Back to Back Theatre The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes

[Theatre]

Over the course of a fictional meeting between a group of citizens, the mentally handicapped performers of the Australian company Back to Back Theatre alert us to the dangers of an omnipotent artificial intelligence. Their experience will soon be ours: one day we may all be considered as deficient.

The Australian company Back to Back Theatre, awarded the Ibsen International Prize in 2022 for its entire body of work, and a frequent visitor to the most prestigious festivals across the globe, now performs its work for the very first time in France, thereby enhancing its reputation as a theatrical institution. For more than thirty years now, the company has been bringing performers with disabilities to the stage in order to question our prejudices about what we perceive as normal, the constitution of our respective imaginations and the steadfastness of our modes of governance. Its artistic director Bruce Gladwin, at the helm since the 1990s, is a direct inheritor of the Art Brut movement and French philosophy of the 1970’s, such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida. The company’s latest creation, The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, depicts a meeting held by a group of citizens in which the various characters present alert us to the dangers of a future in which humanity finds itself dominated by artificial intelligence. As such, the reversal the performers bring about is a stunning one: the handicap they face in their everyday, present lives become our most precious safeguard.