Ash Bolt
Geelong-based theatre group Back to Back Theatre is set to reach a wider audience, with its animation series First Responders screening on the ABC.
The 20-part television series was developed by the theatre group in collaboration with 13 Nelson Park School students who identify as neuro-diverse and is screening on the ABC’s children’s channel ABC ME and the ABC iView app.
First Responders features a group of unlikely experts who are on a mission to help answer any questions about the future – from love, to landscaping and parallel universes – and brings unique perspectives and underrepresented voices to the screen.
The show used a unique writing process that involved interviewing and capturing the students’ verbal responses to the themes of a world in transition, with their audio forming most of the dialogue and soliloquy of the animation.
In the series, the neuro-diverse co-authors are represented as avatars of themselves, as knowledge assets and heroes of a community.
Excerpts from their responses to the interviews are form the content of the animation, while members of the Back to Back Theatre’s ensemble of artists who identify as having an intellectual disability or neurodiversity also play characters in the show.
Each roughly two-minute episode is characterised by a new emergency that the First Responders must respond to, as well as manage their own internal differences, short fallings, egos and conflicts of opinion; their idiosyncratic understanding of everything from physics to philosophy may be all the human race has to liberate it from fear and misinformation.
First Responders began as a series of workshops run by director Ahmarnya Price with the students of Nelson Park in early 2020 which was intended to become a live theatre piece but evolved into the series.
Price said the show allowed the neuro-diverse participants to share their own unique takes on the world.
“What has remained important throughout is that each episode not only represents an aspect of the world we all live in but a young person who has control over the narrative of their own world,” she said.
The series had received funding from Screen Australia and Film Victoria.
Screen Australia head of online Lee Naimo said the organisation was “thrilled to support [Back to Back] bringing this new quirky and charming series to a wide audience on ABC Me, and continuing to provide vital representation for people with disabilities.”
First Responders is directed by Price with animation by Rhian Hinkley, music by Kelly Ryall and illustrations by ARTGUSTO. The series is produced by Alice Fleming, Nikki Watson, with executive producers Bruce Gladwin and Tim Stitz.
The series is co-written and stars Breanna Deleo, Cam LeCouter, Jai Storey, Harry Schaller, Parsa Shabestanimonfared, Priscilla Ragesh, Sarah Gray, Kerry Cook, Grace Funston, Vivian Salter, Chloe Weiler, Ayden Horrocks, Sarah Alwood, Jonathan Slater, Nathan Mead, Lucas Kenyon, Rupert Stone and Charlotte Fitzgerald.
The show kicks off a busy month for the theatre group, with its debut feature film Shadow set to premiere at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas on March 12.
