Lessons in Improvisation: Adapting to on-line program delivery by Naomi Tessler, M.A. In times of discord and disconnect, Playback Theatre weaves storytelling, music, movement, improvisation, and great doses of intuition together with audiences for a restorative, community-building event. Created by Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas and their theatre troupe in New Paltz, New York in 1975, and now practiced across the globe, Playback offers an interactive and therapeutic form of improvisational theatre. Audience members are invited to share their stories for the performers to bring to life on-the-spot through improvisation. It serves to motivate self-expression, a sense of shared experience, and compassion, validating both the diversity and universality of their experiences. Our own company, Branch Out Theatre, is committed to theatre for social change and community building. We recently created an online Playback Theatre performance series welcoming audience members from around the globe to share their experiences during COVID-19. The themes explored revealed a great deal about our collective strength and resiliency. In this short summary, I am sharing some of the lessons learned in creating our new online practice. I hope they may be of benefit to others service providers engaged in interactive group programs during this pandemic and beyond. Adapting our practice As the Artistic Director/lead facilitator of Branch Out Theatre, I lead highly interactive public workshops, performances and community arts projects. My practice creates opportunities for participants and audience members to have their voices heard, their stories shared, embody their lived experiences, and rehearse creating change on- and off-stage.
When COVID-19 swept into our lives, I initially assumed that I would need to suspend my practice. The idea of transferring my work online was not even a thought in my mind. How could I build a sense of trust using an online platform? How could I create a safe space for openness and vulnerability to emerge? How could I build a sense of connection, play, and solidarity online? How do I even operate a zoom meeting? The combination of all these concerns along with my lack of online technical know-how made the first week of COVID-19 a time of professional confusion. Yet, even as the weight of social distancing set in, I was inspired by all the online events, shows and workshops that were popping up, and began to question whether it might be possible. As I read more and more stories about others’ experiences, my desire to offer a playback theatre performance online grew. COVID-19 was impacting people in so many different ways physically, mentally, socially, financially and spiritually. Playback has always been a pathway for me to bring people together to share, hear, see, and learn from each other’s humanity. It felt like a transformative way to respond to the pandemic crisis. In our online rehearsal we quickly realized how great an adaptation would be needed to make our techniques work effectively on a video platform. To make it feel like we were acting together in one place, we had to practice even deeper listening and give each other more space to begin and end our movements and all dialogue. It was difficult to layer sound, so we needed to create space for our musician to open and close our techniques rather than play all the way through. We learned how to play with the screen as our stage and attempt to use closeness and distance from our cameras as metaphors for the layers of emotions we aimed to represent.
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