About a Playback Group

“Bringing” theatre to people usually means performing for people.  But we felt that the performance was only half of the theatrical experience, so we started an “Open Practice” to let audience member go through what we do.

Back in the early 00’s, a couple of friends and I were invited to start a Playback Theatre group in a youth organization in Toronto.  What is Playback Theatre ?  It was a great opportunity for us to really dig-in to the art form and build a team of people.

Established for around 40 years, Playback Theatre has expanded rapidly especially in the past decade, where it is widely used as a platform for community building, social awareness and personal growth.  Playback Theatre is such a form that values and balances input.  Each Playback group has their own goal and character, guided and negotiated among its founders and acting members (literally the actors).

As we were amateurs ourselves, we took sometime ourselves to experience what Playback was about.  From within our community, we invited a stable group of youths who would form the majority for over the next 3 to 4 years during my time there.  We usually practiced 3 times a month, and performed 6 to 8 times a year for a small audience.

Only 1 year into our founding, we accepted a difficult task: to prepare a programme for a youth creativity camp that would let participants experience how Playback Theatre could help them grow as individuals.  As part of a youth organization, we valued youth participation and were determined to plan and execute the programme together.  

Having all gone through about a year for Playback training that brought about much self-exploration, we were unanimous in that the programme would focus on the training experience rather than to provide a performance.  But it was not easy to decide which game and exercise to include from the dozens that we have used over the year.

After some unconstructive discussion on activity suggestions, we had no choice but to go back to the very basic and asked ourselves: In what ways have our training affected us?  What did our style of Playback emphasize?  How has our favourite games/exercises shaped and affected us as a person, an actor and a group?  Even though our eyelids were the weight of lead, our ideas finally took shape and slowly turned into a practical flow of activities that would become our programme for the youth creativity camp.

This camp eventually inspired us to insert an education component into seasonal performances called the “Open Practice”, where a small number of audience members can join a day of Playback practise, and then stay for the evening performance.

The process before every theatre performance is long and arduous.  The concept of “Open Practice” idea is similar to a backstage pre-performance tour for the audience to see the its hidden effort.  The nature of Playback Theatre allows for a very in-depth backstage experience where the audience can experience the physical and mental preparation of an actor, and the satisfaction of the process.