Cordingley, A. (2024). [Set & Costume Design] Multiple Bad Things. By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giambattista Varesco. Directed by Tamara Searle and Ingrid Voorendt. Back to Back Theatre, Geelong, Brussels, Melbourne, 2024.

Multiple Bad Things, an original new performance work co-directed by Ingrid Voorendt and Tamara Serle, produced Back to Back and authored by the ensemble, is creative research that emphasises process and people before product. It results in distinction across domains. Over three years, performers with profound extra abilities, disabilities and neurodiversity developed concepts orbiting fraught positionalities, entitlement and advantage, social domination, coercion and abuse. These topics inform a devised text, movement, and Cordingley's set, spatial and costume design. A non-naturalistic workspace, rife with aluminium tube and actuators, weather stations and renaissance clouds, this environment has evolved in a prompt-response-prompt mode across the years of developments. Unlike the typical pillars of good design, it makes harsh, uncomfortable demands of its performers, exploring the dignity of challenge and responsibility. The only Australian company to have ever won the prestigious international Ibsen Award and the Venice Golden Lion for Theatre, Back to Back is a globally recognised company. This is their first major work post-pandemic. Co-commissioned by international Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles and Festival d'Automn in Paris, the Australian season comprises Geelong Performing Arts Centre and Malthouse Theatre; funding partners further include Creative Australia and Creative Victoria. The Guardian's Tim Byrne reviewed this significant work with 5 stars, writing: 'Technically, it's flawless. Anna Cordingley's set and costume design is shrewd and highly considered, bewildering and mechanistic in some ways but also capable of wonder and transformation… it holds its secrets and eventually delivers a powerful coup de theatre.'