, these shows encompassed musical, comic and dance routines, drawing on the experiences each member had in live vaudeville performance. The discussion outlines these individual histories, and draws attention to a shared fascination with impersonation, which forms an explicit and implicit part of the act, as the performers' stage personas are already emulatory. In addition to the influence of vaudeville, the construction of the Rat Pack also draws on the structures of blackface minstrelsy, with the interactions of the five members being patterned on a fluid variant of the interlocutor-endmen relationships. The interweaving of these influences and performance styles underpins a dominant concern of the troupe, as the comic material frequently negotiates the racial, national and religious identities of the individual performers. In particular, this deals with their shared status of having immigrant ancestry, a status which I term as being 'hyphenated-American', suspended between historical, public and aspirational identities. IntroductionThe Rat Pack remains a somewhat amorphous collection of associates in the popular imagination, in terms of its constituent members and their range of activities. Richard Gehman's contemporaneous book Sinatra and his Rat Pack (1961) notes that a tendency to mythologise has always accompanied the group in the American national psyche:2 All the members of this group vehemently deny that it exists. Yet it does, if only in the minds of those who are not in it, for we in this foolish yet goodintentioned country tend to think in terms of groups. We feel troubled when we cannot think of all of us together putting similar hats on similar heads.

Reclaiming authority: the past and future of theatre and learning disability DIsability Arts is, to appropriate Paddy Ladd's phrase about the documentation of disability politics, engaged in 'the process of freeing ourselves from imposed histories' (Campbell & Oliver 1996). This process is (at least) two-pronged. The need to challenge discriminatory systems that impose fixed narratives on material experience is accompanied by reclaiming authority-the status of the author-in documenting and representing those experiences.

In order to combat the social alienation of people with learning disabilities, applied practice in this field is frequently directed towards performance, partly recognising that marginalisation extends to their exclusion from the stage itself, and partly to establish a communicative space where people with learning disabilities and non-disabled people can meet on something approaching equal terms. This latter point also informs the artistic process with nondisabled artists usually integrated with learning disabled artists in the creation of performance. Heavy Load is a band from Brighton consisting of members 'with and without learning disabilities' that draws on the theatrical constructions and posturing of the punk tradition. In this article, I will consider how punk aesthetics are both adopted and negotiated in order to produce meaning at the local and immediate level.Such adoption and negotiation is more fundamental to applied theatre practice than mainstream performance as it must attend in a detailed and intricate way with the particular lives and contexts it is engaged with. My reflection on Heavy Load is based on two consequent observations about the role of aesthetics in applied theatre. The first is that meaning in applied theatre is carried as much in the aesthetic components of form and structure as it is in content, because the participant here occupies a wholly experiential position inside the creative project rather than the traditional, decoding relationship of the spectator. For many learning disabled performers -including those in Heavy Load -the applied dimension of the work means that they occupy a dual role of participant and practitioner. The second is that this aesthetic dimension is not necessarily contained within the immediate and local, but also a source of diachronic associations. Punk exemplifies this in two ways. It has strong historical and geographical associations in itself which perpetuate a mythological punk identity. It also declares itself as an anti-aesthetic, necessitating a relationship to other aesthetic forms that is both oppositional and contingent. My study of Heavy Load is therefore a consideration of the ways in which aesthetic choices can inform, support and threaten applied theatre practice and the necessity of re-imagining artistic practice in such contexts.Oliver Double (2007, p.47) suggests that punk combines political opposition with theatrical tactics when he notes that it puts 'ideas from the avant garde into a popular theatrical form.' While the avant garde is a broad church, Graver (1995, p.6) argues that it has most 'conceptual clarity' when it incorporates 'pronounced sociopolitical programs that…challenge the hegemony of the dominant culture.' Punk's hegemonic challenge involves a defiant attitude, real and assumed moral transgression and the anarchic refusal of dominant values. This finds expression in an anti-aesthetic which rejects the values masked by institutionalised codes of art, such as ornamentation, virtuosity and conventional notions of beau...

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