Tony McCaffrey
Artistic Director of Different Light Theatre Company, a Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Industries at National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Ara Institute, Christchurch, New Zealand. Co-convenor of the Performance and Disability Working Group, International Federation for Theatre Research. Ph D in Theatre and Film Studies, University of Canterbury. Author of Incapacity and Theatricality: Politics and Aesthetics in Theatre Involving Actors with Intellectual Disabilities (2019) in the Routledge series Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies and of Giving and Taking Voice in Learning Disabled Theatre (Routledge, 2023). Tony has a BA in English from King’s College, Cambridge and for many years has worked as an actor, director and writer in the UK, France, Italy, Turkey, the United States and, for the last twenty seven years, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Different Light Theatre is an ensemble of learning disabled artists. The company has been performing and researching performance for eighteen years in New Zealand, and has toured performances to Australia, the United States, and the UK.
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This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis.
This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic or spectator
Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long- held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty- first- century theatre, McCaffrey’s work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.
Tony McCaffrey is a Lecturer in Creative Industries at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Arts, Ara Institute, Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2004 he established the Different Light Theatre Company, an ensemble of performers with intellectual disabilities.
The unique characteristics of the company mean that we have been prompted to develop or to facilitate the emergence of multimodal ways of working, creating, and presenting performance. Members of the company have diverse forms of access to the conventional techne and building blocks of theatre: voice, gesture, and the kairotic use and application of space and time in live performance. Live-feed and pre-recorded video, captions, voiceovers, voice manipulations, and immersive strategies have all been utilized and explored by the company to connect to an audience, and to simultaneously question and problematize the terms of that connection, commonality, and communication. In the group’s performances multimedia approaches are confronted by the need for care and access intimacy (Mingus) and this often results in a mix of ‘intermediality’ in performance (Chapple and Kattenbelt) that renders political- at a fundamental level - the audience’s processes of perception, understanding, and affective engagement with the performers and the performance.
Does the political efficacy of this work consist in the mere presence of learning-disabled artists in these contexts or is it not rather in the negotiation of the terms of their presence and participation? Learning-disabled theatre is often perceived as giving voice to the voiceless or empowering the presence of those marginalized in society but how can this voice and power avoid becoming co-opted by neoliberal, racial, colonial capital merely to produce the entitled, self-possessed, autonomous individuals that late capitalism needs but the production of which is destroying the planet? One answer to this question is in exploring the multimodal negotiation of voice, presence, representation, and mediation in performance as performance.
Contemporary learning-disabled theatre such as that developed by Different Light Theatre or Australia’s Back to Back Theatre seeks to temper the need for the inclusion and emancipation of learning-disabled people with the cries of the planet and inter-relational ecologies of care. Learning-disabled theatre contributes to debates over identity politics that, in the words of Fred Moten, merely critiques ‘non-male, non-straight, non-white identity while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices.’ Different Light and Back to Back explore the political possibilities of learning-disabled artists’ occupation and sharing of the subjunctive spaces and times of theatrical performance. They do so by taking a multimodal approach to the creation, curation, and presentation of theatrical performance. This multimodal approach is determined by the diverse abilities, capacities, and virtuosity of the learning-disabled artists. In the process, fundamental questions are generated about what is meant by ability, capacity, and virtuosity that have far-reaching implications for theatre and arts practice and research.
This book draws on an extensive archive of performer interviews, recordings of rehearsal processes, and informal logs of travelling together and sharing experience. These accounts engage with the practical aesthetics of theatre-making as well as their much wider ethical and political implications, relevant to any collaborative process seeking to represent the under- or un-represented. Giving and Taking Voice asks how care and support can be tempered with artistic challenge and rigour and presents a case for how listening learning disabled artists to speech encourages attunement to indigenous knowledge and the cries of the planet in the current socio-ecological crisis.
This is a vital and valuable book for anyone interested in learning disabled theatre, either as a performer, director, dramaturg, critic or spectator
Tracing a global path of performances, Incapacity and Theatricality offers an analysis of how actors with intellectual disabilities have emerged onto the main stage, and how their inclusion calls into question long- held assumptions about both theatre and intellectual disability. For postgraduate students, or anyone interested in the shifting dynamics of twenty- first- century theatre, McCaffrey’s work offers a vital consideration of the intersubjective relations between people with and without intellectual disabilities and ultimately addresses urgent questions about the situation and representation of the contemporary subject caught up somewhere between incapacity and theatricality.
Tony McCaffrey is a Lecturer in Creative Industries at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Arts, Ara Institute, Christchurch, New Zealand. In 2004 he established the Different Light Theatre Company, an ensemble of performers with intellectual disabilities.
The unique characteristics of the company mean that we have been prompted to develop or to facilitate the emergence of multimodal ways of working, creating, and presenting performance. Members of the company have diverse forms of access to the conventional techne and building blocks of theatre: voice, gesture, and the kairotic use and application of space and time in live performance. Live-feed and pre-recorded video, captions, voiceovers, voice manipulations, and immersive strategies have all been utilized and explored by the company to connect to an audience, and to simultaneously question and problematize the terms of that connection, commonality, and communication. In the group’s performances multimedia approaches are confronted by the need for care and access intimacy (Mingus) and this often results in a mix of ‘intermediality’ in performance (Chapple and Kattenbelt) that renders political- at a fundamental level - the audience’s processes of perception, understanding, and affective engagement with the performers and the performance.
Does the political efficacy of this work consist in the mere presence of learning-disabled artists in these contexts or is it not rather in the negotiation of the terms of their presence and participation? Learning-disabled theatre is often perceived as giving voice to the voiceless or empowering the presence of those marginalized in society but how can this voice and power avoid becoming co-opted by neoliberal, racial, colonial capital merely to produce the entitled, self-possessed, autonomous individuals that late capitalism needs but the production of which is destroying the planet? One answer to this question is in exploring the multimodal negotiation of voice, presence, representation, and mediation in performance as performance.
Contemporary learning-disabled theatre such as that developed by Different Light Theatre or Australia’s Back to Back Theatre seeks to temper the need for the inclusion and emancipation of learning-disabled people with the cries of the planet and inter-relational ecologies of care. Learning-disabled theatre contributes to debates over identity politics that, in the words of Fred Moten, merely critiques ‘non-male, non-straight, non-white identity while courteously leaving politics to its own uncriticized devices.’ Different Light and Back to Back explore the political possibilities of learning-disabled artists’ occupation and sharing of the subjunctive spaces and times of theatrical performance. They do so by taking a multimodal approach to the creation, curation, and presentation of theatrical performance. This multimodal approach is determined by the diverse abilities, capacities, and virtuosity of the learning-disabled artists. In the process, fundamental questions are generated about what is meant by ability, capacity, and virtuosity that have far-reaching implications for theatre and arts practice and research.
Keywords: aesthetics and politics; postdramatic theatre; disability performance; performance and performativity; inclusion and subjectivation
The history of the company is also deeply implicated in the colonial heritage of Aotearoa New Zealand and the fault-lines of inequity exposed in Otautahi Christchurch by the 2010/11 earthquakes, the 2019 mosque massacres, the Covid pandemic, and the climate emergency. We, the learning disabled artists and I, are still coming to terms with what has been gained and lost in this period, how ‘voice’ has been given and taken, and also, ultimately, with the ‘fugitivity’ that constitutes the company’s reason for being. We are still trying to find a way of being together in an untogether way."
Tony McCaffrey is a Lecturer at the National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Director of Different Light Theatre. He is co-convenor of the Performance and Disability Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. He is the author of Incapacity and Theatricality (Routledge, 2019) and has published articles in Theatre Research International, The Journal of Dramatic Theatre and Criticism and Global Performance Studies. Different Light Theatre is an ensemble of learning disabled artists. The company has been devising, performing and researching performance for nineteen years in New Zealand. They have toured performances to Australia, the United States, and the UK, and members of the group have recently participated in online conferences in Athens, Helsinki, and Reykjavik.
To find out more about Different Light, please see the video transcription and video of a rough recording of Different Light presentation/performance at the University of Auckland in December 2022.
This is a draft paper for 'voice.' It is a work in progress and not a finished fully coherent and fully referenced piece for publication.
Elasticity University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 4th-7th July, 2019.