2009 Kit Denton Fellowship Winner Takes Out Helpmann Prize for Best Play

27 September, 2012

Victorian company Back to Back Theatre has taken out the 2012 Helpmann Award for Best Play. The leading contemporary theatre ensemble has actors with intellectual disabilities at its creative core, and received the 2009 Kit Denton Fellowship in recognition of its groundbreaking work.  With the assistance of the $30,000 Fellowship, the Helpmann-winner Ganesh Versus the Third Reich was developed. The Age gave it 5 stars and called it "Courageous, confronting, intelligent and magisterially considered theatre."

At the time, the company said, "It is a great honour to have received the 2009 Kit Denton Fellowship. The purpose of the Fellowship is to promote courage in performance writing; we can think of no better impulse. With support from the Fellowship, we hope to make a work that is simultaneously intelligent, irresponsible, unpredictable, irreverent, disrespectful, respectful, essential, intriguing, chaotic, ridiculous and funny." They have indeed achieved all that they hoped to, and the Australian Writers' Guild, Cordell Jigsaw Zapruder and TressCox Lawyers congratulate them.

The Fellowship

What was the Kit Denton Fellowship has now become the Kit Denton Disfellowship, as winning it may mean being disowned by your nan. It is awarded to strong, exciting, subversive ideas, and includes a grant, legal support and ongoing development and production support to the value of $30,000 for the winning project.