ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter attempts to draw together the connections between the various performances by actors with intellectual disabilities examined throughout the book: the children in the 1963 film A Child Is Waiting, the residents of a segregated institution at the Sydney Opera House in 1980, Christopher Knowles’ collaboration with Robert Wilson, the residents of an institution in Schlingensief’s FreakStars 3000, and the professional actors of Back to Back Theatre. One connection is the actors’ discovering the joy and emancipation of being ‘left to their own devices’. This possibility is dependent upon a careful and well-crafted negotiation of the framing mechanisms of theatrical performance and the provision of networks of support for actors with intellectual disabilities. The chapter draws a specific connection between the symbolic exhaustion of dramatic theatre at the end of Back to Back’s Ganesh versus the Third Reich and Jérôme Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater as a performative dis-abling of representational performance. Later works by Back to Back – Super Discount and Lady Eats Apple, and HORA’s Freie Republik HORA, in their different ways open up ‘lines of flight’ that might trace paths to a more egalitarian and interdependent relationship between people with and without intellectual disabilities.
