Let's Watch...

Imagine stories. Expressions from the heart. Words with feelings. Narratives with softness of sensitivity and the depth of human experience.

What happens when you want to play these stories out? What happens when you take a teller's tale and use your body to show how it all felt? Use your voice to capture its essence. With no preparation. All improvised. Play it back to them with honesty and commitment.

Playback theatre is all about enacting our life's stories...again. Sometimes as a fluid sculpture with voice and movement, sometimes as an image frozen in time, sometimes as vignettes unfolding magically and sometimes as stories acted out in a narrow corridor. So many ways to reach out and share. 

But what Playback theatre does is more than a re-telling. It heals. As we watch our own stories played out by an ensemble of actors, there is a part in us which witnesses and somehow puts it back in a different perspective. Almost as if the contents of our memory are re-shuffled. The pain that some of these tales are soaked in begins to subside. The joy these stories contain infects others. We feel better. Much better.

As an actor, I loved playing the stories out. I read somewhere that if we delve deep within, we realize that our feelings are replenished by the same source. Acting required me to dig in and drink from that source. No planning and preparation. Being totally there. Beautiful to feel so connected.

As a teller, I saw my own stories replayed and yet transformed magically. A short frail boy who hit three sixes again became a hero. His joy reaching out and embalming the souls of even those who had never seen him.

As a conductor, I had the opportunity to sometimes hold the threads of the teller's story together so that the actors could always make out its essence. I had to make sure that the art form fit the story. A fragmented story, for example, would be done justice to in the playback form of corridors. So much invisible work that binds the whole performance together.

As a watcher, I had the time of my life. Listening and watching as the human drama enfolded every day and I felt being tugged by invisible strings which reached out from the words of the teller and the expressions of the actors. The Me became a We.

My journey with Playback is new. And like all new journeys there is an overarching sense of excitement and a niggling sense of uncertainty. Who knows where it will go. 

Let's watch.

The price of freedom...

The mind wants certainty. Make no bones about it. It wants to know, to make sure, to cling to certainty.  And since it is a part of us, we can be pushed into this deep craving for certainty. Like knowing where exactly a road leads to and how bumpy is it going to be.

But life does not offer any such solidity. No guarantees. Now, either we can accept it or we can fight it. And believe me how good a fighter you believe you may be, you cannot defeat reality. 

But, we live on, in the midst of this make believe. Hoping that tomorrow will be better than today. Hoping that the house on which you have made your down payment will be ready, that the child you have so carefully helped grow older will think of you fondly, that you will get a better job soon, that your friends will last... Some of it comes true and you begin to believe that you have actually cracked it. Done what was impossible for others. Got certainty in your grasp and life will listen to and honour your wishes.

It won't.

No, I am not trying to be a kill-joy and drive fear into you or push you into one of those "what would you do if it were your last day blah..." statements. I am just saying that being an adult is to accept this uncertainty and live with it. With joy if possible. 

Do all you can and accept whatever happens, seems like a good way to be, to live and to love. It is not a better way to live- it is, in my view, the only way to LIVE. Any other way means numbing your fear of something going wrong. 

And it can be very uncomfortable living this way. The mind resists it, at first. It cant build a story anymore of how things will actually turn out -whether bad or good. It will exaggerate your fears. Play with your anxiety. But you must plod on. Slowly lean into the discomfort. Keep at it. And then one day the spell is broken. 

You are free...only to fight a bigger battle this time. Only to help those who are ready. To respect yourself enough and to love yourself deeply. Because you see that you are not alone, the whole universe resides within. And it takes hard work of a lifetime to feel that connection.

But then, there are no guarantees!