November 12, 2012

The Last Time I Was in Egypt...Teaching Playback Theatre


“Mark here, will teach script writing. Julisa will take the directing track. And we have two performing tracks. Chuck will teach acting, and Kimberly…Kimberly…,” the sponsor Essam paused and looked to me for help. “She will teach something…something new called Playback.”

This is how the trainers for a Drama Conference in Upper Egypt were introduced to the 120 participants gathered for 3 ½ days of training over the leap year weekend in 2008.

As the participants made their choices for which foreign teacher they would be with for the weekend, they wanted more information. Essam invited me to explain, to pitch the Playback track. I stood with my interpreter and addressed a sea of eager faces. This was their first Christian Conference solely focusing on drama training ever and they wanted to make the right choice. I did my best to explain.

“From the first time I saw Playback in 2002, I have been excited about the possibilities of this new form of theatre. It is new, created in 1975 in USA, but now there is an International Playback Theatre Network, and there are teams which practice it all over the world. It is simple, beautiful, inexpensive, and powerful, even when performed by amateurs. It also seems that it can be all these things in any language or culture. In a lifetime of being a theatre practitioner, I’ve seen nothing else that makes the most of what theatre has to offer that is special and different than television and films. Theatre, you see, is an immediate art form. The live audience is as important to the success of each show as the actors, play, or any technical element added. Playback is improvised theatre that takes the fun of improv – like the television show “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” and gives it depth and purpose beyond just entertainment. Why? Because the stories, the content of the plays come from the audience. The audience is part of the creative process. The lives of ordinary people become the subject of art. In teaching you Playback, I don’t have to worry about my understanding arabic or the nuances of your beautiful culture. You already know what is taboo, you already know what is funny. I will teach you how to improvise it on stage with adaptable rituals we use in Playback, and you will be ready to perform anywhere and anytime. Come learn playback with me this weekend and be perhaps the very the first to know it and use it in North Africa.”

Sixteen brave souls signed up for the Playback track, which, even after the introduction still felt like a mystery to them. But thankfully for me, they jumped in with both feet from the very first session; giving themselves wholeheartedly to the process of learning Playback. My translator kept remarking about their enthusiasm unhesitating involvement. She said, “I can’t believe they’re doing this! It’s especially unusual for upper Egyptians, because they tend to be more reserved and conservative.”

Where to Begin? Concentration, Observation & Working as a Team
After quick intros in a circle (name/sound/action then everyone immediately copies), I started with an exercise called Diamond Ensemble, a variation on the acting “Mirror exercise” where partners face one another and copy the actions of the leader to the nth degree of exactness. Diamond Ensemble uses 4 people facing the same direction, 3 following the one in the front. There are 3 simple rules: 1. Go very slowly, 2. Don’t make any movements in front of your body, 3. Change leadership when the person in front turns their head more than ¼ turn to the right or left. When done even moderately well, it can look like a choreographed dance. It forces the participants to concentrate, forget about themselves, and pay attention to details. People thought that it was Playback. But I told them that we were just starting off with some exercises and games that would help them in Playback later.

What Did You Learn?
We debriefed the Diamond Ensemble; how it felt, & what they learned. It’s always rewarding to hear people share what the experience brought to them. I asked them how they felt about worshipping God with their bodies. I shared with them how important this has been for me. I believe we all have Spiritual temperaments that long to worship God in more ways than the typical tradition and ritual, Bible study, or celebration in a congregation singing worship songs. There are some of us who best worship God and hear from him by being in nature, or through care giving, or activism – fighting injustice or a righteous cause, there are others who are drawn to simplicity – the ascetics, and then there are some like me who best worship and sense God’s presence through our senses. Through beauty and our body we know his presence or sense his love. An exercise like Diamond Ensemble can be a profoundly worshipful experience when we are moving to worship music or meditating on a passage of Scripture.

For the conference, I’d chosen Isaiah 61:1-4 to be a theme passage and asked them to read it aloud. Later we would try the Diamond Ensemble with the phrases of this passage rolling around in our minds, and sometimes being called out by the leader, or repeated by the group.

But this was all we had time for in our first night together.

Day Two: More Exercises to Prepare for Playback
To work on creating pictures, getting comfortable in one another’s space, and creating depth and levels on stage, we worked on some Sculptures to go with the themes of Isaiah 61:1-4. In teams I observed them discussing and planning at length what they would do and started to worry that they’d ever get to a point this weekend of being able to instantaneously make a Fluid Sculpture or a Freeze Frame Story without first discussing it. But this was an important step in the process and they made pictures reflecting “Release for the prisoners,” “Rebuild the ancient ruins.” And two for “Day of Judgment.”

On the second day I introduced the Fish Tank. “This is kind of a crazy exercise. You’ll think there is no point to it, but you will see later how important it is.”

I asked them to begin walking around the room to fill the space and not bump into one another.  Clap once to start. Two times they freeze. One clap they start again. Then we added a three clap to freeze with an emotion. They started to pay attention to each other as I eliminated the claps and challenged them to start and stop as simultaneously as possible.

Next we eliminated the clapping. Anyone in the group can stop, and if we’re paying attention to one another, the whole group stops. Anyone can start again and we all will follow. I know there are some that like to be the leader, so we’ll limit you to only stopping or starting the group 3 times. Let’s add ages to our walks. I’ll call out “Young child,” or “proud teenager,” or “elderly person” and try your best to copy one another even in the way you portray these ages. It was getting harder!

What’s the point? Is all of this just silliness? Definitely not. They finally got it. They finally started to act as a unit, to start and stop together, sensing organically when to begin, and when to stop.

Later when they were learning all the forms of Playback which require the group to sense when the action needs to come to a stop, they had gotten really good at this.
I kept reminding them of the Fish Tank exercise “You see? You thought I was crazy, but now you know how to stop together, you listen and pay attention to each other. You sense it among yourselves.” I added, “If you are paying attention, and not just about you trying to be a star, you will know what to do, your imagination will take over, and on the spot you will make up something that fits, and works together as a group.”

Almost Ready to Start
The class came in from their lunch break with the room transformed into a Playback performance space. It heightened our expectation of what was finally going to happen. But we still needed to know how, so we took some time to read through and translate the descriptions of the setting, and the players. Having reviewed Jo Salas’ Improvising Real Life, I had made a handout of the nuts and bolts of who does what and how they do it, and how it all works. Before the trip, I’d had some Egyptian friends in LA help with translating the key words, and now I was running down the list of names and descriptions: the conductor, the teller, the actors, the musician, the cloth tree and what is a transformation or correction? I taught them some about how to look and listen for the “essence” of the story, and the structure of stories. We talked about the structure of playback: the conductor’s interview of a teller, the setting up, the enactment, the acknowledgment and “bringing it back to the teller.” It was sometimes tedious to get through these descriptions with translation, but I tried to break it up with activities or exercises to keep us from getting bogged down in words (or wearing out Dalia my translator!). I interspersed some vocal and physical warm ups, and we even had fun with a mini mime lesson: grabbing the steering wheel of a car, and how to get in and out of a car.

Finally we were ready to invite some classmates to the teller’s chair and try out some scenes. We had some terrific stories. Pets running out into busy streets, jumping off running trains, being stranded at JFK airport in New York, finally being free to be myself. I fell in love with my students as I picked up some Arabic along the way. But the phrase I’ll never forget is:

Yalluna Netfallug… “Let’s Watch!”

November 11, 2012

Ethnodoxicologists...What do you call a Filmmaker?

If a musician is an Ethnomusicologist, and a theatre artists is an Ethnodramacologist.

Is a filmmaker an Ethnomoviecologist?

Stephen Cadd grew up a missionary kid in the Philippines. He was always crazy about movies, but found it frustrating that all the films about the Gospel in the library of the Bible School where his parents worked were all Made in America.

As an adult he founded Sword Produtions a film production company committed to helping indigenous peoples make films that suit their own cultures. From their website:

The power of a dramatic film for evangelistic use cannot be overstated. Years of experience have shown this to be one of the most useful tools for evangelism in the 21ST century. Sword Productions has pioneered in producing such films for fifteen twenty years. The cost is very reasonable, considering the fact that the numerical results for the out-reaching churches or groups are quite astonishing. 

Check out the link for a fascinating company using media for the gospel.