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Reviewed by:
  • “We’re People Who Do Shows”: Back to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility ed. by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall
  • Joseph Paul Hill (bio)
BOOK REVIEWED: “We’re People Who Do Shows”: Back to Back Theatre—Performance, Politics, Visibility, edited by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall. Aberystwyth, UK: Performance Research Books, 2013.

Although active since 1987 and a frequent performer in Geelong, Melbourne, and Adelaide, the Australia-based Back to Back Theatre didn’t receive substantial international attention until 2007, when the company toured its production of small metal objects. Now twenty-eight years old, Back to Back Theatre is at the forefront of theatre dealing with disability. Even so, Performance Research Books’ recent publication “We’re People Who Do Shows,” co-edited by Helena Grehan and Peter Eckersall, moves well beyond thematic concerns of disability in order to highlight the company’s continuing theatrical experimentation with space, visuality, and new media.

“We’re People Who Do Shows” is a formidable archival compendium of interviews, photographs, scripts, timelines, artistic reflections, and scholarly responses. Included in the publisher’s Inside Performance Practice series, the book documents the history of Back to Back Theatre with an emphasis on recent works. While certainly a laudatory tribute to the company, the book makes good on the publisher’s aspiration to bridge performance theory and practice. In addition to compiling essays that pursue dramaturgical interests in Back to Back’s work, the editors also included original interviews and multiple quotations from company members. The editors and contributing authors were all based in Australia when the book was published, a fact that accounts for the exclusion of many key international disability scholars but likely ensures greater familiarity with the company’s work.

The title of the book is taken from the ensemble statement that begins the text—a declaration from the company’s actors that they are more than the sum of their (dis)abilities and occupations. The three included scripts (small metal objects, Food Court, and Ganesh Versus the Third Reich), eleven essays, and multiple interviews challenge the perception that intellectually disabled artists are incapable of consciously self-authored and directed theatrical performances. As Bryoni Trezise and Caroline Wake argue in their essay “Disabling Spectacle: Curiosity, Contempt, and Collapse in Performance Theatre,” the company effectively challenges disability terminology and an audiences’ perceptions of disability by foregrounding perception rather than disability.

Grehen and Eckersall inventively reimagined this published performance archive as a dramaturgical project in itself, mirroring the company’s interrogation of spectatorship. For instance, the book has minimal editorial paratext: the play scripts do not include character descriptions, and the book’s dozens of photographs are simply labeled with the production, year, and photographer. For those unfamiliar with Back to Back’s company members (who typically perform characters with their own given names), the published scripts perform playful ambiguity. The essays that follow each script then provide context and [End Page 130] analysis of the plays in performance, highlighting stylistic and design choices that challenge traditional theatrical presentations, including the company’s layering of metatheatricality.

Performance Research Books has produced an aesthetically pleasing book that is a testament to Back to Back Theatre’s dramaturgical complexity and playful spirit. “We’re People Who Do Shows” aims to bring more widespread awareness to a company that is asking provocative questions in theatrically interesting ways.

Joseph Paul Hill

JOSEPH PAUL HILL is a doctoral student in theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His areas of study include the intersections of deaf, disability, and performance studies and the body as spectacle in nineteenth-century U.S. and Western Europe.

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