Gerry Orkin is a long-time Playback Theatre practitioner and teacher from Australia. Based on his extensive experience with PT groups around the world, Gerry notes that for most playback practitioners, the default focus of the work is “our psychological imaginations – a quality of mind and interpretive orientation that helps us understand and embody the emotional meanings of a teller’s narrative.” Rich as it is, this focus often leaves out dimensions of social reality that could be deeply meaningful—even transformative—for teller and audience.
With illustrative examples and practical suggestions, this article calls for broadening the basis of our work to embrace our sociological imaginations as well: “Our sociological imagination…asks not only what a person was experiencing and feeling in their story, but what social forces have contributed to their situation, who else is affected, and what structures and systems might be at play.”
(As usual on PTR, I have maintained the writer’s English language usage.)
Playback Theatre and the Sociological Imagination
Gerry Orkin
Playback Theatre was inspired by community theatre, oral storytelling and therapeutic and humanistic traditions. Its founders, Jo Salas and Jonathan Fox, were also influenced by Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and by Moreno’s psychodrama, both traditions concerned, in their own ways, with liberation and social transformation. In the 1990s some playback companies began to use the form to explore social justice issues. That tradition continues, even as companies centre their day-to-day practice on the witnessing and enactment of personal narratives.
Over the past few years I’ve been fortunate to travel and teach Playback Theatre workshops in 15 countries, as well as attending regional and international gatherings. My playback work has often focussed on the role of social identity and social forces in shaping people’s lives. When stories are told in performances on themes of social justice, or in communities where social justice struggles are part of the fabric of everyday life, the relevance of those factors is obvious. However, in other settings, I have noticed that the social contexts of stories often go unrecognised or unacknowledged.
Typically, conductors and actors make sense of stories using our psychological imaginations – a quality of mind and interpretive orientation that helps us understand and embody the emotional meanings of a teller’s narrative. When we wonder what feelings and inner experiences are at the heart of a teller’s story, and work with things like subtext, motivation and metaphor, we are activating our psychological imagination. Outside the social justice contexts previously mentioned, I don’t often see conductors and actors also making sense of stories using their sociological imaginations. The sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that many experiences we think of as private, “personal troubles” are actually connected to broader “public issues” – problems rooted in how society is structured. Our sociological imagination is that quality of mind and interpretive orientation that helps us identify and be curious about those connections. It asks not only what a person was experiencing and feeling in their story, but what social forces have contributed to their situation, who else is affected, and what structures and systems might be at play. A sociological imagination helps us see both the fish and the water that the fish is swimming in.
In the playback contexts I’m most familiar with, stories are understood primarily through frameworks of emotion, healing, and personal meaning-making, even when they also contain significant social dimensions. On its own, that perspective risks shrinking injustice and oppression down to personal burdens, minimising the scope and context of their impact. Ethically, that matters because the sources of harm are rendered invisible and let off the hook. It also matters artistically, because the stage risks losing three of its most vital dramatic elements – power, tension, and shared social meaning.
The social dimensions of the story need not dominate the enactment; the teller’s suffering is still personal, but it is no longer only personal.
For example, consider the story of a woman who shares about her struggles with her relationship to food and to her body. Her experience sits at a tension point: it is deeply personal, but also profoundly shaped by social forces. A purely psychological reading collapses that tension, absorbing the social into the personal so that her experience is understood only as a matter of individual pain and pathology, and in doing so it risks reinforcing her shame by locating both the problem, and responsibility for the solution, entirely within her.
In contrast, when the conductor brings their sociological imagination to the interview, the frame widens. They are thinking “what social conditions make this experience possible? Who else faces this? Who benefits from things being this way?”. They may already be alert to the ways that certain ideas about appearance and femininity can undermine women’s confidence about their bodies. Curious about that connection, they might ask the teller “Where did you learn the rules about what a ’good’ or ’acceptable’ body should be?” or “If you woke up tomorrow and no woman felt this way anymore, what would have changed overnight?”
Using their sociological imaginations, the actors can embody the personal aspects of her struggle, but also the social process that is at work. For example, they might show us the weight loss and wellness industries pocketing profits made from their exploitation of women’s anxiety and shame. The “rules of appearance” could be enacted as a literal script being handed down, mother to daughter, phone screen to viewer, showing how the ideology of desirable appearance is transmitted and reproduced. By making those kinds of choices the cultural machinery that equates women’s worth with body shape and size, that commodifies thinness and normalises surveillance and self-punishment is made visible as an active social force and a meaningful presence in the story. What first appeared as personal “pathology” becomes intelligible not as a weakness or failure, but as an understandable response to impossible and cruel social demands. The social dimensions of the story need not dominate the enactment; the teller’s suffering is still personal, but it is no longer only personal. The tension at the heart of her story is not resolved, but nor does it have to be; when brought to the stage it is made present, legible and resonant. That transformation more fairly distributes the burden of shame and responsibility away from the individual and toward the systems that produced the conditions of harm. It will very likely also have a quietly strengthening effect, as other women in the room recognise their own experiences in the story and as the teller’s isolation gives way to empathetic solidarity and shared understanding.
Here’s another example: a few years ago I was facilitating a rehearsal for a company. A woman told about feeling guilty, because she couldn’t keep up with her elderly parents’ care needs, while also working two low-income jobs to support her extended family. She saw her situation as a personal failure of obligation and responsibility. While her parents were grateful, the teller felt that she was not coping as well as she should. The actors artfully embodied the teller’s love for her parents, her feelings of guilt and inadequacy and her ever-present exhaustion, but I saw in the interview and the enactment a missed opportunity. My sociological imagination had me thinking that this was also a story about the decline of social infrastructure, and the expectation that families (and, disproportionately, women within families) should absorb all the burdens of care. It was also a story about the impossible mathematics of unstable low-income employment, and uncompensated care work. Seen through a sociological lens, the teller wasn’t a failure – they were being failed.
When we sensitively embody the social context, we give tellers the dignity of being both witnessed and able to see themselves, and their stories, more clearly.
I asked the conductor to re-do the interview, and this time to ask questions that might surface the social context of this story. She asked the teller “Is it fair that there are no other ways to get support for your parents?” The teller sat more upright in her chair, and there were now tears in her eyes. She said that everyone felt embarrassed to talk about this problem, even among friends, because in her culture, struggling to care for ageing parents is a private, shameful matter. She talked about cuts to social services and financial assistance, and how people are scared to talk negatively about the government. She added that as the only female child, she was expected to do most of the care-taking work in her family. With this new information, the actors began their second enactment with a painful scene. They each laid a hand on the teller’s actor’s back and shoulders, each representing a support person or agency. As long as she was being held by those hands, she could dance gracefully, moving with the actors, but as they let go, one-by-one, and retreated, her movements became more and more laboured and uncoordinated, until she was alone, abandoned in the middle of the stage. The four actors, now representing the government and cultural gatekeepers, told her to do her duty and be quiet.
This example isn’t about denying emotional truth; it’s about the transformative potential of a refusal to let people face alone what should be understood and faced collectively. When the social dimensions surfaced, the teller’s exhaustion became evidence of a broken system rather than personal inadequacy. When we sensitively embody the social context, we give tellers the dignity of being both witnessed and able to see themselves, and their stories, more clearly. It’s the difference between “I am not good enough” and “this system is not good enough”.
Of course, there are risks to this approach. A sociological perspective can become its own form of interpretive violence if it is carelessly or inappropriately imposed. Not every story has an important social context (although in my experience, more do than you might think!), but a conductor who sees social forces at work everywhere risks missing what a teller has actually come to the chair to share. Jumping too soon to a structural analysis can push tellers past their own thoughts and feelings toward meanings and conclusions they don’t own, leaving them feeling unheard and unseen if their story’s personal distinctiveness is turned into a stereotype. The aim is not to replace one reductive lens with another, but to be willing to hold and explore both, letting the teller, the conductor and performer’s spontaneity and emergent wisdom inspire the meanings that come to the stage.
Another kind of risk is present when the social forces in a story have historically privileged the teller. In those cases, a focus on those forces can feel like an attack – as if we’re saying to the teller “you’re the problem here”. Conductors need to use their judgement about the appropriateness of exploring the social context of any kind of story, but especially that kind. If they decide to do so, their task is to ask questions that reveal systems without pressuring the teller to assume personal guilt or responsibility. For example, consider a white, male professor’s story about how programs that support women and people of colour in education discriminate against him. A conductor might say: “Yes, in recent times there have been big changes in community expectations and how access to education works – and change can be unsettling. How did your own path through academia compare to colleagues who are different from you?”. That question acknowledges his experience and the changed landscape of access, and treats historical bias as something to examine together rather than something he must defend. The goal is to remain curious about how social systems work, not to score ethical points or occupy the moral high ground. It’s also important to understand that in some communities it can be dangerous to talk about political topics, and there may be other cultural factors in play. Care and sensitivity is important, especially if the conductor and performers are not locals.
If a sociological imagination is an essential competency, then the culture and practice of playback will need re-wiring, not just minor adjustments.
A curriculum for the development of a sociological imagination in playback doesn’t yet exist, but I suggest that there are four broad domains it needs to cover: conceptual understanding (the intellectual foundations practitioners need to have as they step on stage or sit in the conductor’s chair), practical skills (each role needs specific skills to put conceptual understandings into practice), ethical reasoning (the capacity to reason through ethical questions, not just follow rules) and project development (sociological imagination in playback is not just about what happens on stage, but shapes the entire lifecycle of a project from conception, planning, engagement, performance, and follow-up).
First, conceptual understanding: as well as recognising the teller’s lived truth, conductors and actors must be able to contextualise a story’s sociological and political frames of meaning, and develop a feel for how age, gender, class, race, ability, refugee and migration status, economic pressures, religion and cultural norms shape lived experiences, and how the intersections of those social identities can complicate that shaping. A theoretical understanding of those complexities is not enough – we need to have a feel for how social identities actually operate in people’s lives.
There are many ways that can be achieved. Company members can start by sharing their own stories of social identity and the impacts of social forces on their lives. They can explore other social theatre forms, for example Theatre of the Oppressed, and bring back what they learn to their group. They can take time to focus on social justice topics (one company I know of used reading circles to share resources and discuss ideas). A particularly effective and accountable way of exploring conceptual understandings is to actively seek the participation of critical friends in a company’s life. Critical friends are members of communities affected by injustice who are invited to rehearsals to share their knowledge and give advice, sometimes before performances but also in other contexts. In one of my former companies we maintained ongoing relationships with critical friends involved in advocacy, activism or research in the queer community, refugee activist communities, the disability and mental health sectors, a family violence service and our local Indigenous community. Over time, patterns emerged. While each personal story was unique, the same processes of “othering” – dehumanisation, exclusion, essentialising and scapegoating – appeared repeatedly across different circumstances of injustice. That kind of pattern recognition is an essential skill for playback practitioners; it helps us identify when a teller’s private trouble is also evidence of social forces, and to respond accordingly.
What practical skills do practitioners need to turn conceptual understandings into effective work on the stage? For conductors, the main skill is an expanded curiosity – one that is open to a broader contextualising of meaning in stories that is wielded with care and responsibility. For actors, the need is to develop the ability to embody not only inner states, but also the external forces that shape them. That includes a sensitivity to how social identity, social forces, power, cultural norms, and institutional dynamics can be made visible through imagery, spatial relationships, metaphor, rhythm, gesture, and ensemble interaction. They need to be able to spontaneously physicalise frequently encountered elements, such as pressure, constraint, exclusion, comparison, surveillance and invisibility, so that systems and social forces are readable as embodied realities, not abstract ideas. Companies must adapt existing forms (and experiment with new forms) so that the social dimensions that shape personal experiences can be successfully embodied on the stage.
Conductors need to be able to hold brave spaces so that dialogue across differences becomes possible, not just safe spaces where difficult questions might be avoided.
This work requires both boldness and restraint, as the embodiment of oppressive forces can be triggering as well as illuminating – the aim is insight, not re-traumatisation. Underpinning these skills is the capacity to hold empathy while also keeping the social frame in view, allowing the audience to recognise how, for some stories, personal feeling and social context are inseparable in lived experience. Both conductors and actors need the confidence to trust that widening the frame deepens rather than diminishes empathy and meaning, and the courage to navigate the discomfort that exploring social dimensions can create. Conductors need to be able to hold brave spaces so that dialogue across differences becomes possible, not just safe spaces where difficult questions might be avoided.
Developing those skills, however, is only part of what’s needed. Ethical reasoning is the third domain, and it operates at a different level: not “how do we do this well?” but “what are we actually responsible for?”. A purely psychological framing risks obscuring playback’s ethical terrain rather than illuminating it. When stories are understood only as personal and emotional, the ethical questions that arise are largely about care and containment: don’t harm the teller, don’t trigger the audience, don’t exaggerate claims made about the form. Those are real obligations, but a sociological framing surfaces a wider set of questions. Whose stories get told, and whose don’t? When a conductor chooses to widen the frame – or declines to – what are the consequences of that choice for the teller and the community? When social forces in a story have historically privileged the teller, what does fair witnessing look like? Those aren’t questions that can be answered by following rules; they require practitioners who can reason through competing obligations and exercise genuine judgement in real time. That capacity doesn’t develop without deliberate practice: case-based discussion, rehearsal scenarios, and honest reflection on past practice and experience are essential. Underpinning all of that is the recognition that ethical inaction is not neutral – choosing not to surface the social dimensions of a story is itself a choice, one that defaults to the status quo and, in doing so, takes a side.
Project development is the fourth domain. The full cycle of a project from conception through follow-up is itself an ethical and political space, and one where the values of the work either find expression or quietly contradict themselves. Which communities does the company engage with, and on what terms? Who is recruited into the company? What themes are proposed, and what preparation – including community consultation – is appropriate before a performance? What happens after, when the stories that have surfaced may have raised expectations or reopened wounds? A company that brings sociological imagination to its performance work but treats project development as mere logistics is leaving the analysis half-done.
If a sociological imagination is an essential competency, then the culture and practice of playback will need re-wiring, not just minor adjustments. That means challenging the assumption that empathy, good intentions and a functioning psychological imagination are enough. It involves re-thinking what we value and how we think about and articulate playback’s purpose to audiences, how we decide where and for whom we perform (and what themes we choose), who we collaborate with, who we recruit as company members, what competencies we regard as important and how we address those needs through training, and the language we use as conductors and trainers. It means another kind of self-reflection too: after all, a company that names injustice on stage while leaving its own values, structure, management and composition unexamined hasn’t fully embraced what this work is about.
For some in our community, these concepts represent a genuinely transformative shift in how we understand the playback form itself. That’s a lot to ask, and there’s a risk of overwhelming people if we frame this appeal as a demand for immediate fluency, rather than a developmental journey. For some, it will remain easier, safer and more comfortable to stick with what they know – but the discomfort of learning is not a reason to avoid it.
The fundamental questions are: do we have the ability to recognise when social context is an essential element of the heart of a story? And do we know how to bring that recognition to the stage in consensual, appropriate, proportionate and safe ways? (The same questions about consent and safety also apply to psychological framings, of course, but those are rarely treated as distinct framings at all – they’re the unquestioned default, it’s just “what we do”).
The alternative is to continue a practice where we risk failing to serve people – often those who are disadvantaged or oppressed – whose stories live at the intersection of personal experience and social reality. When that intersection is at the heart of what a story means, we owe its teller and our audience the recognition of its transformative potential, in order to meet the promise of ethical witnessing in Playback Theatre.
Acknowledgement
Playback practitioners have been writing, arguing and theorising about our practice for decades, in essays, journals, conference papers and books. I am indebted to that history of work, and acknowledge its impact on my own practice. I can’t name everyone who has, in one way or another, stirred me in my thinking on this topic, but they include Ben Rivers, Steve Nash, Emily Conolon, Jo Salas, Hani Al Rstum, Nick Rowe, Elsa Maurício Childs, Kathy Barolsky, Norbert Ross, Soline Daccache, Pamela Freeman, Sarah Halley, Rea Dennis, Bev Hosking, Peter Hall and Jonathan Fox. I thank Steve, Jo, Peter, Norbert and Soline for their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.
Bio
Gerry is an Australian Playback Theatre practitioner whose involvement with playback began in 1985. He was an actor, conductor and co-director of four successive Canberra Playback Theatre companies between 1986 and 2009, and until 2019 directed a company in Wollongong, New South Wales. Gerry has a particular interest in training conductors, bringing artistry to the stage, and helping companies work with the social dimensions of stories and issues of social justice. Over the past ten years he has offered training in 15 countries, and been involved with community building in Australia as well as internationally. Gerry has a professional background in social policy and human service development, and has worked on issues like homelessness, violence against women and child protection for government and non-government agencies. He can be reached at gerry.orkin@gmail.com. His website is at https://gerryorkin.com. Photo by Hajü www.fotoartus.de.