to add anything to that?
Simon Laherty: Well, the thing I like about Back to Back is the acting, the touring and keeping out of trouble.
Svenja Schäfer: Simon, on the Back to Back website you introduce yourself saying: «We are all actors and we can all act.» I can relate to that quote, it’s very empowering and strong.
Simon Laherty: Yeah, that’s right.
Svenja Schäfer: There is this idea that as an actor you need to become the character you are playing on stage, like a transformation. Can you relate to this or do you bring a lot of yourself on stage, too?
Simon Laherty: I’m not sure about that. But for sure you turn into your character.
Sarah Mainwaring: I find that I do transform into the characters. I am not sure that was the question, but I find I do transform for each show, I change into each character. So that I am able to change into and then out of the character once the show is over. I can change back out of the character, yeah.
Bruce Gladwin: That tension between the actors as people and the characters they play is a tension we play with. In the script for «A shadow whose prey the hunter becomes» as well as in other productions we’ve made; the characters they play also have the same names as the actors. Audiences tend to have an interest or fascination for this: How real are the actors’ personal experiences? Often, the actors are bringing their own personal life experience to it, but it’s also a huge amount of research and discussion. Say, Scott might be delivering text that’s being improvised by Simon. So, there’s a very kind of open dramaturgy.
Svenja Schäfer: Which themes, would you say, found their way into «A shadow whose prey the hunter becomes»?
Scott Price: It’s trying to connect the dots to artificial intelligence and activism, and what might happen in the near future. I’ve been actually trying to explain that to you (talking to Bruce).
Bruce Gladwin: It’s a group of activists that are holding this meeting to bring attention to the dangers and the emergence of artificial intelligence. They kind of have a quest to save the world, but in the process they become their own prejudice and bias.
Scott Price: Like, I’m treating Sarah in a very sexist and misogynist way.
Bruce Gladwin: Then she stands up to Scott and so on.
Scott Price: What’s it called like? The receptions.
Bruce Gladwin: The receptions, yeah. The piece kind of parallels treatment of people with intellectual disabilities in contemporary society with a kind of future scenario where artificial intelligence has overtaken human intelligence and makes this parallel. The way that we treat others is the ultimate way we treat ourselves – I guess, that’s the simple moral of it.
Svenja Schäfer: Do you bring up the topics during development?
Sarah Mainwaring: Yeah, we bring a lot.
Scott Price: Yeah, we do.
Bruce Gladwin: There is a number of people involved in the process. During the course of the making, we had two people pass away that were both involved in the devising process – Sonja and Victoria. So, often we start with eight to ten people working on the writing. Through improvisation and devising tasks, a lot of discussion and research, ultimately, we refine it down to a cast that can present the material.
So, Sarah,Scott,and Simon all contributed to it, but also Sonja, who has now passed away. She was initially playing the role that Simon is playing in the piece. She was a magic contributor to the piece as well.
Scott Price: Yeah, she was.
Sarah Mainwaring: Yeah.
Bruce Gladwin: For instance, there is a point at the start of the piece, where Simon’s character does what is called an Acknowledgement of Country, where the Indigenous Peoples of the land are acknowledged. And in the delivery of that, he names the wrong tribal group. Scott corrects him and then he can’t get the pronunciation of it, he can’t say it the right way. To get this wrong is a kind of humiliation or it’s like a …
Scott Price: Faux-pas.
Bruce Gladwin: But when we were doing the improvisation initially, Sonja was the actor initially doing it wrong.
Scott Price: She did, she did.
Bruce Gladwin: There’s something really interesting about when people get something wrong. We kind of followed that as a philosophy in the making of the work ... Sorry, I’m talking too much.
Scott Price: No, you’re good. I remember this, I do remember it.
Bruce Gladwin: In making the work, there is a vulnerability, and we are quite open to making mistakes, mishaps and misunderstandings. And to some degree, we’ve tried to pursue that in the process.
Svenja Schäfer: Is there anything that you as actors particularly learned from this process?
Sarah Mainwaring: We sort of developed each of the ideas as a group and we explored them as a group. Over time, through acting or through text. We had time and they had time to just develop, which was good.
Simon Laherty: It was like on and off through the years.
Sarah Mainwaring: It did come together over three years, yeah.
Bruce Gladwin: When we started making this piece, we had a lawyer who was on the board and brought attention to a story that was in The New York Times: About 32 men with intellectual disabilities were involved in an employment program in Iowa, United States In the late 1970’s, they were taken out of an institution for the care of people with disabilities and placed in a turkey processing plant where they kill and pack each turkey. They have been working there for something like forty years and still being paid the same amount of money they were being paid in the 1970’s. So, it’s basically a story about enslaved labor and…
Scott Price: And exploitation.
Bruce Gladwin: Exploitation. The responsibility of a society is to take care, to make sure that people are treated appropriately. So, we thought: Oh, that’s a great story. Let’s make that a play. And we actually did create a development, where all the actors were trying to perform these characters who were American and working in a turkey processing plant …
Svenja Schäfer: Sounds interesting ...
Bruce Gladwin: It was terrible, you know?
Scott Price: We were taking up on an American accent, oh my god.
Bruce Gladwin: We brought an audience here and we tried to explain it to them and it was like one of these developments that were just falling flat on your face the whole time.
Scott Price: Yeah!
Bruce Gladwin: It was really awkward. But at the end of it, Scott actually stood up and just said: «Look, the story is about this.» And he just explained the story and he goes: «That’s why we like the story and that’s why it’s important the story is told.» And the way he delivered it to the audience was just a direct audience address. It was like he was an activist. So, we went: There is something really interesting in that, in the idea of the actors playing activists. Because when you’re an activist you can just shortcut. You can just say what you need to say, in a very concise and short way. It’s the nature of activism, you have to get your message across quickly and effectively.
Back to Back Theatre performs «The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes» from 2 to 4 September 2022 at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel. Weitere Informationen