We live, we suffer, we
try to understand life around us. Many times it is difficult to understand what
state of mind we are going through. We don’t know how to relate to the world
around. Language allows us to capture this incomprehensible reality. Paintings,
music, sculptures, dance help us to group different essence of emotions of
life. Movies and dramas expose us to parallel world of understanding where
montage and mis-en-scene are woven in the spectrum of creative arts. Every one of
these gives us a sense of reality which is diverse and multifaceted. We can
never claim that every art performance can give perfect picture of pragmatic c
world and stories of suffering around. Every form has its own uniqueness and
special place in life.
What if people who are
living their own lives start expressing themselves? What if they exercise the
right to reflect upon their own, with authentic-real stories they experienced,
they lived. What if they adopt skills and practices of traditional performance
to turn popular culture upside down? What if they define their reality
themselves and redefine the ways in which it should be conveyed to entire world
around? Welcome to the world of ‘Playback Theatre’. Theatre: By the people, for
the people and to the people; of community and beyond.
Playback theatre is not
about acting and following a script. It is in real sense, living a fraction of
reality we appreciate in the form of different types of small performances. We
do not know many times the lives people are living, stories people have to tell
experiences they have to share, pain-agony they have to hide. In many ways, we
have lost ability to converse with people who are living in different cultures,
other geographies, separated boundaries, distant margins. We are so obsessed
with ourselves that we even don’t recognize, acknowledge existence of OTHERs beyond
our limited sphere. This theatre has grown to overcome complexities of our
arrogance, privileged comfort and dead end in our curiosity which does not
inspire us to engage with people we don’t care.
‘Playback Theatre’ subverts
the aesthetics of traditional theatre and the way dialogue is started through cultural
platforms about those people who have no say or no experience in exercising arts.
Here audience becomes performers, storytellers become scriptwriters, people of
community become supportive actors, traditional artifacts/utensil/weapons
become instruments to produce beats for background music, place we gather
becomes rehearsal place and ground on which we practice becomes a theatre
stage. Margins get transformed into centre and centre is thrown away as if it
has no relevance.
Stories construct
history. They are blood lines of world today. Stories are agenda-manifestos of
future we wish to arrive at. There cannot be single story about one crucial
event let alone about communities, their contested histories, and their journey
uptill now. Thus first understanding what kind of stories are travelling around
us, becomes major task.
When we approach people
for any development related work, it is necessary that we empower people to
enable to express themselves. Ultimately they are custodian of their destiny,
responsible for their progress-welfare and sensitive towards serious issues
harassing their community. Development agencies, academic-research
institutions, government funded departments, journalists engage in one way
dialogue to understand problems of the suppressed. Mere transfer of monetary
funds, and capacity building through skills and training is not enough. Communities
feel strong need to connect themselves in a human way to the aspirations they
are chasing. They constantly lack the ways to creatively express their
anguish/anger about the condition they are forced to live in. Now, playback
theatre has given them a powerful forum to reverse the agenda of development,
discourses of public sphere and language through which people who are suffering
get a chance to reshape it.
Playback is
spontaneous, natural, organic, transparent, honest heart to heart rendition of
realities—troubled realities. It is not artificially scripted, it is not
logistically mediated through boundaries of stage, it is not prisoner of
languages, characters and movements during the performance. It is not inspired to
translate fiction into a performance but it is driven with zeal to relive the
experiences of people. It is real performance but reality depicted in it is not
appropriate, compromised, understated, exaggerate or blown out of its essence. It
is a capsule of metaphors by inhaling which we get a dense shock of life around
to move us beyond the scale we would have been, even after we experience the
same reality in world.
It works like this:
People from community who want to fight for betterment of their lives gather. They
share their stories, experiences within themselves. They develop courage among
themselves to speak the truth, to memorize their personal-communal histories to
learn to listen to each other, to enable each other to start talking.
Then at the place of
performance, where community is a part of audience, real thrill is observed.
There is one storyteller, one conductor and actors team coming from community.
Conductor appeals the audiences (which can be mix of all kinds of people
including community) to volunteer to share their stories by coming in front of
the stage. These storytellers can tell any kind of stories on the range of
happiness to sadness, relations to atrocity, compassion to aggression and
gain-loss etc.
As storytellers start
narrating, the actors listen in rapt attention. After successful narration of
stories, conductor then splits entire story in five-six scenes and utters title
of each scene one by one. As conductor utters title of scenes spontaneously,
actors recount in their minds what exactly the quantum of time should be given
to perform the scene. Then, without discussing anything amongst them with
relaxed composure and totally immersed mental mode, they arrive on stage and
start performing the scene the title of which was mentioned by conductor
initially. All this happens within a span of one-two-three minutes maximum. That
is where it is immensely challenging. It has no space for scripting, crafting,
choreography, costumes, music composition and adding any production infrastructure.
It has no time for reflecting back on the stories lived by storyteller. There
is no scope for editing, adding, deleting what storyteller has told the
audience. It has to be live, unaltered and authentic ‘PLAYBACK’ of the lives
through which those stories are being navigated and reflected upon us. It
allows for creativity but adapting story to dramatization is not allowed at
all. It is tremendously theatrical, it is enormously real; it is not confluence
of both.
Playback is performing
a reality and not acting for it. It has potential to converge minds of
conductor, storyteller, actors, audiences, communities in away none has
imagined. It can be used to question the way in which people`s lives are
shaped, developed or crushed. It gives powerful language of discourse through
lively creative art and through which textual-real politic questions can be
caricatured into body language, group sculptures, facial expressions, sequence
of rhythmic movements, natural-artificial sounds/noise, body shadows, collective
shapes through discrete body postures, illusion of real events through
non-material stage, dislocating-displacing traditional roles through transferable genders, shifting characters and moving images across the array
of performers of drama.
Across the world, this
form of drama is being used to raise the morale of communities to come out of
oppression, arised out of sustained conditioning of their minds which leads to compromise
their voices, arguments, memories, stories, experiences. Through an opportunity
to perform a drama, they and we, together are getting an opportunity to
understand the experiences of OTHERs. Stories connect to us powerfully to the
emotions in those experiences. When unedited scripts enter on the stage through
scene, we get live telecast of their histories. We get to understand their
present in frames of our slowly undressing prejudices while they are sketching
colors of events they faced, on our canvas of mind. Those colours and
undressing constantly plays hide and seek, but what is significant to remember
is that it is so real and natural; that we forget to distinguish—what is art
and what is life; what is script and what is an event; what is act and what is
performance; what is history and what is present…!!!
(Permission needed to copy and circulate this--please write to creativityindian@gmail.com if required)
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