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Pairs from Playback Theatre

During the Blue Mountain Retreat, Cintra Harbold showed us a few Playback Theatre structures, including one called Pairs.

For Pairs, four actors are selected by a “conductor”, a playback theatre term for facilitator or director. The actors come to the designated stage area, stand in pairs, and face out to the audience with their feet rooted, one slightly behind the other.

Once the actors take their positions. The conductor selects a “teller” to tell a short, true story that holds two strong emotions. The retreat participants added the criterion of “two strong emotions related to directing” to serve as the warm-up for director selections held later that afternoon.

After the teller has recounted a story that highlights two strong emotions, the conductor doubles them, highlighting the emotions and key phrases. They check in with the actors to ensure everyone has enough details to play it back. Then the audience and teller watch as the actors play out the two emotions with movement, dialogue, and often humorous renditions of the emotions. A fun twist to the action is to have both actors facing front until it is time for action. At that time, actors turn back to back and perform the action while rotating in a circle.

To close, the conductor calls to end the action and the audience gives the actors a round of applause, then thanks the teller for their story and the teller shares how it felt to receive the performance.

To experience playback theatre, consider River Crossing Playback Theatre’s next open zoom practice on Friday, May, 20th from 7-9 pm. Email rivercrossing@jubileearts.net for more details.

This post is an excerpt from BTS-LPTI: Spring 2022. Read more and subscribe to follow further LPTI updates.