Storytelling, Agency and Community-building through Playback Theatre in Palestine (original) (raw)

According to its initiator, Jonathan Fox, Playback Theatre is a kind of theatre which comes back to theatre’s ”earlier purpose of preserving memory and holding the tribe together” (Fox 2000, n. p.). Playback Theatre blurs the boundaries between performer and audience and connects different individual stories with a broader collective framework, allowing a phenomenological understanding of personal events. My paper aims to explore how Playback Theatre progressively builds a collective narrative starting from individual stories. It does this within the Palestinian context through some practical examples of my experience touring with the ‘Freedom Bus’. In this sense, I want to question how the re-enactment of the shared and yet individual experience can potentially strengthen community identity, and, at the same time, how this process of ‘community building’ may be doubly mediated, first by the actors who ‘translate’ the narration into theatrical language, and secondly by the audiences who witnesses this translation and anchor the community in a reiterative narrative of trauma.