Back to Back Theatre Isn’t So Sure About AI - Art Echo Ep8

Reporter/Provider - TaiwanPlus
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Back to Back Theatre (@Backtobacktheatre1893) is a world-renowned theatre company based in Geelong, Australia. The cast consists of neurodivergent individuals living with autism, ADHD, or intellectual disabilities working together to create a body of work that questions what’s possible in theatre. Since their first production in 1988, the life experiences and beliefs of core members have created theatrical narratives interrogating most people’s ideas about disability, politics, society, gender, and human rights. Neurodiverse movements and thought processes ask bigger questions of the audience, the world, and our future. In 2022, Back to Back’s first feature film “Shadow” won the International Ibsen Award, also known as the ‘Nobel Prize’ of theatre and the dramatic arts. In October of 2023, Art Echo followed the rehearsal process, performance, post-show dialogues, and visits to Taipei as the company brought “The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes” to Taiwan on the final stop of their Asia tour. The play begins with a town hall attempting to define the word ‘disability’. Audiences’ mistakes, mis-readings, mis-leadings, and misunderstandings of neurodivergent people are explored with respect to social communication, pre-conceived notions, and social justice amidst the projected dominance of artificial intelligence (AI). That is, even so called ‘normal’ people are going to one day have an intellectual disability.


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Art Echo

Watch as different artists share the personal stories behind their creative process to help audiences examine their own relationship with creativity in all forms. Art is rarely a distant echo, it's the undercurrent pulsing through everyday life.