Playback Theatre Playback Theatre is an improvisational performance-art form based on true stories told by the audience. The stories are then brought to life by a team of actors, a conductor (facilitator), and a musician. Watching one's story acted out on stage in front of an audience is an exhilirating, entertaining, and transformational experience. It raises personal awareness as well as builds compassion and communication within a community. Created in New York in 1975, the Playback Theatre form is now practised and taught internationally in over 25 different countries. Playback Theatre is performed in a variety of settings such as conferences, festivals, hospitals, prisons, classrooms, and in public theaters. Schools, organizations, residential facilities, conferences, and special celebrations all benefit from the unique experience of Playback Theatre. A group of people in a room, a hall, a theatre face a row of actors sitting on boxes. On one side sits a musician with an array of instruments. On the other, an emcee or "conductor", who waits next to an empty chair. This is for the teller, who will come from the audience to tell a personal story. Then, in a ritualized process, using action, music and dialogue, the players will act out the story. After one teller, another will come. In this way, the individuals in the audience will witness a theatre of their own stories. Playback theatre is used in educational, therapeutic, social change, and arts settings, either as performance, with a company of trained actors and a defined audience; or as a group event with one or two leaders, in which participants become actors as well as tellers for each other. Playback theatre companies now exist in many localities, often calling themselves after their town, such as Melbourne Playback Theatre. At conferences and other special gatherings, a playback theatre show is an outstanding way to bring people together at the opening, or to provide integration, reflection, and closure at the end. Founded in 1975 by Jonathan Fox with Jo Salas and others, the original Playback Theatre Company made its home in Dutchess and Ulster Counties of New York State, just north of New York City. This group, while developing the basis of the Playback form, took it to schools, prisons, centers for the elderly, conferences, and festivals in an effort to encourage people from all walks of society to let their stories be heard. They also performed monthly for the public-at-large. The playback theatre idea has inspired many people. Playback companies now exist on five continents. The International Playback Theatre Network was founded in 1990 to support playback activity throughout the world. As of 1999, the IPTN had 70 company and 200 individual members from 26 countries. For links to many PT companies and other information about Playback, see the home page of the International Playback Theatre Network. International playback conferences have taken place in Sydney, Australia (1992), in a village north of Helsinki, Finland (1993), in Olympia, Washington (1995), in Perth, Australia, (1997), and in York, England (1999). To meet the demand for training which this level of growth has created, Jonathan Fox, Jo Salas and guest faculty run the School of Playback Theatre, based at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, providing beginning, intermediate and advanced levels of training in Playback Theatre. Books about Playback Theatre can be obtained through Tusitala Publishing. Articles written as Leadership projects for the School, lectures from the 1997 Playback Theatre Symposium in Germany, and others can be referenced via the IPTN home page (www.playbacknet.org). Review from Woodstock Times Play it back, Jack Jo Salas stood before a full house and politely asked for a volunteer. I raised my hand and Salas motioned for me to sit in the "teller's chair." Members of the Hudson River Playback Theater sat intently on large wooden blocks in center stage waiting for my tale, anxious to reenact any life-story of my choosing. OK. This was the test. Could they reproduce the heinous hernia incident of '68? I told the tale. They retold the tale with music, dialogue and movement. Suddenly, I was on the gurney again. Improvisational drama. It's what they do, and they do it well. The Hudson River Playback Theatre, who performed Saturday night at the Unitarian Fellowship Hall in Kingston, are a clever crew, bringing any story to life on the spot with whimsy, ingenuity and passion. You provide the story; they bring it to life. It is just fun. "This is theater, but it's not theater that comes from a script. It's theater that comes from you, and it's a co-creation between the people who are looking this way," Salas said, motioning to the audience, "and the people who are looking that way," motioning toward the stage. "And somewhere in the space in the middle is the space of stories, which is where we meet. It's theater that's about us all." Playback Theatre as a form was born back in 1975 in the Mid-Hudson Valley and has been adopted worldwide ever since. The Hudson River troupe belongs to the International Playback Theatre Network, which links playback practitioners in 21 countries. Salas, a founding member of the original Playback Theatre company, is the leader of this local clan who perform at colleges, conferences and community events. The members of Saturday night's performance were Salas; Sarah Urech, a longtime theater student from Switzerland and graduate of the School of Playback Theatre; Lauren Ardman, a social worker and artist; Kathy Donovan, a dancer, choreographer, teacher and therapist; Matt Spitzer, an artist and linguist, and Debbie Lan, a professional musician and recording artist. Salas is also the associate director of the School of Playback Theatre, the author of Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre, and an international teacher of playback. Acting as conductor, Salas began the evening With one-minute dramas, asking volunteers to tell events from the day, which were then reenacted by Urech, Ardman, Donovan, and Spitzer, with Lan providing background music on piano, xylophone and percussion. The results were colorful and varied: a peaceful day of introspection at the lighthouse was juxtaposed a moment later by the frustration of bumper to bumper traffic. The audience was highly attentive at every turn, erupting with laughter and uttering words of approval. For the major dramas, which lasted from five to 10 minutes, Salas employed the special storyteller's chair from which the volunteer relayed the story and watched it come to life. We were brought into the humiliating world of a child with its snotty hankie pinned to her shirt, and the longing of lovers separated by great distances. The individuals who relayed their autobiographical tales nodded in testament after each playback: their emotions had been accurately captured. Salas invited several members of the audience onto the stage to take a turn at playback themselves. Later the actors switched to "pairing," a presentation of opposite feelings about the same event. While the actors presented the excitement of living in a new country with the ever-present yearning for home, and the regret and remorselessness of one man's hangover, Salas and Lan produced emotions that were both conflicting and convincing on violin, piano and percussion. One melancholy vignette, which expressed the sadness and hopefulness of a daughter leaving home, brought tears to the eyes of some, including myself. The actors' keen perceptions were displayed in both eloquent words and expressive silence. Clearly, playback serves a dual purpose: what appears to be strictly art at first glance may also serve as an insightful therapeutic device. When the actors were finished presenting my own title of hospital horrors, Salas asked if I would like to change the story, which I did. The actors then presented the antithesis and turned my childhood panic to peacefulness, the qualm to quiet. Gotta admit - it sure made me think. Revamping the life segments of others isn't the group's only skill. These actors are also it handy singing team, harmonizing beautifully at opportune moments. The evening began in song and ended in an audience participation round of the Jewish traditional tune "Haida, Haida," which the company also performs on their CD Jo Salas and Friends. --Sharon Nichols, Woodstock Times Review from Interweave.org Review of HRPT performance at Stone Ridge Center for the Arts, November, 199 posted at www.interweave.org If you have never experienced Playback Theatre, you must. If you believe the arts can and should reflect the human condition in a wise, affecting, and all embracing way; if you are interested in high quality, experimental theatre; if you want to spend a touching, hilarious, and uplifting evening in the company of Friends you've met for the first time, you must, MUST visit Playback Theatre. Under the direction of Jo Salas, the Hudson River Playback Theatre performs in various venues, mostly in upstate New York. They are a handful of skilled actors, dressed in simple white tops and black slacks, able to invent, improvise and enchant an audience that has come not just to watch but to be part of the magic. The setting is sparse: a curtain/screen; a set of cubes that function as everything from seats, to pedestals, to props; an array of scarves. And, oh yes, two chairs. In these two chairs several subtle, evocative dialogs take place between Jo and an audience member. In these conversations, the elements of a personal story are carefully drawn out. The audience member is encouraged to give the story a title, to talk about the primary "players," and to ask one of the Playback actors to play him or her. Once the story has taken shape in the mind of the audience and the performers, Jo invokes, "Lets watch," and the scene begins. In an astounding display of intuitive surrender, the actors portray the story in a way that potentially transforms the "author's" connection to that experience. Seeing yourself not just objectively but from a new angle can have the effect of actually rewriting (or at least creating a variation on) one's personal past. This shift can free attachment, dissolve resentment, clear regrets, or simply provide renewed understanding. In this way it might be thought that Playback is therapeutic. But it is much more than that. As the audience shares the experience, the story is ennobled, raised almost to the stature of myth as we realize that the stories out of which the fabric of life is woven have, in their depth, common themes - struggling for justice, making a stand, restoring hope, believing in love. These are the foundations of human experience and the stuff that dreams (and heroes) are made of. So, for example, a simple story about a child loosing her stuffed Panda bear becomes a reminder about how the instinctive covenant we make as children to love creatures and care for one another remains with us even though we "come of age" and the things of childhood are lost or set aside. Or the story of a young soldier speaking out when his rights are trampled turns into a parable about the power of courage. His actions teach us that when we speak up we can not only affirm our place in the scheme of things, but actually change the scheme of things. In addition to these improvised life stories the Playback troupe serves up many other delights. These gifted, beautifully attuned actors present us with physical sculptures that vividly embody emotions, and the contradictory states that emotions often brings us to. These are unique representations, that generate insight into, and help us make a humorous peace with our own foibles. The players use voice and body brilliantly; but with a transparent craft, so their spirits are always honestly visible. They can even bring simple household objects to life in sweetly funny puppetry displays. And these guys sing! The sublime harmonies they bathed us in as they welcomed us and bade us good bye were easily, by themselves worth the price of admission. If we're lucky, these artists will record these and we'll have a way to remember the gift they share in holding up a clear and sparkling mirror in which we can fully embrace our humanity. In a world of silly sitcoms, mostly vacuous cinema, and glitz-driven theatre the depth and power of Playback Theatre is remarkable. It is simply a treasure. And you must see it. --Puran Perez