Reflections on a Playback Theatre Performance, by Lynsey Grosfield

“I’m sinking in the quicksand of my thought”

I just completed my first formal activity as an intern for the Montreal Life Stories Project, filming a small-scale “Playback Theatre” event at Concordia University. This was to serve as an introduction to my future work with the Oral History and Performance working group, in which I will be interviewing Montreal artists who utilize their mode of expression to convey their experiences of displacement: either as refugees, immigrants, or survivors of violence or genocide (or possibly all of the above).

The Playback Theatre Perfomance

The experience was intense, to say the least, and so thoroughly different from what I had anticipated that I was both unexpectedly moved and intensely uncomfortable for the duration of the event. I found myself on the verge of tears at various junctions in what the director termed our “conversation.” The naming of the even as such rather than as a performance is important to note, as this mode of expression takes brechtian ideas about theatre to the extreme. I will give you a brief summary from what I garnered this afternoon:

• The event is centred around a theme, and in this case, the theme was the tragedy in Haiti

• The audience members share stories, anecdotes, and feelings that are directly related to the theme at first, but can possibly be only peripherally related later in the event; sometimes, the audience member sharing their story would be asked to pick which performers would play the characters in their story

• The performers than improvise a dramatic response to or interpretation of the story

• The audience member is called on again to reflect on the accuracy of the performers’ interpretation, indicating whether or not they were able to achieve some sort of catharsis in being a spectator to others interpreting their stories and emotions

The interplay and exchange between the audience and the performers made the line dividing them, to which I am so very accustomed, all but disappear. The experience revealed to me just how complacent I am in my comfortable conventions about spectatorship; I don’t even like to dance at concerts, so feeling like I was violating a taboo by not speaking during a theatrical performance made me profoundly uneasy, but not in a bad way. The fact that the flow of the narrative was contingent upon interactivity challenged my notion of the artist on a pedestal and the observers looking on; it equalized everyone in the room, positing us all as artists in the creation of a cultural product.

I don’t want to forget some of the stories I heard at the event, so I will attempt to summarize them for my own sake:

One woman in the audience identified herself as Turkish, and first told her story in terms of the differences between her lived experience of the İzmit earthquake in 1999, and her experience watching the Haitian tragedy play out on television. She noted a remarkable disparity between the feeling of being there, amongst the destruction, and watching the aftermath of a tragedy passively all these years later. After the performers enacted their interpretation of her feelings, she was called on the give a specific illustration of this difference. Her most poignant memory was of a grandmother she met in Turkey who had lost all of the generations of her family in the quake–daughters, granddaughters, grandsons, nieces–and was searching through the wreckage of her home for a simple picture, something that would prove that her family ever existed. That sort of lived experience of tragedy can never really be accurately represented by media, and I self-consciously include myself and what I am writing in this category, as I have no doubt that my re-telling has diluted the impact of the story already.

Another woman in the audience told a story that was much closer to my own context, which is one of such privilege that often all I can muster as a comparable personal experience to a natural disaster is a tale of sexism. Her story was spurred by the ongoing conversation about the frustration and feelings of powerlessness resulting from having your personal experience trampled upon when you are a part of a minority or underprivileged group. She was at a construction conference with her husband, and the speaker made a drawn out analogy between union organizing and haggling for a prostitute. As one of the few women in the room, and likely the only person not laughing, she felt profoundly isolated, being the only person to connect the devaluing of the bodies of sex workers to the larger rape culture in which we live. What was so powerful about her story was not its original telling, but the retelling by the troupe, in which the actor given to portray the storyteller repeatedly demanded her dignity to deaf and laughing countenances around her.

The third story that I would be sorry to forget came from another woman in the audience, this time a student who had worked on her master’s thesis abroad in India, examining the institution of child marriage. Her reflection was brought about by a resonant theme in the latter half of the event: the constant struggle between giving aid and “charity,” and reproducing colonial relationships as a Westerner. She had arrived in India having at least a peripheral knowledge of the country and its culture, owing to her heritage, but was unprepared for the level of complexity of the “child marriage problem.” Her research subject was a twelve year old girl who was to be married to a man over eighty; at first the instinct of the storyteller was to decry this cultural practice as “wrong,” but upon further examination, she found that the girl’s mother was heavily invested in the marriage. It was later revealed that the young girl was being sexually abused by her older brother, who was the sole breadwinner of the family, and the only way out of this situation that the mother could find was to marry her daughter out of the family. The storyteller expressed a profound feeling of paralysation that had gripped her following this experience; she had come in on her white stallion of Western privilege to “save” the poor little child brides, but found on the ground that the damsels-in-distress were not so distinguishable from the other little girls.

I wish I could remember more, but my role as videographer permitted me less time to absorb the event than I might have hoped. I hope to be posting reflections in the near future about my oral history interviews, which will hopefully be more comprehensive and critical of my role, as they will form the basis for my research.