On Democracy features award-winning artist Alex Bulmer and scholar Keren Zaiontz in conversation about Back to Back Theatre’s The Democratic Set.
They will discuss how disabled artists are cripping — and democratizing — the stage through bold enactments that refuse to be peripheral to contemporary performance.
Bulmer and Zaiontz will also ask what these un-apologetic crip performances hold for democracy-at-large. For disabled artists, principles such as freedom of movement and freedom of assembly are not lofty notions, but the stuff of resistance.
Critical Ideas is a partnership between PuSh and SFU’s Institute for Performance Studies. Coordinated by IPS Director Peter Dickinson and PuSh Associate Artistic Director Joyce Rosario, the series brings together artists, critics, scholars, and audiences to discuss formal, social, and ideological issues affecting performance practice and reception today.
Panels are free and open to the public. Now entering its 5th year, the 2020 edition of Critical Ideas has been guest-curated by PuSh Scholars-in-Residence Dylan Robinson and Keren Zaiontz.
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Artist Bio
Back to Back Theatre (Australia)
Based in the Victorian regional centre of Geelong, Back to Back Theatre is widely recognised as an Australian theatre company of national and international significance. The company is driven by an ensemble of actors who are perceived to have intellectual disabilities and is considered one of Australia’s most important cultural exporters.
We contend our operation as a theatre company is beyond expectation of possibility: an affirmation for human potential. The company’s existence contributes to the richness and diversity of Australian life and palpably projects Geelong, Victoria and Australia to the world as innovative, sophisticated and dynamic.
The company has undertaken presentations and screenings at the world’s pre-eminent contemporary arts festivals and venues such as the Edinburgh International Festival, London’s V&A Museum and the Barbican, Vienna Festival, Holland Festival and Theater der Welt, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Public Theater in New York, Festival Tokyo, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong, and Buenos Aires International Festival.
Back to Back Theatre has received 21 national and international awards including the International Ibsen Award, a Helpmann Award for Best Australian Work, an Edinburgh International Festival Herald Angel Critics’ Award, two Age Critics’ Awards, a New York Bessie and the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Group Award for our long-standing contribution to the development of Australian theatre. In 2015, Bruce Gladwin received the Australia Council for the Arts’ Inaugural Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre. The ensemble were awarded the ‘Best Ensemble’ in the 2019 Green Room Awards.
Venue
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 West Hastings Street, Vancouver (Level 2)
Showtimes
January 24
90 minutes