Back To Back Theatre: Ganesh Versus the Third Reich at UC Los Angeles

Back To Back Theatre: Ganesh Versus the Third Reich


Dates: January 24-27, 2013
Location: 
Freud Playhouse, UC Los Angeles

Tickets: $40 – $60 ($20 UCLA Students)

One of Australia’s leading and respected contemporary theater companies, Back to Back Theatre, creates new forms of modern theater imagined from the minds and experiences of a professional ensemble of actors with disabilities, giving voice to the social and political issues that speak to all people. Their acclaimed and highly original production Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is a self-reflective revelation on the creation of theater, through a central hero’s adventure of epic proportions. The story begins with an actor portraying Ganesh, who embarks upon a mission through Nazi Germany to reclaim the ancient Hindu symbol being exploited as the swastika, to restore it to its proper context.

Poignant, beautiful, disarming, full of vulnerability and theatrically sly transparency, Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is also imbued with ample wit. Delving into the weighty responsibility of storytellers, and questioning the ethics of cultural appropriation—Back to Back Theatre’s award-winning production invites us to examine who has the right to tell a story and who has the right to be heard. It explores our complicity in creating and dismantling the world, and celebrates hope and the spectrum of human potential.

Ganesh Versus the Third Reich has won the 2009 Kit Denton Fellowship for Courageous Writing, the 2011 Age Critics’ Award for best new Australia work at the Melbourne festival, three Green Room Awards for Best Ensemble Performance (Alternative & Hybrid Performance), Best Direction (Theatre), and Best Production (Theatre) and the 2012 Helpmann Award for Best Play.
Back to Back Theatre’s previous production, Small Metal Objects, was the recipient of the 2007 Bessie Award for “a work that revealed the choreography of commuter ebbs and flows in the Staten Island Ferry terminal; for presenting an ordinary story in an extraordinary way.” Small Metal Objects also won the Green Room Award for Best Theater Production (New Form); the ZKB Appreciation Prize in Zurich; the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, honoring the company’s long-standing contribution to the development of Australian theater; and The Age Critics’ Special Commendation for its premiere season at the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

For more information and to buy tickets visit: http://cap.ucla.edu/calendar/event_detail.asp?id=253

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