With the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to the Australian group Back to Back Theatre, the Biennale Teatro 2024 has brought a company with disabilities to the world stage for the first time. It was the president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, who presented the prestigious award today during a ceremony at Ca’ Giustinian to the director and artistic director Bruce Gladwin and his differently abled actors.
The motivations for the Golden Lion were read by Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte, directors of the 52nd International Theatre Festival. The differently abled bodies on stage of Back to Back disintegrate “with poetic ferocity every prejudice, every stigma of compassion: if the body has expressive limits, such demarcations on stage become in turn a different grammar”, explained Ricci and Forte, underlining how the company of cognitively disabled people founded in 1987 and based in Geelong, the centre of the Australian state of Victoria, proposes a “path of openness towards the community, as a possibility of meeting with the territory: art becomes a bridge between oneself and the world”.
“Our fears, puritan tolerances, moral blindness are blown away by the cruel fairy tales of the dangerous worlds of Back to Back Theatre, where diversity is the bearer of amplification of knowledge, of inclusion, to cure the deformities of awareness of us apparently able – the motivations of the Golden Lion continue to state – The theatre of Back to Back therefore becomes, in addition to the high intrinsic artistic value, a driver of identity in listening to a voice out of the chorus: the understanding and respect of something different from our models of social representation; the possibility of building the foundations of a renewed relationship and delivering to us – the disabled – the key to understanding our reduced capacity for collective interaction. Because whatever limitation a person may feel, it is up to us as a human consortium to remove it; this is what Culture does, this is the Theatre to be deserved, this and much more is the Back to Back Theatre”.
Bruce Gladwin, accepting the Golden Lion on behalf of his theater company, declared: “I thank the president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and the directors Stefano Ricci and Gianni Forte for granting this tribute to our work. The Venice Biennale is a cultural institution extraordinary and it is with great honor and immense joy that we accept this award. We are all proud of the international spotlight that the Venice Biennale offers us.”
The actors Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price, visibly moved, passed the Golden Lion statue from hand to hand amidst shouts of joy, tears and applause, making the ceremony extremely touching. “We are very happy with this award, we return to Australia full of so many emotions and so much gratitude towards Italy”, they commented. “The theater opens its wings to us every time we act and thanks to the Venice Biennale we now fly even higher,” they added. “Winning the Golden Lion is like winning the gold medal at the Olympics. Winning an award forces you to start over to do better and better.” “The Golden Lion awarded to us is part of that necessary change and I am convinced that it will help to increase understanding – underlined Gladwin – The Italian community demonstrates that it is advanced in addressing disability issues”.
The Australian company Back to Back Theatre, which boasts 22 awards collected over over thirty years, presented the show “Food Court” in its Italian premiere at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale in Venice. Halfway between performance and concert, “Food Court” brings on stage three actresses – Sarah Gonion, Tamika Simpson, Sarah Mainwaring – together with the jazz band The Neck, to tell a story of bullying and rebirth. “For a long time it seemed that people with disabilities were playing victims – explained Bruce Gladwin – In ‘Food Court’ we wanted to create a work in which an actor with a disability played a character capable of doing harm. ‘Food Court’ did not aims to talk about disability. But it raises the question: are the characters portrayed disabled or not?”
