In Playback Theatre, the audience is the author. Sharing a story and watching its improvised re-enactment is an effective way of reinforcing a community's identity, writes Sara Keating.
Founded in the 1970s, Playback Theatre is a very 1970s kind of movement. It is a spontaneous theatre form which takes the stories of its audiences as the basis for performances, and its ethos echoes the idealistic value-system of a post-Vietnam generation. With key roles for a designated master of ceremonies known as "the conductor" or "the shaman", and an emphasis on ritual, the philosophy that underlies Playback's working methods seems very "New Age".
With its roots closely tied to psychodrama, the Playback Theatre philosophy is underpinned by a belief in theatre as therapy, in which audience participation and aesthetic transformation can bring about a cathartic release and communion for audience-participants and actors alike. Playback practitioners worldwide have often contested this interpretation of their work, arguing that the Playback mission is more artistic than holistic, more about aesthetics than analysis.
However, in practice it seems that Playback Theatre is most effective and most moving when being used outside of the traditional environment of the theatre; in the community and social settings where Playback Theatre is most popular, the act of sharing a story and watching its improvised re-enactment reinforces individual and communal identity.
One of the many websites devoted to it asserts that Playback Theatre "build(s) connections between people by honouring the dignity, drama, and universality of their stories".
The most recent performances of the Dublin Playback Theatre Company certainly confirm this. Working with groups of refugee, asylum-seeking and immigrant women, in which, according to their director Sinead Moloney they "shared personal stories about their experiences from their own countries and some of the reasons why they came to Ireland".
Speaking earlier this month at the Ark, in a public lecture organised by the National Association for Youth Drama, founder of Playback Theatre Jonathan Fox addressed a 50-strong crowd of arts facilitators and theatre enthusiasts. With a troupe of five NAYD-trained actors who performed a series of interludes, Fox acted as the "conductor", guiding the audience through the steps involved in creating good Playback Theatre. At key moments, Fox invited the audience to contribute stories so that the process could be illustrated.
In his conductor role, Fox's function was to elicit the key elements in each story and probe the teller for an emotional response from which the actors could take their cues for an authentic incarnation of the story.
The stories offered by the audience ranged from hangovers to passports, from relationship breakdowns to work conflicts.
With the punctuation of a "transition" moment marked by the key phrase "Let's watch!", the actors moved out to embody the teller's story - in this particular Playback performance, through a series of physical gestures, key words and collective tableaux repeated several times, sometimes for emphasis, sometimes for laughs.
However, even as the stories were enacted to a lone musician's clever and witty improvised score, there seemed to be something very "youth drama" about the performances that were shaped from Fox's Playback demonstration.
Appropriately, the majority of the audience were youth drama facilitators who use Playback Theatre in their work with young adults. Peter Kelly, a drama facilitator at Portlaoise Youth Theatre who participated in a workshop with Fox the following day, was first introduced to Playback Theatre through the NAYD ArtsTrain programme. Kelly uses Playback exercises regularly in youth theatre workshops, although not yet directly in performances, and he finds the method useful for "challenging participants and getting them to offer their own stories".
It's a key element for youth theatre companies that participants have ownership of the work they are creating, and Playback gives them direct input into the creative process. Kelly says that "staying true to the teller's story" is the most important rule for good Playback Theatre, but he also concedes that it is often the nature of the story offered that determines the success of the enactment: "generally people go for funny stories, but when you get past that people can sometimes come up with a lovely moment, something sad or honest."
For Kelly, this is where Playback is at its most powerful as a theatrical performance, rather than merely a workshop tool.
In his lecture, Fox focused on the difficulties of having Playback Theatre recognised as an artistic performance, both in terms of practical issues such as funding and in the wider artistic community. However, what Fox calls the "creative dramatics" of Playback in performance pale in comparison to the "healing power of empathy" that Playback offers outside of the theatre. Looking through the performance details of Playback groups in Japan, Australia, North and South America, and most European countries including Ireland, it is in non-theatrical settings that the transformation of an audience's experience is most successful.
In fact it is quite telling that the examples that Fox used to illustrate Playback's success during his lecture were all drawn from community settings: mixed-race workshops in under-privileged areas, New Orleans in the post-Katrina rebuild, New York after 9/11. In these extra-theatrical settings, the personal stories and the socio-political context in which they were told intersected at a key point, where audience members reached a greater understanding of themselves and the importance of their place within the community.
It was these stories, rather than the stories improvised on stage that afternoon at Fox's lecture, which resonated with the audience and will play back again and again in our minds.
