I attended the North American Playback Theatre Festival in Boston, MA (June 16-19, 2011). Playback Theatre is an interactive form with over 30 years of continual practice in many countries and languages. This particular festival welcomed 32 Playback Theatre companies, and I went to learn about this very popular form of theatre.
What I observed were people passionate about stories, and telling stories. But unlike traditional theatre, which usually starts with a script, the stories they tell are brought by their audience, and through a set of conventions which have been developed over time (and are still in development) they invite an audience member on stage in order to elicit and then “play back” a personal story. Playback Theatre serves the storyteller, the audience member, by placing before them on stage something deeply meaningful to them, their story.
From these common practices Playback branches out into a variety of purposes. It is used in education, rehabilitation, therapy, community building and ministry. The practitioners I met were quite diverse, but unified by a common belief in the power of storytelling and a passionate desire to serve the needs of people with stories – that is, everyone.
Playback places a lot of emphasis on the emotional context of the story. Audience members who volunteer a story are asked often to express how they felt in the moment of the story and how they feel in the moment of the retelling of the story. Playback techniques (such as fluid sculpture, pairs and the playback process itself) have been designed to express emotions very powerfully. The conductors, musicians and actors are highly skilled in improvisational theatre and empathetic identification with the participants.
It is obvious to me that Playback Theatre has a lot to offer people, as do the other forms of interactive theatre we work with in the Applied Theatre Center. I first learned about Playback through the book Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre, authored by Jo Salas. Jo was instrumental in the founding and developing of Playback Theatre and continues to work in the form as a member of the Hudson River Playback Theatre company. She has trained groups around the world in this form, and in June 2012 she will join our second Applied Theatre conference as the leader of a track in Playback Theatre.
