Session 7

Today the session was on playback theatre and was led by Veronica Need of True Heart Theatre. With Veronica we looked at how playback theatre is a unique collaboration between the performers and the audience. In one of the exercises we did with her we revisited the idea of using personal stories of narrative as performance and we did this by taking a story from a member of the audience and created a physical performance reflecting this. It was incredibly interesting to see personal stories be immediately recreated on stage and Veronica allowed us to explore physicality as much as possible in terms of representing peoples stories. One example of an interesting piece of physical performance we created was when a story was told by a colleague about their day at university. She talked about constantly looking at her mobile phone that day. When this story was performed as a piece of playback theatre, one individual actually took on the role of the mobile phone and looked at how they could physically portray it using their whole body. We saw how she shuddered with her whole body when the mobile phone vibrated, and physically followed the main character around as though being attached to her. We were also able to explore physical exercises with Veronica such as the "fishing" exercise where we would move as a group in close proximity to one other, in a type of "follow the leader" way where one person would come up with an action for the rest of the group to copy as they moved around the space. We played with this idea by having different groups of "fish" interact with each other and create a story. In terms of our devising we have decided to explore this idea when we are portraying the "shadows" that follow our main character around. The idea of all moving physically as one unit is a very interesting and creative idea and is a simple way to transform narrative stories to physicality. Veronica also talked about how in playback theatre or in performance in general we should not seek to find resolution from performing or telling stories but simply just acknowledge their importance and accept that they need to be told. This reminded me of Helena Enrights "letting it breathe" in that it places emphasis on the importance of narrative, and this reminded me that narrative stories should speak for themself and not be over complicated. The session with Veronica really supported my point that narrative can be transformed in to physicality making an interesting piece of performance, and I have contacted the playback theatre school to hopefully begin some training with them to be able to explore this idea further and use it as inspiration for future devising.