PLAYBACK THEATER AS THE PRACTICE OF COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL HEALING

Abstract

Community-based social healing as a holistic approach involves healing of traumatized individual experiences through constant support of the communal environment, as well as the formation of harmonious interpersonal interaction through understanding and acceptance of the experiences of others. Playback Theater, with its ability to create a liminal space that mixes the individual and the collective dimensions in the specific experience of fused reality and imaginarity, is one the ways to achieve this goal. We are not talking about the exclusiveness of this method, but rather about concretizing a quite abstract adjustment of community-based social healing through an approach that is already developed at the practical and conceptual levels.

Full text

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절차
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Theoretical and practical aspects of modern scientific research
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섹션 27.
HISTORY, ARCHEOLOGY AND CULTUROLOGY
DOI 10.36074/logos-24.11.2023.89
PLAYBACK THEATER AS THE PRACTICE OF
COMMUNITY-BASED SOCIAL HEALING
Rostyslav Fanahei
MA in Cultural Studies, PhD student in Cultural Studies
researcher in the project “Contact2U”, NGO “Power of the Future”
UKRAINE
Abstract. Community-based social healing as a holistic approach involves healing of
traumatized individual experiences through constant support of the communal environment,
as well as the formation of harmonious interpersonal interaction through understanding and
acceptance of the experiences of others. Playback Theater, with its ability to create a liminal
space that mixes the individual and the collective dimensions in the specific experience of
fused reality and imaginarity, is one the ways to achieve this goal. We are not talking about
the exclusiveness of this method, but rather about concretizing a quite abstract adjustment
of community-based social healing through an approach that is already developed at the
practical and conceptual levels.
War, in all its destructive pervasiveness, is a collective trauma in need of
healing. This means the need for the healing not just of a multitude of individual
traumas, but also for healing the togetherness of a community. After all, it is the main
means and goal of overcoming trauma, even if we consider the latter purely in an
individual dimension. On the one hand, the collective nature of trauma can look like
an abstraction, even a pejorative one— a generalization of a multiplicity of personal
and often painfully unrelated stories with common causes or similar features. But this
is precisely the basis of this trauma. It is a violation of togetherness: the usual way of
everyday collective existence and the basic mutual understanding and self-identity
due to it. At the individual level, the violation of the very way of existence is different
— loss of loved ones, forced resettlement, mobilization, etc. In response to this, the
holistic adjustment of community-based social healing involves the construction of a
new community, or the maintenance and reconstruction of an old one.
In both cases, the main problem is the inability to grasp the experience and inner
state of the other person, and therefore understand and accept it fully. This
problem — the impenetrability, and in particular the unpredictability, of the other — is
fundamental to human interaction. The answer to it, although always insufficient, is
cultural development in general: the formation and historical complication of
communicative practices and tools, norms and values, socio-political institutions, etc.
In such conditions as the war, in addition to the existential threat, this fundamental
problem is also radicalized. After all, the difference in experiences increases, in their
totality they are even worse exposed by the usual means of expression, and the
misunderstanding becomes even more conflictual and traumatic.

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The purpose of the article is to analyze the Playback Theater as a practical
application of community-based social healing and to concretize the latter through it.
The idea of Playback Theater (PbT) — “paradoxically simple and complex,
common and unique, ancient and yet totally contemporary form of performance”
[4] — emerged from Jonathan Fox’s research into experimental post-modern
theatrical forms, pre-modern oral communicative practices and the therapeutic
method of psychodrama. However, the basic principles and structure of this
performative practice, which were formed by "The original Playback Theater
Company" (created by Fox and J. Salas in 1975), go beyond these inspiring areas as
something much simpler and more complex at the same time.
The event of PbT is a time-limited repetition of a clear pattern: the conductor
offers to tell a personal story, each person in the audience has the opportunity to
become a storyteller, after this the conductor clarifies the details of the story and a
team of actors and musician improvisationally play the told story back to the teller and
audience. "As such, Playback Theater can be conceived as a series of storytelling
performances interspersed with a series of dramatic enactments, within a ritual
framework" [2]. However, the apparent simplicity of this basic structure carries many
different dimensions, which are synthesized in a special way of interpersonal
interaction, which is one of the most vivid examples of community-based social
healing.
According to J. Fox, the key feature of PbT is that it is simultaneously intimate
and communal. Theatrical-ritual "form" of performance combines individual "content"
and common "context". In other words, it can be expressed thanks to the dimensions
of the PbT event, drawn by H. Dauber [1]. Individual experience has the opportunity
to enter the objective dimension, to manifest itself in the oral performance of the
narrator himself and its in-embodiment by the playback performers. On the other
hand, the objective dimension of everyday life — social roles, rules and norms — is
deconstructed in the ritual interaction that forms and structures the "collective-
subjective" dimension of mutual transformation — liminal space. The concept of
liminality arose initially to denote the central phase of the rite of passage, in which the
previous condition of the person or the community is already gone but the new one
is not constructed yet. Nowadays this term doesn’t have only ritual connotations and
is applied in general to the saturated and opaque inbetweeness of individual or social
disintegration and reintegration.
The playback performers, like a priest in a premodern ritual, lead an audience
of narrators-listeners through such liminal space and returns them renewed, defined
by a shared narrative, healed by common lived experience. In this case, a clear and
constantly repeating structure of the event is important — "readily understood by new
audience members and providing continuity to those who have come before" [5].
Moreover, it is a security framework that simultaneously separates the PbT event
from everyday life and normalizes the transformative process at the level of minimal
predictability.
One of the basic dimensions of the liminal space of PbT is going beyond the
usual social hierarchies — similar to the ritualism of medieval carnivals, in which
differences were overcome and accepted roles were rejected in temporary equal
access to full self-expression. In contrast to the carnivalesque ecstatic explosion, PbT
appeals to equal access to the realization of another basic human need — to tell
one's story publicly and to be heard, recognized, and accepted. This opportunity is
extremely important because telling one's story is performing and constructing
oneself — a process in which the audience is not a passive witness, but an active
accomplice. "The stories told in PBT are both the product and the "end" of an
experience, but also the "beginning" of a journey towards understanding"[7].

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Theoretical and practical aspects of modern scientific research
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However, the storyteller's experience is ambivalent: the flip side of discovering
one's own agency, asserting oneself from an unusual active position is always "taking
a risk", an experience of vulnerability. Therefore, the playback performers need to
form and ritually maintain a special safe space, in which an empathetic relationship
is formed in contrast to condemnation and prejudice.
An interesting aspect in this matter is the specific inclusion of the main theatrical
attribute — the stage — in the PbT event. The border between the stage and the
audience in the classical theater form is the border between the active and passive
position, the significant and the insignificant. In PbT, this border becomes permeable:
there is a constant change of positions, however, the specific staging of the story, the
formation of an aesthetic (sensitive in a broad sense) distance retains its classic
function of enhancing the significance of the story and the narrator who defines
himself through it.
Another dimension of liminality — the state between, in the middle, everywhere
and nowhere — is the spectacle of PbT, quite unusual for classical theatrical forms,
but very close to ritual. Participants are in "completely and simultaneously to two
different and autonomous worlds: the image of reality and the reality of the image"
[A. Boal in 1]. Real personal experience goes beyond oneself, expands in playing
back, acquires implicit meanings and commonly understood forms, is revealed in an
image that is distanced from the usual perception of reality. However, the story was
told/heard first - it supports the reality of the image, and emphasizes the relationship
to the life of another. Moreover, the PbT event is an expression of multiple stories.
Listeners-spectators have already been or can potentially become narrators, who put
their undoubtedly real experience in the center of image-producing, and expose their
existence to others directly by voice and through the playback medium. To undermine
the reality of another's experience is to deny the significance of one's own.
This dimension is decisive for understanding PbT as a practice of community-
based social healing. Briefly, it can be defined as "ability to imagine experiences of
the 'other'... and reality of our interdependence" [6]. The central role here is played
by the ability of the actors to grasp different levels of the story told — the emotional,
interpersonal, social, and universal level of archetypes — and combine them in a
performative act. "Performers of a teller's story disengage the story from its lived-
experience, find its center, dismantle its pre-reflective underpinnings, re-project it in
mythology, metaphor, symbol, and reassemble it for presentation"[4]. It is about the
ability to reflect the common in the emotional intensity and concreteness of the
personal, and therefore to open it for perception and acceptance by others. On the
other hand, to integrate the personal into a common narrative, to give it significance.
In other words: to subjectivize the objective and vice versa.
In addition, although the liminality outlined above presupposes the temporary
ritual exclusion of participants from the social context or at least an aesthetic
distancing from it, the sensitive and resonant role of the playback performer must
always take it into account. PbT always remains a social event, inscribed in the
context of the here-and-now.
Of course, the enacted story, witnessed by listeners-spectators, does not
become experience of reality that will be common with narrator's one. However, this
is an opportunity to feel it in the heightened register, not rational perception.
Moreover, it becomes a common experience of the imaginary, which is revealed to
the narrator in the same played form — everyone becomes equal in front of her in a
common imaginary-real space.
Actually, this shared experience should be considered as the healing of the
community in the PbT event. After all, a community is not just a group of people united
by a compact area of residence, a type of employment or common problems. First of
all it is a feeling of togetherness - the common meaning and significance of the

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common. In his studies of the transformative function of ritual, V. Turner uses the
Latin word communitas to denote this simultaneously imaginary and practical
interpersonal relationship, which is formed in the liminal space and constitutes
everyday life.
For an already existing community, the use of PbT practices is a way to expand
the boundaries and dimensions of everyday interaction, as well as to resolve
misunderstandings and conflict situations. Actually, according to its founders, PbT is
ideally considered as a "theatre of neighbors" — that is formed within the community
and has a permanent supporting effect on it. However, in the current conditions, the
primary creative ability of PbT is more important: thanks to external but sensitive
"intervention" to provide an opportunity for understanding, sympathy, and a special
common experience — to stimulate the transformation of a group of people, that have
different lived experience, into a supporting community.
A vivid example of the application of PbT practices as a means of community-
based social healing in the Ukrainian context is the project "Contact2U", which is
conducted by the NGO "Power of the Future" for the integration of internally displaced
persons in the Dnipro city. This project applies different activities from lectures to
drum circles, but PbT is its core transformative practice and the general model for
supporting of the community and its sustain healing impact on the individuals.
Conclusion. Community-based social healing as a holistic approach involves
healing of traumatized individual experiences through constant support of the
communal environment, as well as the formation of harmonious interpersonal
interaction through understanding and acceptance of the experiences of others. PbT,
with its ability to create a liminal space that mixes the individual and the collective in
the specific experience of fused reality and imaginarity, is one the ways to achieve
this goal. We are not talking about the exclusiveness of this method, but rather about
concretizing a quite abstract adjustment of community-based social healing through
an approach that is already developed at the practical and conceptual levels.
On the one hand, PbT provides an opportunity for expressing, performing and
reforming personal history in a shared context, which ensures individual self-identity.
On the other hand, the community gets the opportunity to live a special ritual
experience of unity and acceptance of differences outside of everyday rules and
roles. It gives significance to common existence and weaves personal stories into a
shared narrative.
References:
[1] Dauber, H. (1999b). How Playback Theatre works: A matter for practical research. In J. Fox & H. Dauber
(Eds.), Gathering voices: Essays on Playback Theatre, (pp.157-171). New Platz, NY: Tusitala Publishing.
[2] Dennis, R. (2004). Public performance, personal story: A study of playback theatre (thesis). Griffith
University. School of Vocational, Technology and Arts Education, Queensland.
[3] Jordaan, O., & Coetzee, M.-H. (2017). Storying Worlds: Using playback theatre to explore the interplay
between personal and dominant discourses amongst adolescents. Research in Drama Education: The
Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 22(4), 537–552.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2017.1359085
[4] Park-Fuller, L. M. (2005). Beyond Role Play: Playback Theatre And Conflict Transformation. Centre for
Playback Theatre. https://www.playbacktheatre.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/LindaPark-Fuller-Beyond-
Role-Play-Playback-Theatre-and-Confl.pdf
[5] Salas, J. (1983). Culture and community: Playback theatre. The Drama Review: TDR, 27(2), 15.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1145490
[6] Saud, N. Bdr. (2020). Playback Theatre An Approach to Community Reconciliation in Nepal. In The 5th
Annual International Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya.
[7] Wright, P. R. (2002). Playback theatre: An investigation into Applied Theatre and communities of meaning,
with specific reference to education and health (thesis). University of New England.