Centre for Playback Theatre www.playbackcentre.org
A dialogue between wildness and order:
playback theatre and
hermeneutic play.
By Nick Rowe.
This material is made publicly available by the Centre for Playback Theatre and
remains the intellectual property of its author.
Centre for Playback Theatre www.playbackcentre.org
A dialogue between wildness and order: playback theatre and
hermeneutic play.
A dialogue is needed between wildness and order. (Tufnell and Crickmay
1990)
‘Stories can drive you mad’ (Okri 1996 p.25).
‘Stories can be either bacteria or light: they can infect a system, or
illuminate a world’. (p.33)
Some years ago I attended a performance of Lifegame by the Improbable
Theatre Company at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. Lifegame is a format
devised by Keith Johnstone in which one person is invited to tell their life story
and see that spontaneously enacted. At the time the striking similarities and
differences with playback theatre were interesting and provocative to me. Like
playback theatre a teller was invited onto the stage; but unlike playback there
was only one teller who was selected before the event. Like playback the actors
improvised the story; but unlike playback the performers aimed for as much
accuracy as they could with respect to the teller’s memories: to the extent that he
was asked to describe precisely the scene to the actors. He was given a bell to
ring at any time during the enactment if the actors were particularly ‘close to the
truth’ and ‘a buzzer’ if they were off the mark.
In Lifegame, rather like psychodrama, the ‘teller’ was asked to describe in detail
their memory of the scene in which the story took place. In playback theatre the
actors seem to have considerably more artistic freedom to create a scene that is
illustrative of either their own interpretation of the psychological and social
dynamics of the event or, if provided by the teller, of her internal representation of
it. Conductors in playback do not usually ask for detailed descriptions but
generally prefer that the performers create scenes and dialogue through
improvisation. In general, because of the way in which playback is constituted,
performers have far more freedom to explore the images, signs and meanings
that may have been suggested by the teller’s story. In this paper I want to
suggest that this particular kind of play ― which I shall call hermeneutic play ― is
a crucial aspect of playback performing and constitutes a key indicator of
effective playback. It is clearly in stark contrast to Lifegame as I witnessed it.
Of course, this freedom for performers in playback has its limits: they also need
to tell the story; to find ways to represent the teller’s narrative. In fact there is a
fruitful tension in all playback performing that lies between the necessary task of
representing the teller’s story and the performative, playful exploration that
begins as soon as the conductor says “Let’s watch”. The performer knows that
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she must represent the story as effectively as possible whilst also knowing that,
paradoxically, she must ‘forget’ the story and open herself up to what happens as
the performance unfolds. The performer needs to embrace ― but not
prematurely resolve ― this seeming contradiction between representation and
the here-and-now performative encounter on stage. Or as Fischer-Lichte puts it
improvisers work in the tension between the referential and the performative
functions of theatre (1997). Playback performers need to hold a place between
the representational and the performative. If they confine themselves to the
representation of the story without taking note of what is happening in and
between the performers, their work will seem lifeless. If, on the other hand, they
become so absorbed in what is happening onstage they risk losing themselves in
performative excess and will produce work that is, at best mystifying to the
spectators and, at worse, self-indulgent.
This capacity of the performers to maintain the tension between the
representational and the performative is, I would suggest, a key characteristic of
effective playback. Much work has already been done in identifying what
constitutes good playback and the importance of the aesthetic, social and ritual
aspects (Dauber 1999; Fox 1999; Salas 1999) have been well-considered and
discussed. However these theories have largely been developed from the
perspective of the conductor rather than from the performer. They have not
addressed sufficiently the phenomenology of playback performing: the momentby-moment emergence of the enactment as performers interact with each other
and with the stage environment. It is an omission which needs to be addressed if
we are to have more understanding of the ways in which playback can produce
individual and social change. Of course there is an argument, with which I have
some sympathy, that analysis of such a live and complex event as a playback
enactment is both futile and potentially destructive: like capturing a butterfly in
order to see how it flies. However, there is a counter-argument, with which I also
have sympathy, that it is incumbent on us playback practitioners to analyse (and
so be critical of) their work since we are presuming to make theatre out the
memories of others.
I propose that there is a crucial aspect of effective playback that is largely
produced through the improvisation of the performers. It derives from their
willingness to hold the tension between the representational and the performative.
I will call it ― rather tentatively ― hermeneutic play.
Hermeneutic play
Before I look at this in more detail however it is necessary to relinquish one idea
that is often fondly held in the playback community ― that effective playback
captures or portrays the essence of the teller’s story. The problem with such an
idea is that it does not take us very far: how could we ever know what the
essence is and do stories have essences anyway? Do not stories have multiple
meanings? In my view the notion of the ‘essence’ of the story is an unhelpful one
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because it underplays the performers’ response. For me, the notion of a
‘response’ is important here. The performers do not replicate the story or, in
some way, capture its essence. Rather the teller and the audience witness the
performers’ response, which is, as the anthropologist James Clifford (1986) might
say, partial in both its senses: partial because we will only see part of it and
partial because it will always be inflected by the performers’ preferences. In the
end the idea of essences denies the humanity of the players. Their performance
can be wonderful, generous, risky and inspired: but it is never more than human.
There is no neutral performance. There cannot be a ‘pure’ enactment of the story
that is ‘untainted’ – and, by the way, I don’t think that it is a ‘taint’ – by the
performers. There is no pure ahistorical response to an autobiographical story; it
is always ‘partial’ in Clifford’s doubled sense. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin’s
statement concerning the storyteller: traces cling to the actor’s response in the
same way that ‘…handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’ (Benjamin
1970). Our fingerprints are all over the story. We need, therefore, to take
responsibility for our interpretations. But let us not despair! It is those fingerprints
that make the enactment interesting – that give it the potential for change. It is
the very partiality of the performers’ ― the fact that their perspectives are
different to the tellers’ ― that allows for the possibility of change.
Perhaps most importantly, by masking the inevitable and prevailing influence of
the performers and maintaining the idea of playing the story’s essence, we let
ourselves off the ethical responsibilities of the performer. To believe that we will
capture the essence of the story is to believe that we can allow the story to pass
through us, as it were, without our influence. This, I believe, is a fantasy. In short
the performers do not ‘playback’ the essence – they respond in their inevitable
partiality.
To return to the notion of hermeneutic play: by ‘hermeneutic’ I mean that which is
related to the art of interpretation. It describes the process by which we attribute
meaning to what we hear and see. All theatre, in one way or another, is
concerned with, and deeply interested in, this process of reading and attributing
meaning. Theatre presents ‘signs’ to the audience with the intention that they will
be ‘read’ for meaning. As Aston and Savona write:
Everything which is presented to the spectator within the theatrical frame
is a sign…Reading signs is the way we set about making sense of the
world. (1991 p.99)
In playback theatre we are no less involved in this process of ‘sign-making’ ―
every move we make (or don’t make) is read by the spectators for its meaning.
Whenever we perform in response to the tellers’ story it is inevitable that the
spectators and the other performers will attribute meaning to our actions. This
active nature of the audience is most graphically borne out in an exercise popular
with Playback Theatre York: the story is told with the actors outside the room;
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they return and perform. It is striking how often their enactment seems to ‘fit’ the
story, a fact, I think, that is largely due to capacity of the spectator to make
meaning from actions that are framed within a theatrical context. As we often say
in the company: don’t worry about what you do too much, the audience will make
sense of it!
‘Interpretation’ is, of course, a difficult word – especially for those suspicious of
the worst excesses of psychoanalytic and psychological interpretation in which
crude meanings that lack in subtlety are attributed to human actions. I want to
reassure you here that it is not my proposal that performers should ‘interpret’ in
that way kind of way ― although sometimes we do and then the enactment is
heavy-handed and, potentially, manipulative. It is certainly the case that in
playback rich and polysemic associations can be held by an image where, most
surely, ‘translation’ into words would do violence to its subtlety. Nevertheless
interpretive processes are always at work in theatre performances as spectators
‘read’ what is taking place on stage to establish meaning and sense. It is my
proposal that effective playback works with this interpretive activity to surprise us
and to ‘loosen’ the story from predictable (and potentially oppressive)
representation and to expose it to the improvisation of the actors.
My proposal will be clearer if I give some examples of how I think hermeneutic
play works in playback performances. In effective playback theatre the
performers play with the meanings and signs, they:
1. Elaborate upon what is both said and unsaid in the teller’s narrative
For example, a young man in the first term of life at University told a story
when he was 10 years of age. He had given his sister a clay ‘tower’ which he
had hoped that she could use for her rings; he was very pleased with it,
except, as he put it, “It looked like a giant penis”. One of the actors, aware
perhaps of the current transitional stage in this young man’s life, played the
boy’s mother and, holding a white cloth to clearly signify a baby, said “My little
boy is growing up; he is becoming a young man.” In this example the actor
chose to explore (and play with) what was unspoken in the story: the
impending sexual awakening of the boy that is implicit in him bringing home a
penis: an awakening that maybe parallels that of the student in his first term.
It was this that the young man commented on in his feedback. One could say
that his story had been expanded and, to some extent, been rewritten. The
story that he had perhaps told many times for its comedic value has a new
dimension. Although the actors exploited the obvious comic potential of the
‘clay penis’, the story had already been told and so they were free to
elaborate and play with the meanings that is suggested.
2. Enter into linguistic and gestural play with aspects of the narrative
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Take, as an example, this vignette to an audience of professionals working in
health and social care. The story concerned a woman who was gradually
deteriorating from the effects of Alzheimer's disease. The teller, who had
been a very close friend of this woman, described how distressed she was at
seeing her friend's deterioration. Only two actors were cast − the teller's actor
and her friend with Alzheimer's disease. The rest of the actors formed a
chorus and commented upon the action. The chorus began to play with the
word ‘lost’:
‘I've lost my …..’
‘I have…’
‘I’ve lost…’
‘I’m lost..’
‘lost’
‘I'm lost…’
‘I have lost my memory’
‘I have lost my…’
‘I have lost my friend’
The chorus is playing upon the word 'lost', exploring its different possible
meanings to progress the enactment. The word 'lost' has at least three
meanings in this extract - being lost, losing memory and losing a friend. The
signifier ‘lost’ begins to slip and slide as the actors play with it; for me, there is
a poignancy in allowing the word ‘lost’ to encompass both the loss of memory
and the loss of a friend. We are talking here about the performers ‘playing
with signs’ suggested by the teller’s story. The play between the performative
and the representational is clear in this example.
3. Condense some aspects of the story, stretch or dilate others
A teller may recount, for example, a moment of realisation, or epiphany or
terror, which in chronological time was very brief but which the performers
may draw out to explore its subjective/experiential texture. This compression
and dilation of time, although certainly not unique to playback theatre, has
important implications. It directs the spectator's attention to the subjective
experience of time − how the passage of time is represented in memory and
in dreams. Our memory of the passage of time is notoriously unreliable. In
memory, as in the dream, time does not elapse evenly but jumps forward or
dwells at length on a particular episode. Memory compresses, elides or
dilates time according to the interests and preoccupations of the rememberer.
Through the compression or dilation of time, playback theatre enactments
seek to match, or resonate sympathetically with, the processes of memory
and the dream.
4. Substitute one ‘set’ of signifiers for others
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The use of metaphor and symbol in playback is well-recognised (Salas 1993)
and I do not intend to consider it at length here, except to note that these
tropes often unfold within the enactment as the performers play with each
other, the environment and the material of the story.
5. Explore the phenomenological possibilities of the moment in order
to represent the story.
In one Playback Theatre York performance the actors improvise with a long
piece of elastic. They are seeking to represent the tensions and stresses in a
relationship; as they do so they play with the elastic’s physical, symbolic and
representational qualities. They explore (and discover) the relationships in the
story through the properties of the elastic. As Hazel Smith and Roger Dean
put it the actors explored moments of ‘non-referent’ improvisation (Smith and
Dean 1997) in order to inform the ‘referent’ improvisation.
So what we can see is certainly not a process of replication of the teller’s story,
but one of hermeneutic elaboration and expansion as the performers play with
the associations and meanings the story may hold. By way of a parallel to
playback theatre consider this statement by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas
on the fundamental importance that free association and playful discourse have
in the therapeutic relationship. He writes:
If unconscious thinking is too complex to be grasped by consciousness, if
one person’s unconscious can communicate with another’s unconscious
mind only by playing with it, then psychoanalysis is a radical act – freeing
the subject from character restraints and intersubjective compliances
through the naturally liberating and expressive medium of free association.
…The fundamental agency of change in a psychoanalysis is the
continuous exercise of this freedom, which ultimately deconstructs and
disseminates any narrative action … and establishes in place of the
morality of the thematic a dissembling spirit that plays the self into myriad
realities. All along, what has seemed to be the means to truth – free
association – is the truth itself… (Bollas 1995 p.69-70) [my emphasis]
To adapt Bollas’ proposal to playback theatre we might argue that the
performative playful engagement of the performers is at least as important as the
representation of the narrative action. It may be that the improvisational play of
performers is not so much the means to producing and effective representation
but is the process that, in itself, can produce change. Stories as Ben Okri points
out ‘…can be either bacteria or light: they can infect a system, or illuminate a
world’.(Okri 1996 p.33) They can bind us to particular imprisoning perspectives:
hermeneutic play can work to loosen these bindings.
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What is it about playback theatre that allows this hermeneutic play to take place?
I would propose that it is made possible by the way in which playback is
structured. In other words: it is in the wisdom of the design. In this section I will
consider three aspects of the design of playback that are crucial in enabling
hermeneutic play to take place.
1. The story has already been told
In most conventional theatre the audience do not know the story that will unfold
during the performance; it is therefore a key role of the actors to make sure that it
is told. In playback theatre the story has been told ― often with considerable skill
― and it is the task of the performers, employing a far wider range of
representational devices than the teller, to ‘translate’ the story in such a way that
it will validate the teller’s experience and surprise, amuse or challenge the
spectators.
There are a number of implications that follow from that fact that the story has
been told. Firstly, the performers have more opportunity to play with the story
since they do not have the task of telling it. Of course the teller and the
spectators would most likely be disappointed it the performers neglected the
narrative shape of the story; nevertheless there is not the pressure to establish
the ‘signposts’ that mark out the narrative than if the story had not been heard
before.
Secondly, because the story has already been told, the audience and the teller
are more interested in not so much what will happen as how the performers will
perform the story. They are therefore as interested in the processes of
representation as in the narrative progress of the enactment. It is clear then that
playback sets up – through its design – an interest in how personal stories will be
represented: an interest in the processes of perception and interpretation that are
always at work when stories are told. Another way to put this is to say that
playback theatre promotes reflexivity. David MacBeth writes of reflexivity:
By most accounts, reflexivity is a deconstructive exercise for locating the
intersections of author, other, text, and world, and for penetrating the
representation exercise itself. (2001 p.35)
What I am suggesting is that playback draws the attention of the spectator to the
process of representation: to the play of signification that is always at work when
we seek to represent human experience. As the enactment progresses the
spectator is aware simultaneously of the unfolding enactment and of the already
told story.
Thirdly, at its most straightforward the playback theatre process involves a
contrast between two very different discursive modes: the ‘telling/conducting’ and
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the ‘enactment’. The teller and conductor are, by and large, confined to
representing the story through verbal means. The fact that the teller remains
seated and the way in which he is conducted encourages him to render his story
in verbal form. This is not to deny that the teller’s non-verbal behaviour and
paralinguistic inflections will not feature in the narration and inform the
subsequent enactment. However, it is to claim that the primary means of telling
will be linguistic. This, it will be suggested, is a key characteristic of the form
since the structure of playback theatre performances juxtaposes very different
means of representation. In doing so it opens up the audience’s awareness of
different symbolic systems that may be employed to convey personal experience.
2. The enactment is not planned: it is improvised.
Of course this is not quite true: the performers are always likely to be drawing on
what Charlie Parker (in Sawyer 2000) called ‘ready mades’ to improvise. That is
sequences of action that have been developed in previous performances or
rehearsals. Nevertheless it is certainly true that to a significant extent the
performers allow the enactment to emerge from their interaction with each other
and with the story.
In defining improvisation as ‘the exploration of occasion’, the poet Peter Riley (in
Dean 1989) neatly conveys the quality of here-and-now encounter that is
characteristic of playback acting in particular and, often, improvisational acting in
general. It is the playful, emergent, discovered nature of the improvisation that
significantly permits hermeneutic play. To put this in another way effective
playback performers are prepared to be open to the unknown. These ‘on the
edge’, ‘threshold or liminal moments’ are the most fragile ones for the performers
― it is now that they are often most vulnerable. The need for them to maintain a
high level of awareness of the moment potentially increases their selfconsciousness and may heighten their feelings of vulnerability and exposure.
Indeed, Jonathan Fox writes that playback actors often fail because they fear
‘liminality’ (1994 p.101). In order that this moment of not-knowing is maintained
and the opportunities for hermeneutic play optimised, the performers must, to
some extent, resist resolution of the problems that face them. They need to allow
the enactment to emerge through the dynamic tension between the task of
representing the teller’s story and their encounter with each other in the here and
now.
3. There are multiple voices working on the teller’s story
There is no authoritative playwright in playback theatre; it is what Jonathan Fox
calls ‘non-scripted theatre’ (Fox 1994). The enactment develops out of the
interplay of many ‘voices’. Each performer will bring different perspectives to the
enactment. There is no authoritative version of the story; it is brought together by
the democratic collaboration and interaction of multiple points of view: a process
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inherent in improvisation that Keith Sawyer calls ‘collaborative emergence’
(Sawyer 2000).
Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony or ‘multi-voicedness’ (1994 p.92) and his
associated ideas of dialogism and the position of the author, provide a useful
springboard for the discussion of polyphony. Bakhtin’s view of the polyphonous
novel is one in which the author (for Bakhtin, Dostoevsky is the exemplar)
enables, or sets the stage for dialogue, between different voices. For Bakhtin, the
author does not disappear in the polyphonous novel, instead he or she, ‘creates
a world in which many disparate points of view may enter.’ (Morson and Emerson
1990 p.239). Bakhtin proposes that
It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a
plurality of consciousnesses, one that in principle cannot be fitted within
the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very
nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among
various consciousnesses. (1984 p.81)
Bakhtin’s favouring of polyphony develops out of his hostility to what he calls
‘theoretism’: the tendency in the humanities to create systems and structures and
mimic the epistemology of the physical sciences (Morson and Emerson 1990
p.101). Instead he searches for a ‘dialogic sense of truth’ that does not transcribe
away the ‘eventness of the event’ and does not exclude the particular, the
unfinalisable and the unforeseen. Morson and Emerson explain:
The dialogic sense of truth manifests unfinalisability by existing on the
‘threshold’ (porog) of several interacting consciousnesses, a ‘plurality’ of
‘unmerged’ voices. Crucial here is the modifier unmerged. These voices
cannot be contained within a single consciousness, as in monologism;
rather their separateness is essential to the dialogue. Even when they
agree, as they may, they do so from different perspectives and different
senses of the world. (1990 p.236-7)
Of course Bakhtin was describing the novel, not the theatre. In fact he argues
that drama is ‘a monolithic genre’ in which the focus on the character, the
authority of the director, and the drive toward the final resolution of differences in
classic tragedy, reduce the possibilities of polyphony (Carlson 1992 p.314).
Despite this Carlson proposes that because of the ‘multiple voices of enactment’,
Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism and polyphony ‘…should provide a rich area for the
study of the creation of meaning and of psychic relationships’ ( p.322).
It is the potential for capturing the complexity of reflexive voices in playback
enactments and the stress Bakhtin places on the ‘threshold event’ that, I think,
makes his ideas so fruitful for conceptualising playback theatre. The ’unmerged
voices’ of the ensemble work at the ‘threshold’ to produce enactments which, at
their best, may not only validate but also challenge the audience’s and teller’s
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perception of the narrative. In conclusion, the polyphony built into the design of
playback theatre allows for the possibility of hermeneutic play because the
teller’s story is opened up to these voices; no single person can control what will
emerge during the performance; and in interacting with each other these voices
‘discover’ new perspectives on the story. Their interaction creates something new.
In this paper I have proposed that hermeneutic play is a characteristic of
effective playback theatre. I have suggested that the conditions for it to flourish in
an enactment are that the performers maintain a tension between representation
and performativity; are willing to play with the meanings and signs that may be
contained within a story; collaborate together in the emergence of the story; and
sustain the interplay of multiple voices (polyphony). Far from being the
enactment of the ‘essence’ of the teller’s story, effective playback theatre creates
something new out of the improvisation of the performers.
I conclude wth a confession: for me, the most interesting playback is that which is
a little irreverent, which plays, sometimes almost parodies, the meanings that
may be attributed to the teller’s story. It is axiomatic of the current interest in
‘narrative therapy’ that we can be trapped, as well as validated, by our own
stories. Effective playback, through the processes of hermeneutic play, loosens
the ‘ties’ of the story, opens up other possible interpretations and reveals the
means through which we make sense of our experience. To paraphrase what
Mary Douglas says of the joke: an effective playback enactment ‘is a play upon
form that affords an opportunity for realising that an accepted pattern has no
necessity’ (1975 p.96)
Adam Phillips proposes that the alternative to believing in an authoritative,
original version of the teller’s story in psychotherapy is ‘…that there are just an
unknowable series of translations of translations; preferred versions of ourselves,
but not true ones’ (2002 p.143). He goes on to argue that in psychoanalysis
‘…the only good translation is the one that invites retranslation; the one that
doesn’t want to be verified so much as altered’ (2002 p.146). In psychotherapy −
and I would argue in playback theatre − one is not referring back to some original,
but forward to a new translation: a new, but never final, version. Perhaps then the
name ‘playback’ is misleading; if it wasn’t such a clumsy title perhaps we should
call it ‘play-forward’ instead.
――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――――
References
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Copyright: Nick Rowe, February 2005.
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