Playback Theatre: Enacting real stories of real people

A member from the audience volunteers to share his or her life experience and then watches it being spontaneously enacted by actors, with all the raw emotions and intimacy of human life on stage. This is Playback Theatre, an interactive and improvisational canvas used to illuminate life and incite dialogue. Originally created by US-based theatre performer Jonathan Fox with the help of musician and activist Joe Salas in 1975, Playback Theatre has since travelled to more than 50 countries across six continents. And spreading knowledge and benefits of the form in the city is the Sterling School of Playback Theatre, which was formed by Cyril Alexander in 2000. It is to mark 16 years of its efforts that the Playback Theatre Fest ’16 was organised from December 3 to 8, an extravaganza that is hosting for the first time, Jonathan Fox himself. 

Speaking about how the concept of Playback was born, Jonathan, who is now in his 70s says, “I was a young man then (in 1975) and I was very interested and involved in experimental theatre. I thought of myself as a theatre artiste. One day, I saw in front of my mind’s eye a group of people in a village and they had something to tell. There was a stage and actors on it and I knew they were sitting ready to act out the stories of those people. It was just this simple idea. I was the director of a theatre company at that time and I had actually started a new company (Playback Theatre company) to begin this new approach that we ended up calling it Playback Theatre.” Since the art is based on real-life stories, almost invariably, during a Playback event, there are emotionally charged moments and even catharsis. There is no fixed plan for a performance as it is solely based on the real stories narrated by the audience. 

Without a clear framework provided by the rules, spontaneity can quickly turn into chaos, creativity into confusion, and when the audience isn’t ready to open up, there could be no story to recreate. But, Jonathan says, “You need to build an atmosphere where people actually feel comfortable and where they want to tell something. Each performance is different and it depends upon who you’re in front of, the circumstances they’re in and you have to be sensitive to that. This is what makes it different from traditional theatre, where you come to the theatre, enter an artificial space, and you see what is presented to you. In the idea of playback, you have to blend in with the mood of the audience and what’s going on. So, it’s not just the art there’s the social connection and conscience that’s also a very big part of it.” 

Over the years, Playback has also been used as a therapeutic medium in fields like transitional justice, human rights, refugees and immigrants, disaster recovery, climate change, birthdays and weddings, and conferences, in an effort to encourage individuals from all walks of society to let their stories be heard. “Across cultures and languages, there seems to be a need for people to tell their story and for others in their community to hear that and give them an assurance that they’re not alone. It can help communities understand what’s important and how to move forward in a way that’s useful to them.” It’s been 40 years and there have been thousands of stories that Jonathan has come to narrate. Recalling one of the many stories that have left a deep impression, Jonathan says, “I remember the floods in America in 2006 when New Orleans was hit by typhoon Katrina. 

Six months later, we took a playback team there and we heard stories of people. For one performance in school, there was one girl who the teachers had told us about. She had to climb on to the roof of her house and there was flooding all around. She was with her grandfather and she had to stay there for two days, before they were rescued. The teachers were worried that she had been through a bad experience and if we could get her to tell, maybe it would be helpful. So for the last story, for that performance, she raised her hand and she said, ‘Well my story is I got to ride in a helicopter’. 

The person asking the questions asked her why and what happened, beginning to expect she would tell the horror she went through. She said ‘yes I was on the roof, but I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about riding in a helicopter’. You could see the teachers beginning to ask her to talk about the trauma. But we accept what the teller wants to tell. And her story was about riding in a helicopter and that’s what we acted out.” He adds, “And when I thought about this story afterwards, I felt she was telling everyone present in the room there, something they needed to hear, that there is always hope. That there is a chance that a helicopter would come when you’re looking at what could be the end of life. It’s not over and you can be saved. It was a very uplifting story, a story of resilience.”