View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by UC Research Repository i INCAPACITY AND THEATRICALITY: POLITICS AND AESTHETICS IN THEATRE INVOLVING ACTORS WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre and Film Studies in the University of Canterbury by Edward Anthony McCaffrey University of Canterbury 2015 ii Abstract This thesis examines the relationship between people with intellectual disabilities and theatrical performance. This type of performance has emerged from marginalized origins in community arts and therapeutic practices in the 1960s to a place at the forefront of commercial and alternative theatre in the first two decades of the twenty first century. This form of theatre provokes an interrogation of agency, presence, the construction and performance of the self, and the ethics of participation and spectatorship that locates it at the centre of debates current in performance studies and performance philosophy. It is a form of theatre that fundamentally challenges how to assess the aesthetic values and political efficacies of theatrical performance. It offers possibilities for thinking about and exploring theatrical performance in a conceptual and practical space between incapacity and theatricality that looks toward new and different ecologies of meaning and praxis. The methodology of the thesis is a detailed analysis of the presence and participation of people with intellectual disabilities in specific performances that include a 1963 US film, a 1980 Australian documentary, the collaboration of Robert Wilson with autistic poet Christopher Knowles, and recent performances by Christoph Schlingensief, Back To Back Theatre and Jérôme Bel’s collaboration with Theater HORA. I examine the working relationships and the aesthetic and political strategies of these performances in specific geographical and historical contexts in order to explore what kinds of efficacy and affective engagement this form of theatre can offer to people with and without intellectual disabilities. iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank the members of Different Light Theatre Company for providing the starting point for this thesis and for continuing collaboration and friendship: Alan Barnes, Damian Bumman, Glen Burrows, Stuart Craig, Andrew Dever, Ben Ellenbroek, Rebecca Flint, Theresa King, John Lambie, Ben Morris, Josie Noble, Shawn O’Rourke, Caroline Quick, Peter Rees, Michael Stanley, Isaac Tait, Natalie Walton, and Amber Kennedy and Louise Payne, now deceased. Thanks to Stuart Lloyd-Harris and Kim Garrett for their continuing engagement and debate. I wish to thank NASDA and CPIT for space in which to work, time, including a six month sabbatical from full-time employment, and funding to share research internationally. I wish to thank all those with whom I have had dialogue at conferences of Disability Studies in Education, Society for Disability Studies, Performance Philosophy, Performance Studies international and the International Federation for Theatre Research, particularly the Working Group on Disability and Performance. I wish to thank Trisha Ventom, Rachel Mullins, Missy Morton, Kathleen Liberty and visiting academics: Beth Cherne, Yayoi Mashimo, Tatiana Josz, Theodore Hoffman and, above all, Petra Kuppers. I wish to thank all at Theatre and Film Studies at University of Canterbury: Sharon Mazer and, above all, Peter Falkenberg my primary supervisor. Two earthquakes, four change proposals and closure in 2016 cannot erase the Department’s intelligence, the contribution made to Christchurch, and exemplary commitment to engaged research. I wish to thank Marie, Mary and Paul, who are with me always, and Greta Bond for her intelligence, consideration and generosity. iv Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: A Child is Waiting: ‘To throw a spotlight on the subject of retardation’ ............ 35 Chapter Two: Mirror Stages: Aldo Gennaro and Robert Wilson ..................................................... 96 Stepping Out: ‘the birth of a theatre of the mentally handicapped’ ................................... 96 Mirroring inverted: Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles ........................................ 130 Chapter Three: FreakStars 3000, Back to Back, and Disabled Theater ........................................... 156 FreakStars 3000 .................................................................................................................................... 166 Back to Back Theatre .......................................................................................................................... 190 Small metal objects .............................................................................................................................. 191 Food Court ............................................................................................................................................... 206 Ganesh versus the Third Reich ......................................................................................................... 228 Disabled Theater ................................................................................................................................... 262 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 315 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 328 1 Introduction The first theatrical performance by people with intellectual disabilities that I attended was in 2004. It was a large cast version of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes performed by residents of a community for people with intellectual disabilities. The audience was composed of other residents, staff, and friends and family. I was there as I had been asked to organize some drama workshops for people with intellectual disabilities in the community. The performance was different to anything in my previous experience of theatre. The director stood at the front of the audience, narrating and sometimes prompting or correcting the performers. The performers seemed distracted, unengaged and struggled to remember what it was they were supposed to do. Some of their bodies moved in the agitation of involuntary or compulsive movements. My memories of that event are of being bored, and of being embarrassed for all present when performers delivered lines of dialogue intended for other characters to the director, to the ceiling, or to the floor, and yet there were performers on that stage that engaged and held my attention with their presence in ways that I had very rarely experienced in other theatres. In that room there was a strange mixture of incapacity and theatricality that both fascinated me and prompted me to try to do something better for these people. At that time I understood that ‘something better’ as something that was both better theatre and that could help people with intellectual disabilities live better lives: more engaged, more empowered and more included. That continuing fascination, and 2 the desire to discover what ‘to do better’ might mean, has led me to set up Different Light Theatre Company in Christchurch and to ask the questions that now form the basis of this thesis. What can theatre bring to the lives of people with intellectual disabilities? Does it offer the potential for greater equality, empowerment and emancipation? What can people with intellectual disabilities bring to theatre? Does their involvement question what is meant by theatre and what it means to be an actor? What potentially emerges in the encounter between the two? Does it cause a rethinking of what is meant by the capacity to be an actor both onstage and off, and do the perceived incapacities of people with intellectual disabilities provoke a rethinking of what is meant by theatrical performance and what its aesthetic and political efficacy might be? In this thesis I intend to show how the involvement of people with intellectual disabilities in theatre provokes a reconsideration of some of the aesthetic principles and political efficacies of theatre. This theatre might be said to be located between incapacity understood as an inability to achieve norms that is yet productive of innovation, and theatricality as a wavering between the symbolic systems of theatre and the free play of performance. I prefer not to settle upon any ontological definition of ‘intellectual disability’ as this is a term that will be contested throughout this thesis, whilst at the same time I will be seeking to acknowledge the lived experience of those people subjected to this diagnosis. I will be concentrating on what emerges in the relationship between people who are diagnosed as intellectually disabled and those who are not in the theatre: performers, directors (and other theatre creative) and audiences. I will be speaking from the perspective of someone who is not diagnosed as being 3 intellectually disabled, as this is the perspective from which I can speak with some experience. I am using the term incapacity rather than disability because in the pragmatics of everyday usage this lexical choice is one that is more dependent on context. There is a difference between the statements ‘She is disabled’ and