By Steve Dow
The Venice Biennale Teatro, the global pinnacle of live performance, had a specific request for a little regional Australian theatre company for this year’s festival.
It asked Back to Back, a company comprising intellectually disabled and neurodiverse actors, to perform its production of FOOD COURT, prompted in part by a real-life 2006 case in which 12 teenagers in Werribee bullied and humiliated a 17-year-old girl with a developmental disability, selling DVDs of the filmed assault.
Back to Back Theatre performs FOOD COURT in Venice as part of the Biennale Tetro’s 52nd International Theatre Festival.Credit: Andrea Avezzùà, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
It is one of their most critically lauded works, an investigation of bullying and assault on people with disabilities, a subject deeply personal for its creators. It has, until now, relied on a luminous, inflatable set that dramatically skewers audience perspective but Italian customs held up the set last month over a freight weight issue. It wouldn’t be available in time.
So Back to Back presented the work to discerning Venice theatregoers on a bare stage, with artistic director Bruce Gladwin deciding against making a speech to audiences on why the set was absent.
But FOOD COURT lost none of its power, as actors Sarah Goninon and Tamika Simpson’s unnamed characters – dressed in gold bodysuits – bullied actor Sarah Mainwaring’s character Leslie, demanding that she strip naked and dance.
It’s this “poetic ferocity” and the group’s “visionary parables” that have driven the Venice Biennale to award the Geelong-based troupe the highest level of recognition: the Golden Lion.
On stage in a Gothic 15th century palace fronting Venice’s Grand Canal, Gladwin and five actors accepted the prestigious award for lifetime achievement, which places them among an elite body of visionary international theatremakers, all recognised for challenging conventions and revealing hidden truths in their art.
Members of Back to Back Theatre accept the prestigious Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.Credit: Andrea Avezzùà, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
Each of the actors took turns holding the award on stage, after Biennale Teatro artistic directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte read the award citation in Italian, the translation of which includes the line: “Our fears, our puritanical blindness, all of these are blown away by Back to Back Theatre’s cruel tales of perilous worlds.”
Most of the Geelong company’s touring party of 20 had arrived in style via speedboat water taxis for the ceremony, staged in the ballroom at the Venice Biennale’s headquarters. Staying for the past week at the 16th century Hotel Casa Verardo, they performed twice at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale.
Since its launch in 1987, Back to Back has garnered 22 national and international awards, including the International Ibsen Award in 2022, touring the world with productions including small metal objects, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes and the Helpmann award-winning Ganesh Versus the Third Reich.
“When we go make the next work, it feels like we’re starting all over again,” said Gladwin, who has helmed the company for 25 years.
Since its launch in 1987, Back to Back has garnered 22 national and international awards. L-R Sarah Goninon, Tamika Simpson, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price.Credit: Andrea Avezzùà, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
Scott Price, who has spent 17 years with the company, said the Golden Lion was “a bit like winning the AFL premiership or the NBL finals”. One of the FOOD COURT’s original devisors, he recalled he, too, had had a horrific time at school. “We had a school next door full of naughty kids, and they targeted me constantly.”
Mainwaring, who has been with Back to Back for 17 years, and was another of the show’s original creators in 2008, said she felt “strong” on stage despite the bullying, expressing her character’s individuality in defiance of her tormenters.
The nudity didn’t trouble her, even though her body had been more exposed on the bare stage. “I knew the steps through it, and I knew that it was difficult and confronting, but not confronting for me as an actor.”
Powerful, too, was the denouement, when Mainwaring’s character, left for dead, finds her voice after presenting throughout the play as mute. She finally speaks by reciting the “be not afeard” speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Sarah Mainwaring performs FOOD COURT in Venice. Credit: Andrea Avezzùà, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
It is a moving, poetic refusal to be defined by violence. “Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not,” said Mainwaring. “I cried to dream again.”
This has been a remarkable year for Australian artists in Venice. In April, Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore was awarded Australia’s first Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for best national participation for his installation work, kith and kin, and at the Venice Film Festival in August-September, director Peter Weir will receive a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
Steve Dow was a guest of the Biennale Teatro.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday.