Playback Theatre - a hard thing to blog about

Playback Theatre is a hard thing to blog about. Even just to talk about.  And it's a point of constant frustration.  Just today after our performance, i met a number of people who were skeptical about any "kind of theatre" that could be compelling for their group - until they saw it.  Why IS it so hard to talk about? And what can be done? Well... 

It's private. People tell their stories based on a trust the gets built among audience and players in a particular moment. When people tell their stories, it belongs to that moment. It feels to many of us like a violation to go around telling the world about the real-life stories folks told in a Playback session.

"It's like nothing we've dealt with before Captain." We're talking about an art form that is like, from another planet. Literally, we have so little active cultural experience with such interactive arts, that our reference points to describe it are just not there!. Today, i met a retired couple whose daughter is one of our Playback players and they said exactly this:

"we couldn't really understand it when she described it before. Now we do. But now, we couldn't explain to anyone else either."

It's counter-technocultural. While there's a wide swath of arts moving toward interactivity, the highest profile arts are technologically intensive - social networking, learning software, digital animation, independent YouTube projects, global recording projects. These are inspiring and thrilling to behold - and participate in. They also constitute a mainstream - the appearance of a cutting edge which actually displaces space (time and money) for more personal, subtle and embodied arts.

At their worst, the new wave of hi-tech arts are a din of noisy distraction, keeping us all from getting to know our neighbors - and ourselves - in the only way we truly can - face to face. At their best, they are a door through which we can get involved in other truly interactive arts.

Come to think of it, that's really what JubileeArts.net is all about. A door to understand more fully what improvisational, interactive arts ARE and can DO in our hi-tech world. Hope you'll be walking through that door a lot with us!