My Playback Journey
It was March of last year 2003 when I got involved in Playback. I was a volunteer in a women’s conference here in Manila and I was asked to document the whole Playback Theater Workshop to be handled by the Hong Kong Playback Group. It was a very enlightening experience for me. Through the workshop and the Playback performance, I gained more insights and made me realize so many things. I had seen playback as a theater form that highlights the experience of the people, a story was told as it was immediately re-enacted. It was doing real service for the people by using theater skills and improvisations.
I had been into theater since I was12, I joined several theater groups since high school and up to my college years. After which, I was involved in the theater work for the communities of Metro Manila. We had longed and experimented theatrical forms that would reflect the real lives, stories and issues in the communities. When I encountered playback, it struck me so much like finding a cure for a rare disease. Finally, a theater form that will reflect the real stories of the community, promotes mutual understanding and tolerance and even healing.
After that great moment, my first playback experience I never stopped communication with my Chinese playback facilitator. Writing emails about how I liked playback and what I can do to use playback in our community theater. After encouragement from my facilitators, I echoed the playback workshop in my group in Guadalupe Makati. We had long days of studying the forms, the dimension and the essence of playback theater. We also adopted it in our aesthetic, we used to have realistic, avant garde, absurd and expressionistic type of performances. We had great stories in our group during our workshops. We heard stories of abuse, great fear, dilemmas and reconciliation about our group members. These are stories that we never heard from our members for it was never let out in the open. Playback provided a venue for us to understand more about each other. We also shared the same playback workshop to a college group based in a university here in Manila.
Months passed and the 8th International Playback Theater conference came. I was encouraged by the Hong Kong Playbackers to attend the conference. I told my group about it and we all got excited. We know that we need a lot of training before we could do real playback for the communities that we serve. We lack funds for the conference, so we went around soliciting funds so I could go to Japan for the conference. It was also a great honor for me that I was given a scholarship by the IPTN in that conference. Soon, great news came. Philippine Airlines, a major airline company here in our country decided to sponsor my air fare to the conference. All was set except for the money that I will spend traveling around Japan for the conference. We went around asking friends and supporters for monetary support, we raised enough for the conference.
Surely my experience in Japan was great, I learned so much and I can’t wait to go back to Manila and teach playback in my community.
When I went back, I was invited by Samaritana Transformation Ministry Incorporated (a group that supports prostituted women in the street and bars to leave prostitution and start a new life) to give a workshop for their women. The workshop turned out so well that they decided to perform playback in their anniversary. On the process of the workshop and performance, the women claimed to have regained self respect again and dignity through the stories that they all shared. Some claimed that they also experienced healing. The women found strength from each other thru the stories that they shared. As of the moment, we are still in touch with Samaritana. They will now include playback in their projects, so they could serve more abused women by listening to their stories and playing it all back for them. They also plan to gather prostituted women in the streets and bar of Cubao, Manila and do a playback performance for them in the street.
Someone from the audience in the Samaritana anniversary was so moved by the women’s playback performance; he approached me and asked if we could do the same thing to the urban poor group he is handling. After a month, we scheduled a playback workshop in a Payatas, Quezon City. This is the garbage dumping site of the whole Metro Manila. It is also in this area where the youth urban poor “Lilok” was based. We had a 2 day playback workshop with more than 20 youth. We had great stories in the workshop, stories about how the youth in the area cope with the poor situation they are in, stories
on how they juggle working in factories for a living and go to school at the same time. Playback gave a chance to these impoverished youth to once again dream and hope for a bright tomorrow.
Back in my group in Makati, from our name ARTE emerged the birth of Arte Playback Troupe which I founded and serve as director. We had series of playback workshop every weekend to strengthen the groups skills in performing playback. We all had fun doing the different forms, from short fluid sculpture to freeform. Now, we regularly meet on Saturdays for rehearsals and perform in the afternoon for our community. It is a pleasure for our group to also tour the different Barangays (small communities) in our area and do playback performance for them. We encountered amazing stories on how community leaders handle community groups that are difficult to govern. Stories of how people move their families from one place to another in order do find jobs to sustain their living.
Last February 6, we did our first Friday performance in our community. All our families were there. We had good stories of family relationship, about pressure in the workplace and of a wedding that was cancelled on the day of the ceremony. It is thru this monumental event that our group committed to perform for a large audience every first Friday of the month.
Just last week, we worked with the voter’s education project of Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture and the Center for Community Transformation. We had a playback performance for the training of community leaders that will go to the remote areas and educate people regarding responsible voting. We had “Eleksyon” or election as the main theme. It is a big success, we had more than an hour of playback with a very energetic audience. The fluid sculpture of how they wanted to take part in the election was a hit and so as pairs of their dissatisfaction regarding the present political system in the Philippines. We had three long forms of their sad and happy experiences during the voter’s registration, and amazing stories on how election takes place in the remote areas of our country. The result of the performance was unimaginable. The whole audience swore to take part in the coming election based on the feelings, the stories and the insights that they had during the playback performance.
To date, Playback performances came one after another. From close friends, families, educational institutions, non government organizations and others.
The Socio Pastoral Institute, non government organization that helps the urban poor in the Philippines invited us to welcome their Austrian guests to the Philippines and their work. It was our first time to perform for a foreign audience. The interaction was so great that they also invited us for their closing activity. The Austrians were so impressed that they used the playback form in the closing program as their gift to their host group. One of them even promised to bring playback to Austria.
We were invited twice for a wedding performance by friends. Both shows were a great gift to the couples and their families. We were also invited to a playback performance in a big campus near our area. We prepared a sequence and theme for the performance, but when we went there and perform everything changed. We were overwhelmed by the eagerness of the students to see our performance. We heard stories of youth and the stress they were going through. Women, voicing out fear and anger over failed relationships. We saw men crying over their family problems. But all of them went home smiling, finding comfort and blessings in each others stories. The same thing happened to a group of college students who came from the province to see our show as part of their tourism projects in Manila. They thought they just went in the Makati garden park hall for a show, little did they know that they were in for a big surprise. They did not only saw the beauty of the city but also the beauty of their life stories.
This October 1st 2004 marked the opening of the Playback Studio, a small space we devoted to playback training and performance. This will serve home to Manila Playback Theater and office to our playback theater network in the Philippines that we started coordinating.
It is also in the same spirit that I founded Manila Playback, the Philippines' pioneer playback theater group. It aims to develop the playback theater concept as a popular theater art form, serving as venue for empowering grassroots communities by making their stories surface and their voices heard, and thus provides healing and transforming environment for communities and individuals.
Panoorin natin! (let’s watch)
edward l. dantis
