Standing Up: Playback Theatre and School Bullying by Jo Salas

This month it’s my turn to contribute a post. With kind permission from the editors, this article is excerpted and adapted from my chapter “Stories in the Moment: Playback Theatre for Building Community and Justice,” published in Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict, Vol 2, eds. Cohen, Varea and Walker, published by New Village Press in 2011. (I encourage readers to explore this remarkable anthology of writings on theatre that addresses conflict in many parts of the world.)

“Standing Up: Playback Theatre and School Bullying” describes and evaluates the approach pioneered by Hudson River Playback Theatre in upstate New York, now used by other PT companies as well.

(Link to Russian translation by Irina Khrustaleva: Джо-Салас-Плейбэк-театр-и-буллинг-в-школе-редакция-для-публикации)

Standing Up: Playback Theatre and School Bullying

by Jo Salas

Emma—not her real name–is a seventh grader, about 12 years old. She’s small for her age, slender, very smart, very artistic. She’s not part of the “popular” crowd in her class. Emma’s interests are different, she doesn’t make friends easily, she can be a bit sarcastic and prickly. For a long time, she’s been the target of daily, relentless, cruel bullying. She comes to school every day knowing that other kids are going to make fun of her, isolate her, and humiliate her. She feels powerless to stop it. She’s talked to her teachers and her parents. Her parents have talked to the principal. The principal has scolded the bullies. Nothing seems to help. Telling her story in a Playback Theatre performance, she says: “It feels like they’re tearing my heart out.” All she wants is for the other kids to leave her alone. She would also like it if a couple of the other girls would ask her about her artwork.

Emma has five more years of school. She doesn’t know how she’s going to survive.

What can we, both adults and young people, do to stop this kind of suffering? Continue reading “Standing Up: Playback Theatre and School Bullying by Jo Salas”

Gaps, Complicities, and Connections: Stories from a Movement Towards Racial Justice in Higher Education by Nisha Sajnani and Amanda Wager

Nisha Sajnani
Amanda Wager

In Playback Theatre we refer to “the red thread,” the connection that can emerge between spontaneously told stories–not simply a theme, but a kind of dialogue between the stories themselves. We are seeing a red thread emerge in this blog, a conversation about Playback Theatre’s capacities and responsibilities in relation to participation, inclusiveness, and social justice. This new article from Nisha Sajnani and Amanda Wager continues the red thread, looking at a sequence of performances exploring racial justice on an American university campus.

Nisha is the incoming Director of the Drama Therapy program at New York University and the principal editor of Drama Therapy Review. Amanda is an educator, researcher, and an Assistant Professor at Lesley University. See full bios following the article. 

Gaps, Complicities, and Connections: Stories from a Movement Towards Racial Justice in Higher Education

by Nisha Sajnani and Amanda Wager

Social movements for racial justice have regained momentum on college campuses across the U.S and Canada over the last three years, including at Lesley University in New England where we have both taught. Eighty-one lists of demands created by student groups call for greater accountability on the part of university administration and faculty to recruit and retain students and faculty of color, develop and use curricular materials that do not reify White, middle-class realities as the norm, allocate money, space, and human resources to acknowledge the health and social impacts of racism and better support the wellbeing of students of color, and to provide continuing education on racism and intersecting oppressions as it affects everyone implicated in university life.[i] 

Continue reading “Gaps, Complicities, and Connections: Stories from a Movement Towards Racial Justice in Higher Education by Nisha Sajnani and Amanda Wager”

Playback Theatre and Social Change: Functions, Principles and Practices by Ben Rivers and Jiwon Chung

Ben Rivers
Jiwon Chung

Based on the authors’ extensive experience in the US, India, and the Middle East, this concise article proposes a set of well-reasoned principles and guidelines that support the effective, ethical use of Playback Theatre for social change. Ben Rivers is Co-Director of the Arab School of Playback Theatre in Lebanon. Jiwon Chung is a practitioner of Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed in Berkeley, California. (See full bios following the article.)

Russian translation by Irina Krustaleva

Playback Theatre and Social Change: Functions, principles and Practices

by Ben Rivers and Jiwon Chung

April 2017

Playback Theatre can contribute towards social justice by giving a human face to the issues and demands that define a movement. The enactment of personal stories brings out the truth, dignity and detail of a cause, re-grounding political struggle within our shared humanity.

In this article, we will propose several functions that Playback can serve within social movements. We will also look at some guiding principles and techniques that can support our work as Playback activists.

Functions of Playback

Through Playback Theatre, silenced voices and counter-testimonies are heard and amplified. This helps to raise awareness about the realities of injustice and oppression.

At the same time, oppressed populations are able to define their own sense of self through accounts that celebrate the richness, complexity, and dignity of their lives. This in turn helps to challenge the stereotypes and other forms of misrepresentation that frequently define mainstream discourse. Continue reading “Playback Theatre and Social Change: Functions, Principles and Practices by Ben Rivers and Jiwon Chung”