Rajiv Shah’s essay is a succinct and eloquent meditation on the moment between “Let’s watch!” and the beginning of action in an enacted story. He reminds us–experienced Playbackers as well as newcomers–that if we pay attention and do not rush, that moment is full of creative possibility. Those brief seconds can allow actors to deepen their understanding of the story, attune to their fellow performers, and let the stirred-up waters of empathy and memory settle into clarity.
Rajiv is a long-time Playback practitioner in Mumbai, India.
Holding the Waters: Reflections on the Changing Relationship to the Pause in Playback Theatre
Rajiv Shah
Introduction
Recently, while listening to newer members of our Playback group speak about their experience of entering stories, I found myself revisiting a landscape I had not walked through for many years. They spoke of racing thoughts, uncertainty, self-consciousness, anxiety and the pressure to know what to do before stepping onto the stage. Listening to them was like coming across an old photograph. I recognised the terrain immediately. Many experienced Playback actors eventually learn to move through this landscape with greater confidence and trust. Yet returning to it reminded me how much of our development as Playback performers takes place there. This essay is an exploration of that territory, a place many of us know well when we begin and often forget once we have learned to move through it.
The Pause
The teller has finished speaking. The conductor turns towards the actors. The audience waits. For a few brief moments nothing happens. Or at least it appears that way.
Beneath the stillness a storm has already begun.
Images flash across the mind like birds startled into flight. Emotions rise and disappear before they can be named. The body tightens or softens. Memories arrive uninvited. One actor feels sadness. Another excitement. A third notices a heaviness in the chest. Thoughts rush in, eager to be useful, offering solutions before the question has even been fully heard.
And through all of this runs a single impulse. Do something. Move. Speak. Become the story.
Yet the art of Playback may lie precisely in not doing so.
Between listening and acting there exists a small territory of uncertainty. It is not always a comfortable place to inhabit. We do not yet know what the story means. We do not know what form it will take on stage. We do not know what images, emotions, or impulses have been stirred in the other actors. Yet over time we learn to trust that they too have been listening, that something is taking shape not only within us but within the ensemble.
Most of us encounter this territory first as anxiety. We want to leave it as quickly as possible. We want certainty. We want to know what to do. But if we can remain there, if only for a few moments, something begins to happen.
The story sinks below thought. Like a stone dropped into a lake, it disappears beneath the surface. Ripples spread outward through memory, sensation, imagination, and feeling. Not only within the individual actor, but across the ensemble itself. Something begins to organise itself beneath awareness. A shared understanding, still fragile and incomplete, starts to emerge before any of us has fully named it.
With experience, however, the pause begins to change its character. What initially feels like uncertainty gradually becomes trust. Trust in one’s own listening. Trust in fellow actors. Trust that the story need not be understood immediately. Trust that the ensemble often knows more than any individual actor. The territory remains the same. What changes is our relationship to it. The beginner encounters the pause as anxiety. The experienced actor increasingly encounters it as trust.
The pause is not empty. The pause is where the work begins.
The Urge to Escape
Human beings do not enjoy uncertainty. We prefer conclusions to questions, movement to stillness, certainty to ambiguity. When tension arises, we instinctively seek relief. We want to discharge it, release it, be done with it.
Playback actors are no different.
The moment a story is told, the mind gets busy. It starts constructing scenes, assigning characters, interpreting motives, deciding what the story is about. Sometimes this happens so quickly that we mistake it for listening. It is not. It is an escape. The anxiety of not knowing transforms into the comfort of having decided. The trouble is that stories, like people, rarely reveal themselves so quickly.
A teller once spoke about the total feeling of isolation he felt on his first day in a new school he was “dumped” into by his mother who disappeared immediately. He was led to a big field where everyone was assembled in lines, and he had to join one. He looked around unsure before a stranger’s hand pulled him into one. As he spoke, memories of my own first day in a boarding school began to surface. Before the story was even finished, I could feel scenes forming in my mind. I knew the feeling of being surrounded by unknown faces, of the sense of abandonment, of disconnection, of that hand that was held out. I knew what I wanted to recreate. I knew the emotions I wanted to play. Yet none of this belonged to the teller. It belonged to me. The pause gave me just enough time to recognise this and return to his story rather than my own.
Playback is full of such seductions. The challenge is not to eliminate them. That would be impossible. The challenge is to notice them. To recognise that the first thing that arrives is not necessarily the thing that needs to be played.
What Belongs to Me?
Every story enters a crowded room.
It arrives carrying its own emotions and meanings, but it enters a space already occupied by our memories, desires, fears, fantasies, and unfinished business. No story arrives on a blank canvas. This is both the gift and the danger of Playback.
Our personal histories allow us to resonate with the teller. We are moved because something in us recognises something in them. Yet the same mechanism can cause us to mistake our experience for theirs.
The pause gives us a chance to separate these threads. Not completely. That would be impossible. But enough. Enough to notice what has been stirred in us. Enough to ask whether the sadness belongs to the teller or to a memory awakened by the tale. Enough to recognise that our strongest impulse may sometimes have more to do with ourselves than with the story before us.
The pause does not empty the room of our own histories. The room remains crowded. It simply allows us to see more clearly who has entered with the teller and who was already there.
Thinking Is Not Analysis
When people hear the word thinking, they often imagine reasoning, interpretation, and analysis. That is not the kind of thinking I mean. The thinking that interests me is closer to listening. It is awareness of the body. Awareness of emotion. Awareness of memory. Awareness of imagination. Awareness of impulse. Awareness of the countless small movements taking place within us before action emerges.
Much of this happens without words. A sensation appears before an explanation. An image arrives before a thought. The body leans forward before the mind understands why.
In Playback we are not trying to think our way to the correct answer. We are allowing experience to organise itself. Like muddy water left undisturbed, something begins to settle when we stop stirring it. Clarity emerges not because we force it but because we create the conditions in which it can appear.
Holding the Waters
I often think of the pause as a reservoir. The story enters us like a river after heavy rain. Energy begins to accumulate. Emotions gather. Images gather. Sensations gather. The pressure rises. Actors encountering this territory for the first time often open the floodgates immediately. Whatever arrives first rushes onto the stage.
Sometimes this works. Often it does not. The more experienced actor allows the waters to rise. Not forever. Only long enough for something deeper to form. The energy is held rather than discharged. Organised rather than scattered. What eventually emerges carries greater force because it has not been spent at the first opportunity. The enactment becomes less reactive and more responsive. Less about relieving the actor’s tension and more about expressing the teller’s emotional reality.
From Personal Emotion to Aesthetic Mood
The goal of Playback is not simply emotional expression. If it were, we could all stand on stage and tell our own stories. Something else is taking place. The teller brings an experience. The actors receive it. The experience passes through body, imagination, memory, and feeling. And then it returns to the stage transformed. A personal emotion becomes something larger. A private grief becomes shared sorrow. An individual triumph becomes collective courage. A moment of confusion becomes recognisable to an entire room.
This transformation is one of the quiet miracles of Playback.
The audience does not merely witness a story. They enter an emotional atmosphere. For a few moments they inhabit a shared mood. The story belongs to everyone. This aesthetic experience cannot be manufactured through technique alone. It emerges from the quality of listening that precedes action. The pause is one of the places where that transformation begins.
Learning to Stay
For me, practices such as Qi Gong have become invaluable teachers. Standing apparently motionless, noticing sensations, resisting the urge to immediately respond, and allowing experience to unfold in its own time, I was unknowingly rehearsing for the pause. The body was learning a form of patience that would later become available in the moments between listening and acting.
Inside, however, a great deal is happening. The body wants to move. The mind wants to wander. Sensations arise. Discomfort appears. The impulse is always towards escape. Yet if one remains, something gradually changes. The discomfort becomes less threatening. The urge to act loses some of its urgency. One becomes capable of inhabiting uncertainty without immediately trying to fix it.
I suspect every Playback actor needs some equivalent practice. It need not be Qi Gong. It could be meditation, Tai Chi, yoga, martial arts, contemplative movement, breath-work, or even long solitary walks. The form matters less than the capacity it develops. What we are cultivating is the ability to stay. To remain present. To tolerate tension without rushing to resolve it.
Learning from the Pause
In Playback training we often spend considerable time discussing what was played in an enactment. We spend far less time exploring what happened before the first movement, in the few moments between listening and acting. What happened in the pause? What did you notice in your body? What image arrived first? What emotion surprised you? What impulse did you follow? What impulse did you resist? What did you sense the other actors were moving towards? At what moment did the ensemble begin to find a shared emotional centre?
Questions such as these slowly train our attention towards the invisible process from which an enactment emerges rather than only the performance itself. Actors begin noticing patterns. They discover how anxiety influences choices. They become familiar with their habitual responses. They learn where they rush. They learn where they hesitate. Over time they begin to trust not only their own listening but also the listening of the ensemble. The pause gradually becomes less a place to escape from and more a place to enter.
These reflections need not be confined to training sessions. Looking back together after rehearsals or performances, asking not only what we played but how we arrived there, can gradually cultivate a company culture in which listening becomes deeper, trust grows, and the pause itself is recognised as part of the art rather than merely the silence before it. Perhaps this is why traditional Playback performances often allowed scenes to begin more slowly than they often do today, using music to support the unfolding.
Conclusion
Playback is often described as spontaneous. Yet spontaneity can be misunderstood. It is not simply doing the first thing that comes to mind. Nor is it the absence of reflection. The most alive moments in Playback often emerge from a brief encounter with uncertainty. A willingness to remain still while something forms. A willingness to let the story settle into the body before rushing to perform it. A willingness to tolerate tension long enough for imagination, feeling, memory, and impulse to organise themselves into action. The pause is only a few seconds long. Yet within those few seconds lies the difference between reaction and response. Between discharge and expression. Between acting out and aesthetic transformation. Nothing appears to be happening.
And yet everything is.
Perhaps the art of Playback lies not only in telling stories, but in learning how to hold, to contain the waters long enough for something true to emerge.
Bio:
My name is Rajiv.
I was initiated into Playback Theatre in 1992. Like many others of my generation, however, questions of survival and livelihood soon demanded precedence, and my attention shifted toward work and career. I spent the next two decades in the field of Information Technology, eventually retiring from full-time industry work in 2017, though I continued teaching and mentoring.
Playback returned to my life through a workshop conducted by Preeti Nair. Soon after, I had the good fortune of attending the annual Playback Theatre Jamboree held that year in Bangalore. Since then, I have been an active part of the Mumbai Playback community, now known as EMPURPLE.
Alongside theatre, my academic and personal interests have been deeply shaped by psychology and psychoanalysis. I hold a Master’s degree in Organizational Psychodynamics and underwent a further three years of training in psychoanalysis, a discipline I continue to regard myself as a lifelong student of rather than someone who has “completed” it.
My current interest lies in exploring how Natyashastra can influence Playback and the intersections between Playback Theatre and psychoanalytic thought. In the years ahead, I hope to write Natyashastra and psychoanalytically informed papers that engage with Playback as both a performance form, but also as a space of unconscious process, affect, memory, relationship, and collective meaning-making.
Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash