This Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) first appeared in the Journal of the International Playback Theatre Network in 2025.

By Elsa Child and Gerry Orkin 

What is social activism in Playback Theatre?

Social activism in Playback Theatre refers to the applied use of the form to amplify the voices of marginalised and oppressed people and to support efforts that address social and environmental harm and create positive social change. Prioritising and making space for those stories is an act of empathetic solidarity that is in line with the origins of Playback Theatre. 

Playback Theatre was founded with social justice aims in mind. Its founders, Jo Salas and Jonathan Fox, were influenced by Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy (1970) and by Moreno’s psychodrama, both traditions concerned, in their own ways, with liberation and social transformation. 

Since the 1990s many Playback Theatre companies have collaborated on projects designed to make space for the stories of people who have been oppressed. Those projects have worked with people from many marginalised communities, e.g. refugees, queer and disabled people, and in support of activists concerned about social and environmental issues. Even when a performance is not intentionally focussed on social justice issues, Playback Theatre’s activist potential is always present. If a story told in a mainstream performance touches on injustice or social harm, conductors and actors can choose to bring those dimensions to life on the stage, in appropriate, proportionate and safe ways. 

An activist Playback Theatre recognises that attempting to be neutral in the face of oppression is ethically unjustifiable. Equally, an activist Playback Theatre understands that reducing polarisation is a worthy goal, but not if it is based on creating false equivalences between situations that are not morally or ethically equivalent.

An activist Playback Theatre is also about tensions and choices. How do we conceptualise our practice in terms of our own identities and privileges? How do we work with the tensions between inclusiveness and the aims of our activism? How do we make our companies more diverse, more ethical and more equitable places of justice? How do we build Playback Theatre ecosystems that include self-reflective practice, social justice-focussed knowledge and skills development and partnership building with communities of need and make a meaningful contribution towards a more just world? 

What is the relationship between personal stories and broader social justice narratives in Playback Theatre?

Playback Theatre thrives on personal stories, but those stories do not exist in a vacuum. They often carry with them the imprints of oppressive systems and ideologies like racism, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, to name but a few, that shape individual experience. In playback, our task is not just to represent the teller’s emotional truth, but to reveal how that truth is connected to larger collective patterns. A story about being harassed on public transit, for instance, may be deeply personal, but it may also be about gendered space, racial profiling or disability invisibility. When playback honours both the specificity of the teller and the broader forces at play, it helps communities see how the personal is always already political, as we have stated above. That is not about politicising stories that are not political. Rather, it is about refusing the false divide between private pain and public struggle. As feminist theorists like Audre Lorde and bell hooks have argued, storytelling becomes transformative when it connects lived experience to structures of power.

In playback, the audience is not passive. They are implicated. Recognising their own place in the systemic backdrop of someone else’s story can be unsettling, yes, but also necessary. When those links are made with care and deep respect for everyone’s basic humanity, playback does not just reflect society, but it remakes how we perceive it. Our goal is not to extract political meaning from every story, but to remain attuned to the political conditions that give rise to stories in the first place. Social justice playback does not force narratives into ideological frames. It listens deeply, actively and lets the story and the enactment reveal their own connections to the world.

Does Playback Theatre need to avoid polarisation when addressing justice issues or can it embrace discomfort and tension?

Avoiding polarisation in social justice-focused Playback Theatre does not mean avoiding conflict. It means creating the specific conditions where differences can be held, examined and transformed, rather than silenced or flattened. True polarisation often emerges when complex stories are reduced to ideological slogans or when participants feel unheard or judged. One way playback avoids this is by foregrounding lived experience over opinion. Personal storytelling shifts the focus from abstract positions to embodied truths. This humanises even painful or politically charged topics, allowing room for nuance. When someone shares what a law or cultural norm has meant in their life and not just what they think about it, it becomes harder to dismiss them.

Another key strategy is cultivating ensemble and audience readiness. Facilitators must assess whether the group can hold difference respectfully and whether the performers are trained to play across this complexity. That takes work. It means practicing how to represent multiple truths in one enactment, how to challenge a harmful idea without shaming the teller and how to recognise when the room is too charged to proceed safely. And, more centrally, it means that we can only expect to bring together oppressed communities and individuals and their oppressors, when the latter are ready to recognise their position as oppressors and those oppressed by them have consented to this moment and strategy. And when we, as practitioners, are ready to name oppression when it is both maliciously or unconsciously expressed. Playback Theatre does not aim for false balance. As Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas (2021) have defended, playback is not about equal airtime, but about restoring dignity where it has been denied (see also Salas 2024). Avoiding polarisation is not about avoiding discomfort. It is mainly about guiding the room through a discomfort that is generative, not destructive. This requires a deep ethical commitment to justice, humility in facilitation and an understanding that listening is not passive, but an act of relationship across difference and across power dynamics.

Can Playback Theatre be truly neutral and non-judgemental or is it inherently political?

Playback Theatre cannot escape its political nature. Despite what appears to be, at first glance, a well-intentioned idea of being non-judgemental, the process of listening, choosing and reenacting stories is saturated with social, cultural and political meaning. Playback practitioners (conductors, actors and musicians) decide which voices to highlight, which gestures to emphasise and which silences to preserve. At its best, those decisions are not neutral; they are deliberate and should be deeply ethical. As Kathy Barolsky argues, Playback is not only a tool for empathy, but also a mechanism for re-storying trauma and injustice through collective witness (Barolsky, 2021). Neutrality, in this sense, becomes a form of passive complicity with dominant narratives.

Artificial intelligence systems also offer a parallel. Just as algorithms reflect the values of their programmers and training data, playback reflects the ideologies of its facilitators. The myth of objectivity in either case disguises who holds power. Neutrality, then, is not just impossible, but it is a distraction form the inner mechanisms of power and an erasure of its consequences for communities and individuals. By framing playback as a space for critical reflection and ethical stance-taking, practitioners can choose to surface counter-narratives rather than passively mirror society. Ben Rivers and Jiwon Chung (2017) describe playback as a transformative practice that carries social change potential precisely because it is relational, embodied and subjective. It provides a container for voices otherwise ignored or misrepresented. Far from being neutral, playback is most impactful when it acknowledges its own biases and wields them in service of equity and repair, a stance that is inherently political.

What theoretical frameworks support justice-oriented practice in Playback Theatre?

Among many other sources, the work of political philosophers Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth and sociologist C. Wright Mills supports a justice-oriented practice in the arts, including Playback Theatre.

For Fraser, social justice comprises the justice of equitable redistribution of wealth and the justice of recognition, which includes social inclusion, respect for diverse identities and addressing discrimination and marginalisation. Axel Honneth describes humans as beings that constantly seek recognition, defined as a need for love, respect and solidarity. Such recognition is necessary to maintain a good relationship with self and others and for the development of identity and psychological wellbeing (Fraser & Honneth, 2004). Playback Theatre cannot redistribute wealth, but it can contribute significantly to the justice of recognition. It can embody the social meanings in personal stories, acknowledge their impact for the benefit of tellers and audiences and express respect, promote solidarity and contribute to the enhancement of social esteem. Through that recognition, it can positively impact the psychological wellbeing of individuals who have experienced injustice.

Even when a performance is not specifically focused on social justice, there is theoretical support for an active consideration of the social dimensions of stories in C. Wright Mills’ concept of the “sociological imagination” (Wright Mills,1959). “Sociological imagination” describes a quality of mind that is sensitive to the relationship between personal experience and social forces. In contrast, our “psychological imagination” describes a quality of mind that is sensitive to a story’s emotional and psychological contexts. A psychological imagination is essential in Playback Theatre, but it typically dominates, so we often emphasise only the personal contexts of stories and miss their important social meanings. For example, a woman’s story about negative body image might be understood as a story about individual shame or insecurity. Seen through the lens of a sociological imagination, we are also invited to consider the impact of social forces on the teller. Sensitive embodiment on stage of the unjust harm caused to many women by the beauty industry and by cultural ideals of femininity can be a transformative experience, liberating a teller from feelings of personal responsibility and shame.

Beyond those three examples, there is strong theoretical support for using participatory theatre (including Playback Theatre) in justice-orientated arts practices. For example, Paulo Freire (on critical pedagogy and popular theatre), Michael White (on narrative therapy and social construction), Kimberlé Crenshaw (on feminist and intersectional theory), Ignacio Martín-Baró (on community and liberation psychology), Howard Zehr (on restorative and transformative justice) and Judith Herman (on trauma-informed practice) have all made contributions that inform justice-oriented practice in Playback Theatre. 

What specific activities or practices define a social justice-centred Playback Theatre?

Social justice-centred Playback Theatre goes beyond empathetic, deep, active listening; it deliberately creates conditions that prioritise equity, safety and the amplification of marginalised voices. One foundational practice is trauma-informed facilitation. Conductors are trained to recognise power dynamics in the room and ensure that storytelling occurs with full consent, transparency and follow-up support if necessary. That is not mere performative safety, it is rooted in community accountability. That means that empathetic, deep, active listening inherently strives to hear all elements that a story holds, including its implications for the whole audience in the room and the communities outside the room.

Another core practice is curating playback environments where historically silenced voices are explicitly welcomed. That can involve hosting story circles with groups often pushed to the margins, like undocumented workers, migrants, refugees, LGBTQIAP+ people, formerly and presently incarcerated individuals, and preparing performers to engage with the complexity of those narratives without co-opting, simplifying or tokenising them. Language access, cultural mediation and disability accommodations are also absolutely central in this curation. 

Moreover, playback for social justice includes regular debriefs within companies and playback facilitators in general, not just to reflect artistically, but to interrogate how power was present in the room. Playback can serve as a space of social, cultural and political resistance when it centres its reflection on the racial, gendered and/or economic hierarchies that emerge during the process. Training in playback cannot and should not be limited to acting technique. Practitioners need to undergo anti-oppression education, learn about local struggles and co-develop ethics protocols with the communities they serve. Story selection, enactment and musical underscoring are all approached with attention to systemic patterns, not just personal emotion.

Ultimately, those practices redefine playback from an artform of mere response and reaction to one of interpretation and, when needed, intervention. Its aim is not just to reflect stories, but to contribute to their transformation and to the conditions in which more just stories can unfold.

What are some examples of activist Playback Theatre being used for social justice?

The Freedom Theatre’s Freedom Bus in Occupied Palestine

Created in 2011, The Freedom Bus tours towns, villages, Bedouin encampments and refugee camps throughout the West Bank using Playback Theatre for cultural activism to bear witness, raise awareness and build alliances throughout occupied Palestine and beyond. The initiative uses Playback Theatre for community-building, cultural activism and collective trauma response.

Hudson River Playback Theatre’s Immigrant Stories Project

This 8-year project included over 100 bilingual performances for immigrant groups in New York’s Hudson Valley, funded by the Dyson Foundation. The project served immigrants from many countries including Haiti, China, Bangladesh, Kosovo, and Spanish-speaking nations, with stories from the first 20 shows published in a bilingual book, “Half of My Heart/La Mitad de Mi Corazón”. 

Identity, Performance and Social Action Project with refugees in London

This project was based at the University of East London and used Playback Theatre with Kosovan, Kurdish, Somali and mixed refugee groups to explore the construction and politics of identity and belonging. The project allowed refugees to narrate crucial moments in their lives since coming to Britain, particularly highlighting conflicts between constructions of self, community and society.

Chautari Natak, Nepal 

Chautari Natak has been working in Nepal since 2015. The project uses a locally adapted form of Playback Theatre that combines traditional Nepali gathering spaces with theatrical storytelling for healing and reconciliation. The name combines Chautari (traditional Nepali gathering spaces under trees) with Natak (theatre/drama). The project turns the sharing of personal stories into opportunities for the socio-cultural empowerment of participants and for promotion of social cohesion. It has a particular focus on marginalised communities including ex-combatants, ethnic minorities and those affected by Nepal’s decade-long civil conflict.

Jeevika, the Bonded Labour Liberation Front, Karnataka, India

Jeevika is a grassroots activist organisation of former bonded (enslaved) labourers that has been working since 1993 to eradicate bonded labour and oppressive social structures in Karnataka, India. Jeevika has incorporated Playback Theatre both within villages and internally, with leaders noting that the practice helps sustain meaningful relationships between members and strengthens the movement by bringing people together to share personal stories, thereby challenging the social fragmentation and divisions that caste-based systems tend to impose.

Theatre of Friendship, Sri Lanka

Theatre of Friendship is a Sri Lankan initiative using Playback Theatre to foster reconciliation and understanding between communities divided by the civil war and the country’s colonial history. It was established in 2012 and aims to create spaces for dialogue and bridge social and structural divisions, building long-term cross-cultural alliances between people of Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim backgrounds.

Creating Community Justice Project, Melbourne, Australia

The Creating Community Justice Project brought together African-Australians from Sudanese, South Sudanese and Ethiopian backgrounds and members of the criminal justice system to discuss their experiences of justice and community justice issues. Melbourne Playback used storytelling, performance and games to build trust between the participants and empower them to communicate their stories with confidence. The project also developed leadership and public speaking skills, allowing participants to make a powerful presentation of their work in a way that engaged the justice system.

How can Playback Theatre challenge rather than reinforce dominant, oppressive narratives?

Playback Theatre challenges dominant narratives by opening a space for counter-stories, for stories that contradict or complicate the ones most visible in mainstream media, policy or education. That can only happen when practitioners are trained to recognise structural inequalities and inequities and work actively to avoid reinscribing them through their performance.

Oppressive narratives often show up (and this is a very important point to underline and for us to be aware of) not through overt malice, but through the normalisation of certain experiences as universal. As Ben Rivers and Jiwon Chung argue, Playback Theatre makes the invisible visible, allowing suppressed histories of colonisation, racism, displacement, marginalisation and discrimination to become embodied and seen in real time. The structure of playback, especially when used in community-based contexts, gives marginalised storytellers authority over the frame and interpretation of their experience, over their own narrative. 

However, this is not automatic. The danger lies in uncritical re-performance, re-enactment: repeating a story without interrogating its context or the social meanings behind it. For example, enacting a story of dealing with poverty without addressing structural causes like housing injustice or wage inequality risks romanticising hardship rather than challenging its roots. To avoid that, we must cultivate critical empathy, an ability to feel with a story while also situating it politically. That means listening with curiosity and also with historical, social and political awareness. The teller’s dignity must be honoured, but so must the systems that shape their world be named.

Playback becomes politically potent not when it merely reflects, but when it disturbs the smooth surface of dominant culture. It is not enough to give voice to individuals and communities. Our practice must also equip communities to question who benefits from the current narrative order and how storytelling can become a tool of resistance, not just relief.

How can Playback practitioners uphold accountability when addressing oppression, even when it is unintentional?

Social activist Playback Theatre practitioners inevitably make mistakes but can minimise their impact and commit to accountability by establishing clear protocols before projects and performances begin, by using reflective processes and empowering community members to give feedback after each performance or, in urgent cases, to interrupt performances in real-time if harm occurs. 

If oppression occurs (whether through misrepresentation of cultural elements, reinforcement of stereotypes or dismissal of systemic context), the ensemble, through the conductor, must immediately acknowledge the impact without defensiveness, even if the harm was unintentional. That acknowledgement can occur during the performance, if that is required. Opportunities to meet with affected community members after the performance must also be offered. Communities who experience oppression in a playback context are not expected to support the ensemble. Companies must have robust internal debriefing process in place, so that they can internally process mistakes and support each other after performances (with a supervisor or mentor, if necessary). For internal purposes, calling in, rather than calling out fellow ensemble members is preferred (Ross, 2025)

More generally, accountability requires ongoing education and regular supervision with experienced mentors. Most importantly, practitioners must understand that intent does not negate impact: if a performance causes harm, the focus should be on repair and learning rather than explaining how no harm was intended. That includes being willing to step back from ongoing work, recognising that accountability sometimes means accepting that your ensemble or Playback Theatre as a form might not be suited to working with a particular community or on a particular issue, regardless of your desire to be of service.

What ethical considerations must guide Playback practitioners when representing trauma or marginalised voices?

Representing trauma in Playback Theatre demands an ethics of responsibility, not just compassion. When marginalised voices speak, they often carry histories of silencing, distortion, tokenism and/or voyeurism. Practitioners must be mindful that even well-intentioned performances can retraumatise or unintentionally reproduce harm if enacted without consent, training and contextual awareness.

A central ethical principle is the idea of co-regulation: the space must support emotional processing without pushing tellers or performers beyond what feels safe. That means respecting boundaries, understanding cultural differences in storytelling and in enactments and never using a story as a dramatic opportunity. As Jonathan Fox has stressed so many times, playback is a ritual of relationship and, in ritual, every role carries responsibility for the collective emotional space. Consent in playback is ongoing. Tellers may offer their story in the moment, but their body language and tone must also be read with care. Performers must know how to play trauma (individual, social, political) with restraint and dignity, avoiding caricature or over-dramatisation and be prepared to play less, through poetry, metaphor and symbol, when that best serves the teller’s integrity.

Ethical representation also includes self-reflexivity: asking whose story is being centred, who is watching and listening and who has the cultural knowledge to interpret and perform it responsibly. Without this, well-meaning ensembles can slide into what bell hooks called eating the other (“Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”, 1992; see also, for a Playback centred approach on the same line as this, Nick Rowe’s chapters 9 and 10 on his fundamental book Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre), turning pain into performance for liberal consumption. Ethics in playback is not a checklist, but an evolving practice of accountability. When working with trauma or marginalised identities, we, as individuals, as companies and as playback facilitators in general, should always ask whether we are making room for healing and deep sharing or if we are merely stealing the stage.

How can Playback Theatre amplify marginalised voices without appropriating their stories or erasing cultural specificity?

Playback companies can avoid appropriating stories and erasing or misrepresenting cultural specificity by building meaningful and accountable relationships with marginalised communities. That ongoing process allows for trust-building, deeper cultural understanding and co-ownership of collaborations, projects and performances. 

At the heart of those relationships is work with informants who can advise about cultural contexts, histories and current realities for the communities they represent. Recognising that different cultures have different approaches to public storytelling, audience participation, and emotional expression, informants help playback ensembles develop deeper understandings of the values, communication styles and storytelling traditions of each community they seek to work with. Based on those understandings, ensembles can, where necessary, adapt playback rituals and processes to align with community norms, rather than unilaterally imposing established Playback Theatre conventions.

Accountability also operates at a more granular level. For example, rather than performers unilaterally interpreting stories, it might sometimes be appropriate to create space for dialogue in which tellers can speak directly about what they want to see enacted and can offer feedback before an enactment is considered complete. In some cases, it might be appropriate to establish protocols about the ways that tellers can stop or redirect an enactment, in situations where the performers have inadvertently misrepresented the meaning or cultural context of a story. Stories of marginalisation are rarely experienced solely at the personal level, so an accountable practice must also acknowledge and represent broader systems of oppression. That approach prevents systemic issues from being oversimplified as merely personal experiences, while still respecting and valuing individual stories.

Recognising that marginalised communities are experts on their own stories and don’t need theatrical rescue, playback companies must be willing to follow community leadership, accept honest feedback, step back when our services aren’t wanted and prioritise long-term relationship-building and accountability over the emotional satisfaction of feeling helpful through our dramatic enactments of a community’s stories.

What role does the conductor play in shaping or framing social justice narratives during performance?

The conductor is not a neutral facilitator, but a narrative gatekeeper. Their questions shape which themes emerge, how stories are contextualised and how power circulates in the room. In social justice-based/aware/centred playback, the conductor’s role becomes inherently political, because they guide the group’s collective attention toward inequity or away from it. A skilled conductor does not simply listen to individual stories; they track systemic threads running between them. When a teller speaks about an eviction or a microaggression, the conductor might draw out broader forces at play, like housing discrimination or racial bias, for example, without speaking over the teller. A conductor’s role is also to find the intersection of personal and political meaning. Just as we know, from the fundamental lesson second-wave feminism has taught us, that the personal is always political.

Tone also matters. A conductor who responds with empathy, but avoids naming the social forces behind a story, risks reinforcing the illusion that injustice and inequity are merely unfortunate rather than structural. Conversely, conductors who bring courage and awareness to naming injustice can turn playback into a space of recognition and resistance. Furthermore, the conductor models relational ethics. By how they intervene, frame transitions and invite reflection, they influence how performers and audience understand their own roles in systems of harm or solidarity. They can shift playback from being a mirror of the moment to a lens through which new individual, social, political and community understanding emerges.

Ultimately, the conductor’s choices either replicate the status quo or create space for its disruption. There is no neutrality here; only the question of which stories are made visible and who is allowed to see them in full.

How does Playback Theatre navigate power dynamics between performers, audiences and within ensembles?

The fundamental power dynamic in Playbook Theatre is both intimate and asymmetrical. Audience members hold the power of story ownership and vulnerability (as the originator of the theatrical moment), but the ensemble holds ultimate interpretive power, as they make choices about how they embody the teller’s narrative. The key to navigating that tension is in managing consent, checking in with the teller before and after the enactment and in conceptualising the work as collective meaning-making, as something we are exploring with the person, rather than just being about them. 

Beyond that, Playback Theatre operates within cultural contexts that shape who participates, who attends performances, whose stories are told and who enacts those stories. Those factors are often shaped by power dynamics and require thoughtful navigation across race, class, gender, sexuality (and other social identity markers) and in terms of the structural and relationship dynamics within companies. The invitation to attend performances and tell stories is itself culturally loaded. Broadly speaking, middle class audiences usually feel more comfortable claiming space, while others may be reluctant to share stories they perceive as being less worthy. Given Playback Theatre’s emphasis on aesthetic interpretation and psychological reflection, the form can also be more accessible to audience members who are already comfortable with therapy-speak and artistic expression. 

Who gets to participate also reflects the dynamics of power. To ensure that audiences can recognise themselves and their life experiences represented on stage, effort is needed to recruit and retain culturally-diverse representation, but also to protect against burdening individual members with the responsibility of representing all aspects of diversity or having to educate others about the experience of exclusion and difference. To address that risk, companies can implement strategies that improve everyone’s cultural competency, including their ability to work with diverse communities and with stories involving trauma or oppression. 

There are other power dynamics at play. If only some people can afford the time and financial costs of participation in training, the ensemble inevitably reflects economic privilege. Scholarship and sponsorship support within companies can make attendance at external training possible for people who are otherwise unable to attend. 

Within ensembles, the dynamics of power can be particularly complex. Power imbalances emerge around experience levels and within certain leadership structures. Successful ensembles typically develop agreements about how leadership is shared, rotation of roles, feedback mechanisms and collective decision-making processes. The most effective companies tend to be those that recognise that power sharing enhances rather than diminishes the work of the company and can help strengthen relationships between members. A socially activist Playback Theatre recognises that addressing power dynamics within ensembles is not just about effective administration and the quality of individual interactions and relationships, but is also about creating structures that support equity and justice in our broader work. 

How can Playback Theatre be aligned with movements for transformative justice, such as abolitionism, decolonisation and anti-capitalism?

Abolitionism seeks to dismantle criminal justice punishment systems while building alternatives for addressing harm, rooted in healing and accountability rather than retribution. Playback Theatre itself models what abolitionists envision: communities coming together to witness, hold complexity and imagine different futures without relying on rigid authority structures to impose solutions. The form can support the goals of abolition by creating spaces that demonstrate alternatives to punishment and isolation. Companies can invite stories of accountability, healing and community response to harm, partner with restorative justice organisations and post-incarceration support services and create brave spaces where people who have caused and experienced harm can share stories in the same room.

Decolonisation is the process of dismantling systems of cultural and economic domination and returning stolen land, power and self-determination to Indigenous peoples, while undoing the mindsets and structures that perpetuate colonial violence. In a Playback Theatre context, decolonisation means examining whose stories get told and how they are interpreted. Other ways to align with decolonisation include examination of the theatrical traditions embedded in the form, experimenting with collective facilitation, examining how personal stories often get stripped of their cultural context and shifting our interpretive focus toward collective experience rather than only prioritising individual healing.

Anti-capitalism challenges the exploitation inherent in capitalism, where profit comes before people, and envisions economic systems based on mutual aid, more collective ownership, and meeting everyone’s needs. Anti-capitalist playback means questioning the economics of the form, examining the conditions that make playback accessible only to those with leisure time and resources, offering sliding scale training fees, scholarships, sponsorships, free community performances and questioning our professional relationships with profit-led corporate entities.

More generally, to align with those movements, playback companies can create opportunities for performances about collective resistance, mutual aid and systemic transformation, rather than only about personal experiences. Those events can be organised in collaboration with grassroots organisations already doing anti-abolitionist, decolonising and anti-capitalist work. The beauty of playback is its flexibility: it can evolve to serve liberation rather than merely reflecting the world as it is. When we perform stories of transformative justice in action, we help audiences imagine and practice the world we are building together.

What competencies, training and critical awareness must practitioners develop to engage meaningfully in justice-based work?

To engage in social justice work, playback practitioners need, simultaneously, deep performance skills and a deep, ongoing commitment to political education, cultural humility, and critical self-reflection. One of our most essential competencies is an understanding of intersectionality. Practitioners must learn how race, gender, class, disability and other identity categories interact in complex, context-specific ways. Without that understanding, we risk simplifying or misrepresenting the lived realities we seek to honour. That calls for formal training in anti-oppression frameworks, facilitated by educators rooted in lived experience, not just theory.

Another key area is group facilitation that centres equity. That includes conflict mediation, trauma-informed practices and knowledge of power dynamics in mixed groups. In playback, improvisation is not just artistic, it must be ethical. Practitioners need to know how to represent in a way that avoids the use of cliches, appropriation, stereotyping or tokenism. Listening skills are paramount, but not just active listening in the therapeutic sense. Practitioners must develop a critical consciousness, the ability to hear the political content in personal narrative and to respond accordingly.

Just as importantly, playback practitioners must be willing to confront their own biases and privileges. That means engaging in difficult conversations, taking feedback and being accountable to the communities they serve. Ongoing mentorship, peer learning, supervision and reflective practice circles help sustain this. Engagement with social movements also requires relationship-building. Practitioners should be embedded in the communities and causes they support, not dropping in as artistic saviours, but showing up consistently and in solidarity, even (if not especially) in their own daily lives. Playback for justice is not just a performance practice. It is a deep social and political practice and it must be treated with the gravity and training that such work requires.

How does trauma-informed practice shape Playback Theatre’s engagement with social justice issues?

Trauma-informed practice fundamentally shapes how Playback Theatre engages with social justice issues by centring safety, containment, consent and healing in the theatrical process. That integration recognises that many social justice issues arise from or perpetuate systemic trauma, requiring careful attention to how stories are shared, witnessed, and enacted. 

Effective trauma-informed Playback Theatre requires that multiple layers of safety are established before an ensemble responds to difficult social issues. For example, conductors need to establish clearer agreements about consent, confidentiality, boundaries and the right to pass. And where possible, the physical space is arranged to support both tellers and audience members who might be triggered by the content of stories told. That preparation helps people safely engage with topics like racism, poverty or violence, while holding agency over their own participation. Trauma-informed Playback Theatre emphasises informed consent and ongoing choice. Tellers maintain control over how much detail to share, can stop or redirect their story at any point, and, in contrast with the traditional playback ritual, can, where appropriate, collaborate with actors in shaping the enactment. That approach helps avoid the risks of re-traumatisation that can occur when people feel their experiences are being interpreted without their full consent or understanding.

A key aspect of trauma-informed practice in Playback Theatre is the way it transforms social justice from individual struggle to a process of collective healing. When someone shares a traumatic story, the conductor’s reflection, the actors’ careful embodiment and the audience’s witnessing can create a container for processing shared trauma. That collective holding can validate experiences that are often minimised or denied. 

Trauma-informed Playback Theatre recognises that individual stories often reflect broader systemic issues. It creates space to explore how personal experiences connect to larger patterns of oppression while minimising the possibility of re-traumatisation that can occur when people feel reduced to their trauma. The focus shifts from simply telling difficult stories to understanding how communities can support healing and change. That approach requires ongoing attention to power dynamics within the Playback Theatre space itself. Trauma-informed practice invites conductors and ensembles to more carefully consider who gets to tell stories, whose voices are centred and how cultural differences in trauma responses are honoured. 

As part of a trauma-informed approach, rather than leaving participants feeling overwhelmed by injustice, trauma-informed Playback Theatre aims to build collective resilience and agency. Conductors invite stories of resistance, individual community strength and the celebration of small victories, alongside stories of struggle. That balanced approach helps individuals and communities process pain while maintaining hope and capacity for action.

What are the implications of prioritising “safe spaces” versus “brave spaces” in justice-oriented Playback Theatre?

Safe spaces in Playback Theatre emphasise protection and comfort, creating environments where tellers from marginalised communities can share difficult experiences without fear of judgment, re-traumatisation or harm. That approach involves content warnings, ground rules about language and the right to opt out of participation. The conductor actively monitors and manages the emotional temperature and atmosphere during performances, helping create conditions where people who have been silenced can begin to find their voice. In contrast, brave spaces acknowledge that meaningful engagement with justice issues sometimes involves discomfort and risk (Arao & Clemens, 2013). They invite participants to embrace that discomfort, challenge each other’s assumptions, and remain present with difficult emotions, rather than avoiding them. In Playback Theatre, that might mean allowing more confronting stories to emerge, encouraging direct dialogue about issues like privilege and oppression and resisting the impulse to paper over fundamental differences.

Safe spaces tend to centre the needs of those most harmed by injustice, but that can limit the potential for transformation by prioritising the comfort of all participants over those who have been marginalised or oppressed. Brave spaces may better serve the goal of changing minds and challenging systems, but they risk re-traumatising those already marginalised while placing emotional labour on those least able to bear it. 

Effective justice-oriented Playback Theatre often means using both approaches in sequence. Initial work prioritises safety to build trust and allow marginalised voices to emerge. As a sense of community develops, the work can gradually move toward braver engagement that challenges assumptions and explores systemic change. The choice depends on the specific community and context. Experienced activist organisers might benefit from brave space challenges, while communities beginning to heal from collective trauma might need extended safe space work before engaging in more challenging dialogue. The conductor’s role becomes crucial in reading the room and adapting the approach moment by moment. They must assess whether the ensemble has sufficient trust and skill to handle challenging content and whether pushing toward bravery serves justice or reproduces harm. The most effective approach involves building capacity to hold both safety and bravery simultaneously, spaces where people can be vulnerable about their pain while also challenging each other to grow beyond their current understandings.

What are the risks or pitfalls of performative allyship or using Playback Theatre superficially for activism?

When Playback Theatre is used to appear activist without engaging the depth of real struggle, it can do more harm than good. Performative allyship, that is acting in solidarity only when visible, safe, simple or easy, risks turning storytelling into spectacle, especially when the pain of marginalised communities is mined for emotional or aesthetic impact without material accountability. A key risk is that our playback will become a comfort ritual for privileged audiences, where they can feel bad about injustice without being challenged to act. This kind of superficial engagement reinforces power rather than redistributing it. As Jiwon Chung warns, there is a danger when playback is used as “catharsis without consequence” (Rivers & Chung, 2017)

Another pitfall is tokenism, as we have mentioned before. Hosting one diversity playback event without integrating ongoing anti-oppression work into the ensemble’s practice or inviting marginalised tellers without giving them real narrative agency, erases the very equity the form we claim to support. Superficial activism can also damage relationships with communities who may already be wary of artistic extractivism. Playback is based on trust. If that trust is broken, if stories are mishandled, misrepresented or used to boost an ensemble’s image, it can retraumatise tellers and fracture community ties. To avoid those pitfalls, playback companies and playback facilitators must anchor themselves in humility and sustained solidarity. This means showing up for local movements beyond the stage, compensating tellers and facilitators fairly and consistently reflecting on their own complicity in systems of power. Playback that aligns with justice is not about performance alone. It becomes a practice defined by accountability, risk-taking and transformation, both onstage and off.

 How can Playback Theatre foster empathy and solidarity across lines of difference such as race, gender and class?

Playback Theatre’s capacity to build bridges across difference lies in its ability to create space for complexity without hierarchy, allowing different experiences of oppression and injustice to coexist and inform each other, rather than compete. That potential also comes with risks that must be carefully navigated. The most powerful moments can happen when stories reveal shared experiences of marginalisation, while also recognising distinct and different realities. For example, when a trans woman shares about family rejection and a formerly incarcerated person tells of employment discrimination, an audience can be guided to recognise (and empathise about) similar patterns of systemic exclusion, but without erasing the specific ways transphobia and carceral punishment operate. 

While empathy across lines of difference is essential, on its own empathy can be dangerous. There is a seductive fantasy that feeling someone else’s pain automatically creates solidarity, but, without a social and political analysis, empathy tends to just reinforce existing power structures and paper over important systemic challenges. A wealthy audience member might feel deeply moved by stories of housing insecurity while continuing to oppose affordable housing developments in their own neighbourhood. The risk is that empathetic emotional responses can become a substitute for material change.

A social activist Playback Theatre works best when it helps people understand not just individual suffering, but the systemic connections between almost all suffering. When stories reveal how the same economic forces that displace poor communities also criminalise poverty or how immigration enforcement and mass incarceration serve similar functions of social control, audiences begin to see how their struggles are interconnected rather than isolated. True solidarity emerges when people leave understanding that their liberation and wellbeing is fundamentally bound together, that none of us are free until all of us are free – and this phrase is not just a nice sentiment, but a strategic reality.

How can Playback Theatre companies build meaningful partnerships with social justice organisations and how do they evaluate their impact?

Building partnerships between Playback Theatre companies and social justice organisations starts with a shift in mindset: from being service providers to being collaborators. This means not arriving with a finished product or a presumed understanding of a community’s needs, but entering relationships slowly, respectfully and with a willingness to follow rather than lead, to learn rather than impose. Meaningful collaboration often begins with listening, outside of performance. Playback companies can attend local organising meetings, community events, and protests not to perform, but to witness and understand context. This groundwork helps establish trust, which is the foundation for any real partnership. Transparency about goals, values and limits is also crucial. Companies should be clear about what playback can offer: brave (and the difference between safe and brave spaces should always be addressed, as we have seen) spaces for expression, embodied storytelling, collective reflection, but also acknowledge where it is not a substitute for direct action, therapy or organising strategy. Or, maybe even more centrally, for therapy. Strong partnerships involve co-design. Instead of inviting a social justice group to use playback, ensembles can invite co-creation of events: setting themes together, choosing who is in the room and deciding how stories are used beyond the performance. This shared authorship reflects the ethical stance that movements know best what they need.

Ongoing evaluation is also key. playback companies should solicit feedback not just about the art but about the process, accessibility and cultural relevance of their work. Aspects like childcare and translation, for example, should all be considered part of making a partnership with a specific community real, not symbolic. Ultimately, partnerships thrive when layback is offered as a tool in service of a community’s long-term goals, not as an artistic intervention that centres the performers. Solidarity is measured in relationship, not visibility.

In conclusion, building meaningful partnerships with social justice organisations requires Playback Theatre companies to engage in sustained, reciprocal relationships grounded in trust and shared purpose. Collaborations are most effective when they are co-designed, with community partners shaping content, process and evaluation. Playback practitioners must listen deeply to organisational goals and offer their tools in ways that support, rather than co-opt, existing efforts. Evaluation in justice contexts goes beyond audience satisfaction; it involves assessing relational impact, narrative shifts and contributions to community-defined outcomes. Metrics may include qualitative feedback, long-term engagement or shifts in collective understanding. Impact is best understood as part of a broader ecology of change, rather than a singular outcome.

How does artistic quality intersect with social justice impact in activist Playback Theatre?

There is often an assumption that art for justice must compromise on aesthetic rigor, but, in Playback Theatre, artistic quality and social justice are not and should never be at odds. In fact, strong, poetic, non-literal artistic choices can deepen the impact of justice work when they emerge from attentiveness, deep, active listening, full presence and ethical rigor. Artistic quality in playback is not merely about technical perfection; it is about embodied truthfulness. When performers are fully present, when they play with emotional precision, meaningful artistic choices and relational attunement, stories land with greater resonance. This kind of enactment allows tellers to feel seen and communities to feel reflected not in an abstract or performative way, but in a way that invites change and allows tellers to see their stories from the outside, to reimagine them and to reframe them in a productive way.

Conversely, poor artistry, which may include wide range of issues, from flattened gestures and over or under-acting, to the use of cliches and stereotypes, unjustified literality, lack of symbolic and metaphorical resonance or problematic enactment timings, can dilute and disrespect even the most urgent stories. If a performance lacks meaningful artistry, the emotional message risks being lost. This does a disservice to both teller and audience. Injustice and inequity are already filled with misrepresentation; playback must resist adding more.

However, this does not mean art should ever override ethics. Stylisation that distorts meaning or virtuosity that centres the actor rather than the teller betray the form. Artistic choices must emerge in service of the story, not the ego of the ensemble. At its best, Playback Theatre becomes both aesthetically moving and politically consequential. The two are not separate paths, rather entwined expressions of justice through form, poetry, rhythm and radical listening.

What sources exist for practitioners seeking to use Playback Theatre for social justice activism?

A growing body of resources supports playback practitioners in aligning their work with social justice movements. Some of the most vital are writings by experienced practitioners who explicitly theorise playback as a justice-making practice. Ben Rivers and Jiwon Chung’s article Playback Theatre and Social Change (2017) outlines principles for grounding the work in equity, including dismantling privilege within ensembles and connecting personal stories to political frames. Rivers continues this work through workshops blending trauma-informed, psychodrama, and socially-engaged playback. Kathy Barolsky’s work offers a critical lens for practitioners pushing the form beyond its Eurocentric assumptions. Her diffractive review is available on ResearchGate and provides theoretical depth as well as practical insights. There has also been an increase in international offers, both in international gatherings and other forums, like specific trainings, courses and panels where issues of ethics, race, trauma and social transformation are increasingly foregrounded. Recent events have included panels on the ethics of playback (Playback in the Port) and antiracism in playback, decolonial approaches to gatherings planning and structuring, ensemble practice and gender equity in story facilitation, hands-on strategies for justice-oriented performance, including trauma-informed practices, cultural humility and ensemble ethics. Additionally, many social movements themselves have developed partnerships with playback groups and have documented their process. Collaborations with immigrant justice organisations, LGBTQIAP+ youth groups and prison abolition projects have produced toolkits and videos that can serve as models. 

A rich ecosystem now supports Playback Theatre with a focus on justice and equity. HEED Playback Theatre, a global education initiative whose name stands for Healing, Equity, Empowerment and Diversity, offers an eight-day retreat and year-long mentorship precisely to help implement local playback projects grounded in social and environmental justice. Spazio Rebelde has recently hosted Embodying Change: Conducting Playback Theatre for Social Impact, led by Hani Al Rstum and Devrim Nicolò Turletti, and a series of conversations on accessibility in playback co-led by Michele Chung and Allison Kenny. Hani has also launched an online laboratory specifically on playback and social justice, an accessible resource for engagement beyond in-person events. Michele Chung, Lena Kalashnykova and Nour Wardani have deepened the discourse in the Playback in the Port round table and subsequent article Playback Theatre in Times of Civil Unrest and War, which explores facilitating in contexts of profound social and political rupture and with all their practice and teachings on accessibility and social justice at large. Jonathan Fox has recently completed the first edition of his Heart of the Art: Ethics for Playback Theatre online course, offering ethical frameworks for playback in general, including a reading of playback as a justice-oriented practice since its inception.

Also, looking forward, the next European Playback Theatre Gathering (EPTG) will be held in Salamanca, Spain (October 2–5, 2025), with a clear focus on playback as a language, space and tool for social justice, under the title Resilient Voices: Half a Century of Stories, framed by the ethical Manifesto of the Iberian Playback Theatre Association.

Finally, Leticia Nieto (and her-co-authors)’s seminal book Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment offers practitioners a powerful framework to analyse hidden and unconscious influences of oppression and cultivate everyday skills that promote justice, equity and self-awareness. Nieto too grounds playback practice in psychological and relational accountability.

Together, these resources, ranging from global programs, in-depth writings, online labs and conversations, ethics courses, activist workshops and major international gatherings, offer both theoretical rigor and grounded methodologies. They represent a compelling toolkit for any practitioner determined to make Playback Theatre not just an art form, but a meaningful intervention in the struggle for social justice. However, the richest resource remains long-term relational practice, learning in context, with communities, in dialogue. Playback for social justice is not a model to be applied. It is a commitment to listening, showing up and changing, not just other individuals and communities, but ourselves.

References

Arao, B., Clemens, K. (2013) From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice, in The Art of Effective Facilitation. Routledge 

Barolksy, K. (2021) Playback Theatre, social justice and empathy: A diffractive review. Applied Theatre Research, Volume 9, Issue 2

Fox, J., Salas, J. (2021) Playback Theatre and Social Change, in Personal Stories in Public Spaces: Essays on Playback Theatre by Its Founders. Tusitala Publishing

Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2004) Redistribution or Recognition? A Political–Philosophical Exchange. Verso Books

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder and Herer, New York

hooks, b. (1992) Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, in Black Looks, Routledge 2014

Nieto, L., Boyer, M.F. Goodwin, L., Johnson, G.R., & Collier Smith, L. Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment. Cuetzpalin

Rivers B., Chung J. (2017) Playback Theatre and Social Change: Functions, Principles and Practices, Playback Theatre Reflects

Ross, L. J. (2025) Calling In: How to Start Making Change With Those You’d Rather Cancel. Simon & Schuster

Rowe, N. (2007) Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in Playback Theatre. Jessica Kingsley

Salas, J. (2024) The Tension Between Inclusiveness and Social Justice in Playback Theatre, Playback Theatre Reflects

Wright Mills, C. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press

About the authors

Elsa Childs

Elsa has been practising playback since 2017. She is a Centre for Playback Theatre Accredited Playback Theatre Trainer, a graduate of the Centre’s Leadership program and a member of the faculty of the Iberian School of Playback Theatre, as well as a member of the board of the Iberian Playback Theatre Association, where she is responsible for ethics. In 2018, Elsa founded the Lisbon-based professional playback company InVerso, which she directs. She is a co-founding member of the Portuguese playback group Projecto Eco and the international online group Perspektives. She is also a co-founder of the HEED Playback Theatre project, an international program that trains and supports playback practitioners to develop projects for social and environmental justice in their own communities. Elsa views Playback Theatre as a tool for social justice and anti-oppression work. She brings poetry, dance and a deep aesthetic and ethical awareness to her practice.

Outside of playback, Elsa is an actor, producer and writer in non-playback theatre. She is a co-founding member of A Corda, a non-profit cultural association that creates multi-disciplinary works that integrate theatre, music and literature, and a co-founder of the intersectional feminist group Eufémias, which created the biennial Eufémia Festival (this year’s edition will be on Memory and Resistance on Stage).

Gerry Orkin

Gerry Orkin’s involvement with Playback Theatre began in 1985. He was an actor, conductor and co-director of Canberra Playback Theatre over a period of 25 years, and more recently he directed a playback company in Wollongong, New South Wales. 

Gerry has a professional background in social policy and service development, working on issues like homelessness, violence against women and child protection for government and non-government agencies. He has co-created Playback Theatre projects on those themes, as well as on climate change, aged care, and in the juvenile justice and mental health systems. 

Gerry has a passion for training conductors and working with the social dimensions of stories and issues of social justice. He’s led workshops on those topics in Australia, Singapore, Finland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, India, the UK and Portugal.

In Playback Theatre personal stories are presented as individual experiences offered for communal witnessing. However, when stories of trauma are told, they rarely live solely within the individual. Instead, they are often shaped by social forces, and amplified and enacted through social structures: racism, patriarchy, colonial histories, economic exclusion, ableism, and other forms of systemic and structural power. To ethically engage with trauma in playback theatre requires  the ability to recognise stories that emerge from (and refer back to) those social conditions, and the skills and knowledge to bring such stories to the stage in appropriate, proportionate and safe ways.

Trauma can be understood as a rupture in meaning and safety that is often created in the context of unequal power relations. Experiences of violence, silencing, marginalisation, or chronic insecurity are not random misfortunes. They are patterned outcomes of social systems, often produced and reproduced by the interests those systems serve. When such experiences enter the playback space, they bring with them more than emotional content; they carry histories of oppression, domination and resistance. Treating those stories only as personal narratives risks reproducing the very erasures that have often contributed to the trauma in the first place. If a refugee's story of displacement is enacted only as personal grief, the politics that produced the displacement remain invisible, and the enactment quietly confirms displacement as a thing that simply happens to people, rather than something that is done. The opposite risk also exists: if a story is held only as evidence of structural patterns, the teller can be flattened into a representative of a category, and the specificity that makes the experience theirs is lost. The work is to hold both the singular life and the social reality that shaped it.

Playback theatre's signature gesture (the public enactment of a personal story) has political weight even in the context of trauma. To place a story into collective view is to declare that this experience deserves attention, legitimacy, recognition and response. For tellers whose lives have been shaped by structural injustice, that act carries profound importance. The ensemble's embodiment is not only interpretation. It is the acknowledgment that what happened to the teller is not an aberration, but is intelligible within a broader social reality. When an enactment locates responsibility for trauma within the social context from which it emerges, it can offer the teller a measure of healing that purely individualised responses cannot. Consider the story of a woman struggling with an eating disorder and negative body image. If understood and played back only as a story of personal pathology or family dysfunction, the enactment may inadvertently and unfairly reinforce the teller’s sense of responsibility, shame and isolation. But when the enactment also makes visible the unjust harm and relentless cultural and corporate machinery that equates women’s worth with body size, that commodifies thinness and beauty, that normalises surveillance and self-punishment, the teller’s experience is reframed as an understandable response to cruel and impossible social demands. That shift does not erase or discount individual factors or the story tellers suffering; it simply redistributes the burden of shame from the person to the systems that produced the conditions of harm.

That kind of reframing can be profoundly affirming and liberating. It names what has been unnamed: that the original trauma and trauma response is not the teller’s fault, that their response makes sense within a context of social and structural violence, as well as within individual circumstances. The enactment becomes a form of witnessing that refuses to pathologise the individual while simultaneously refusing to absolve the social forces at play. It creates space for the teller to see themselves not as broken, but as someone navigating their situation in a world structured by injustice and inequality.

At the same time, playback’s aesthetic and procedural choices shape how power is negotiated on stage. The conductor frames what kind of story is invited and how it is contextualised. The ensemble decides what is amplified, symbolised, or left unsaid. Those decisions are never neutral. A story of workplace humiliation, for example, can be rendered as an individual conflict or as an expression of institutional power. A story of gendered fear can be played as personal anxiety or as a socially produced condition. Each choice made by the conductor and the team carries ethical consequences.

Playback theatre’s commitment to empathy can be politically insufficient if it stops at emotional resonance. Empathy without a broad analysis risks collapsing structural harm into individual feeling, allowing audiences to “empathise” and “feel moved” without being unsettled. A socially conscious playback practice resists this by allowing for discomfort, contradiction, and asymmetry to remain visible. It does not rush stories of injustice toward hope, resolution, redemption, or catharsis, but holds space for anger, grief, and "unfinishedness".

That said, playback does not, and cannot, offer justice in any material sense. What it can offer is a moment of recognition and symbolic redress: a counter-narrative to dominant stories that deny, minimise, or normalise harm as only ever a personal responsibility. When done with care, playback can function as a site of collective meaning-making, where private suffering is re-situated within the social dimensions of stories, within public histories and with shared responsibility.

In this way, the relationship between trauma and playback theatre is fundamentally social and political. The work is not simply about helping individuals tell their stories, but about how those stories challenge, expose, or reproduce existing power relations. Playback’s ethical task is to ensure that the act of telling does not strip stories of their social meaning, but allows them to speak about the worlds that produced them. 

Originally published at Playback Theatre Reflects, an independent blog for writing on Playback Theatre curated by Jo Salas, co-founder of Playback Theatre.

Playback Theatre was inspired by community theatre, oral storytelling and therapeutic and humanistic traditions. Its founders, Jo Salas and Jonathan Fox, were also influenced by Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and by Moreno’s psychodrama, both traditions concerned, in their own ways, with liberation and social transformation. In the 1990s some playback companies began to use the form to explore social justice issues. That tradition continues, even as companies centre their day-to-day practice on the witnessing and enactment of personal narratives. 

Over the past few years I’ve been fortunate to travel and teach Playback Theatre workshops in 15 countries, as well as attending regional and international gatherings. My playback work has often focussed on the role of social identity and social forces in shaping people’s lives. When stories are told in performances on themes of social justice, or in communities where social justice struggles are part of the fabric of everyday life, the relevance of those factors is obvious. However, in other settings, I have noticed that the social contexts of stories often go unrecognised and unacknowledged. 

Typically, conductors and actors make sense of stories using our psychological imaginations - a quality of mind and interpretive orientation that helps us understand and embody the emotional meanings of a teller’s narrative. When we wonder what feelings and inner experiences are at the heart of a teller’s story, and work with things like subtext, motivation and metaphor, we are activating our psychological imagination. Outside the social justice contexts previously mentioned, I don’t often see conductors and actors also making sense of stories using their sociological imaginations. The sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that many experiences we think of as private, “personal troubles” are actually connected to broader “public issues” - problems rooted in how society is structured. Our sociological imagination is that quality of mind and interpretive orientation that helps us identify and be curious about those connections. It asks not only what a person was experiencing and feeling in their story, but what social forces have contributed to their situation, who else is affected, and what structures and systems might be at play. A sociological imagination helps us see both the fish and the water that the fish is swimming in. 

In the playback contexts I’m most familiar with, stories are understood primarily through frameworks of emotion, healing, and personal meaning-making, even when they also contain significant social dimensions. On its own, that perspective risks shrinking injustice and oppression down to personal burdens, minimising the scope and context of their impact. Ethically, that matters because the sources of harm are rendered invisible and let off the hook. It also matters artistically, because the stage risks losing three of its most vital dramatic elements - power, tension, and shared social meaning.

For example, consider the story of a woman who shares about her struggles with her relationship to food and to her body. Her experience sits at a tension point: it is deeply personal, but also profoundly shaped by social forces. A purely psychological reading collapses that tension, absorbing the social into the personal so that her experience is understood only as a matter of individual pain and pathology, and in doing so it risks reinforcing her shame by locating both the problem, and responsibility for the solution, entirely within her. 

In contrast, when the conductor brings their sociological imagination to the interview, the frame widens. They are thinking “what social conditions make this experience possible? Who else faces this? Who benefits from things being this way?”. They may already be alert to the ways that certain ideas about appearance and femininity can undermine women’s confidence about their bodies. Curious about that connection, they might ask the teller “Where did you learn the rules about what a ’good’ or ’acceptable’ body should be?” or “If you woke up tomorrow and no woman felt this way anymore, what would have changed overnight?”

The social dimensions of the story need not dominate the enactment; the teller’s suffering is still personal, but it is no longer only personal. 

Using their sociological imaginations, the actors can embody the personal aspects of her struggle, but also the social process that is at work. For example, they might show us the weight loss and wellness industries pocketing profits made from their exploitation of women’s anxiety and shame. The “rules of appearance” could be enacted as a literal script being handed down, mother to daughter, phone screen to viewer, showing how the ideology of desirable appearance is transmitted and reproduced. By making those kinds of choices the cultural machinery that equates women’s worth with body shape and size, that commodifies thinness and normalises surveillance and self-punishment is made visible as an active social force and a meaningful presence in the story. What first appeared as personal “pathology” becomes intelligible not as a weakness or failure, but as an understandable response to impossible and cruel social demands. The social dimensions of the story need not dominate the enactment; the teller’s suffering is still personal, but it is no longer only personal. The tension at the heart of her story is not resolved, but nor does it have to be; when brought to the stage it is made present, legible and resonant. That transformation more fairly distributes the burden of shame and responsibility away from the individual and toward the systems that produced the conditions of harm. It will very likely also have a quietly strengthening effect, as other women in the room recognise their own experiences in the story and as the teller’s isolation gives way to empathetic solidarity and shared understanding.

Here’s another example: a few years ago I was facilitating a rehearsal for a company. A woman told about feeling guilty, because she couldn’t keep up with her elderly parent’s care needs, while also working two low-income jobs to support her extended family. She saw her situation as a personal failure of obligation and responsibility. While her parents were grateful, the teller felt that she was not coping as well as she should. The actors artfully embodied the teller’s love for her parents, her feelings of guilt and inadequacy and her ever-present exhaustion, but I saw in the interview and the enactment a missed opportunity. My sociological imagination had me thinking that this was also a story about the decline of social infrastructure, and the expectation that families (and, disproportionately, women within families) should absorb all the burdens of care. It was also a story about the impossible mathematics of unstable low-income employment, and uncompensated care work. Seen through a sociological lens, the teller wasn’t a failure - they were being failed. 

When we sensitively embody the social context, we give tellers the dignity of being both witnessed and able to see themselves, and their stories, more clearly. It’s the difference between "I am not good enough" and "this system is not good enough”.

I asked the conductor to re-do the interview, and this time to ask questions that might surface the social context of this story. She asked the teller “is it fair that there are no other ways to get support for your parents?”. The teller sat more upright in her chair, and there were now tears in her eyes. She said that everyone felt embarrassed to talk about this problem, even among friends, because in her culture, struggling to care for ageing parents is a private, shameful matter. She talked about cuts to social services and financial assistance, and how people are scared to talk negatively about the government. She added that as the only female child, she was expected to do most of the care-taking work in her family. With this new information, the actors began their second enactment with a painful scene. They each laid a hand on the teller’s actor’s back and shoulders, each representing a support person or agency. As long as she was being held by those hands, she could dance gracefully, moving with the actors, but as they let go, one-by-one, and retreated, her movements became more and more laboured and uncoordinated, until she was alone, abandoned in the middle of the stage. The four actors, now representing the government and cultural gatekeepers, told her to do her duty and be quiet. 

This example isn’t about denying emotional truth; it’s about the transformative potential of a refusal to let people face alone what should be understood and faced collectively. When the social dimensions surfaced, the teller’s exhaustion became evidence of a broken system rather than personal inadequacy. When we sensitively embody the social context, we give tellers the dignity of being both witnessed and able to see themselves, and their stories, more clearly. It’s the difference between "I am not good enough" and "this system is not good enough”.

Of course, there are risks to this approach. A sociological perspective can become its own form of interpretive violence if it is carelessly or inappropriately imposed. Not every story has an important social context (although in my experience, more do than you might think!), but a conductor who sees social forces at work everywhere risks missing what a teller has actually come to the chair to share. Jumping too soon to a structural analysis can push tellers past their own thoughts and feelings toward meanings and conclusions they don’t own, leaving them feeling unheard and unseen if their story’s personal distinctiveness is turned into a stereotype. The aim is not to replace one reductive lens with another, but to be willing to hold and explore both, letting the teller, the conductor and performer’s spontaneity and emergent wisdom inspire the meanings that come to the stage.

Another kind of risk is present when the social forces in a story have historically privileged the teller. In those cases, a focus on those forces can feel like an attack - as if we’re saying to the teller “you’re the problem here”. Conductors need to use their judgement about the appropriateness of exploring the social context of any kind of story, but especially that kind. If they decide to do so, their task is to ask questions that reveal systems without pressuring the teller to assume personal guilt or responsibility. For example, consider a white, male professor’s story about how programs that support women and people of colour in education discriminate against him. A conductor might say: “Yes, in recent times there have been big changes in community expectations and how access to education works - and change can be unsettling. How did your own path through academia compare to colleagues who are different from you?”. That question acknowledges his experience and the changed landscape of access, and treats historical bias as something to examine together rather than something he must defend. The goal is to remain curious about how social systems work, not to score ethical points or occupy the moral high ground. It’s also important to understand that in some communities it can be dangerous to talk about political topics, and there may be other cultural factors in play. Care and sensitivity is important, especially if the conductor and performers are not locals.

If a sociological imagination is an essential competency, then the culture and practice of playback will need re-wiring, not just minor adjustments. 

A curriculum for the development of a sociological imagination in playback doesn’t yet exist, but I suggest that there are four broad domains it needs to cover: conceptual understanding (the intellectual foundations practitioners need to have as they step on stage or sit in the conductor’s chair), practical skills (each role need specific skills to put conceptual understandings into practice), ethical reasoning (the capacity to reason through ethical questions, not just follow rules) and project development (sociological imagination in playback is not just about what happens on stage, but shapes the entire lifecycle of a project from conception, planning, engagement, performance, and follow-up).

First, conceptual understanding: as well as recognising the teller’s lived truth, conductors and actors must be able to contextualise a story’s sociological and political frames of meaning, and develop a feel for how age, gender, class, race, ability, refugee and migration status, economic pressures, religion and cultural norms shape lived experiences, and how the intersections of those social identities can complicate that shaping. A theoretical understanding of those complexities is not enough - we need to have a feel for how social identities actually operate in people’s lives.

There are many ways that can be achieved. Company members can start by sharing their own stories of social identity and the impacts of social forces on their lives. They can explore other social theatre forms, for example Theatre of the Oppressed, and bring back what they learn to their group. They can take time to focus on social justice topics (one company I know of used reading circles to share resources and discuss ideas). A particularly effective and accountable way of exploring conceptual understandings is to actively seek the participation of critical friends in a company’s life. Critical friends are members of communities affected by injustice who are invited to rehearsals to share their knowledge and give advice, sometimes before performances but also in other contexts. In one of my former companies we maintained ongoing relationships with critical friends involved in advocacy, activism or research in the queer community, refugee activist communities, the disability and mental health sectors, a family violence service and our local Indigenous community. Over time, patterns emerged. While each personal story was unique, the same processes of "othering" - dehumanisation, exclusion, essentialising and scapegoating - appeared repeatedly across different circumstances of injustice. That kind of pattern recognition is an essential skill for playback practitioners; it helps us identify when a teller’s private trouble is also evidence of social forces, and to respond accordingly. 

What practical skills do practitioners need to turn conceptual understandings into effective work on the stage? For conductors, the main skill is an expanded curiosity - one that is open to a broader contextualising of meaning in stories that is wielded with care and responsibility. For actors, the need is to develop the ability to embody not only inner states, but also the external forces that shape them. That includes a sensitivity to how social identity, social forces, power, cultural norms, and institutional dynamics can be made visible through imagery, spatial relationships, metaphor, rhythm, gesture, and ensemble interaction. They need to be able to spontaneously physicalise frequently encountered elements, such as pressure, constraint, exclusion, comparison, surveillance and invisibility, so that systems and social forces are readable as embodied realities, not abstract ideas. Companies must adapt existing forms (and experiment with new forms) so that the social dimensions that shape personal experiences can be successfully embodied on the stage.

This work requires both boldness and restraint, as the embodiment of oppressive forces can be triggering as well as illuminating - the aim is insight, not re-traumatisation. Underpinning these skills is the capacity to hold empathy while also keeping the social frame in view, allowing the audience to recognise how, for some stories, personal feeling and social context are inseparable in lived experience. Both conductors and actors need the confidence to trust that widening the frame deepens rather than diminishes empathy and meaning, and the courage to navigate the discomfort that exploring social dimensions can create. Conductors need to be able to hold brave spaces so that dialogue across differences becomes possible, not just safe spaces where difficult questions might be avoided.

Developing those skills, however, is only part of what’s needed. Ethical reasoning is the third domain, and it operates at a different level: not “how do we do this well?” but “what are we actually responsible for?”. A purely psychological framing risks obscuring playback’s ethical terrain rather than illuminating it. When stories are understood only as personal and emotional, the ethical questions that arise are largely about care and containment: don’t harm the teller, don’t trigger the audience, don’t exaggerate claims made about the form. Those are real obligations, but a sociological framing surfaces a wider set of questions. Whose stories get told, and whose don’t? When a conductor chooses to widen the frame - or declines to - what are the consequences of that choice for the teller and the community? When social forces in a story have historically privileged the teller, what does fair witnessing look like? Those aren’t questions that can be answered by following rules; they require practitioners who can reason through competing obligations and exercise genuine judgement in real time. That capacity doesn’t develop without deliberate practice: case-based discussion, rehearsal scenarios, and honest reflection on past practice and experience are essential. Underpinning all of that is the recognition that ethical inaction is not neutral - choosing not to surface the social dimensions of a story is itself a choice, one that defaults to the status quo and, in doing so, takes a side.

Project development is the fourth domain. The full cycle of a project from conception through follow-up is itself an ethical and political space, and one where the values of the work either find expression or quietly contradict themselves. Which communities does the company engage with, and on what terms? Who is recruited into the company? What themes are proposed, and what preparation - including community consultation - is appropriate before a performance? What happens after, when the stories that have surfaced may have raised expectations or reopened wounds? A company that brings sociological imagination to its performance work but treats project development as mere logistics is leaving the analysis half-done. 

If a sociological imagination is an essential competency, then the culture and practice of playback will need re-wiring, not just minor adjustments. That means challenging the assumption that empathy, good intentions and a functioning psychological imagination are enough. It involves re-thinking what we value and how we think about and articulate playback’s purpose to audiences, how we decide where and for whom we perform (and what themes we choose), who we collaborate with, who we recruit as company members, what competencies we regard as important and how we address those needs through training, and the language we use as conductors and trainers. It means another kind of self-reflection too: after all, a company that names injustice on stage while leaving its own values, structure, management and composition unexamined hasn’t fully embraced what this work is about.

For some in our community, all that represents a genuinely transformative shift in how we understand the playback form itself. That’s a lot to ask, and there’s a risk of overwhelming people if we frame this appeal as a demand for immediate fluency, rather than a developmental journey. For some, it will remain easier, safer and more comfortable to stick with what they know - but the discomfort of learning is not a reason to avoid it. 

The fundamental questions are: do we have the ability to recognise when social context is an essential element of the heart of a story? And do we know how to bring that recognition to the stage in consensual, appropriate, proportionate and safe ways? (The same questions about consent and safety also apply to psychological framings, of course, but those are rarely treated as distinct framings at all - they’re the unquestioned default, it’s just “what we do”). The alternative is to continue a practice where we risk failing to serve people - often those who are disadvantaged or oppressed - whose stories live at the intersection of personal experience and social reality. When that intersection is at the heart of what a story means, we owe the teller and our audience the recognition of its transformative potential in order to meet the promise of ethical witnessing in Playback Theatre.

Acknowledgement

Playback practitioners have been writing, arguing and theorising about our practice for decades, in essays, journals, conference papers and books. I am indebted to that history of work, and acknowledge its impact on my own practice. I can’t name everyone who has, in one way or another, stirred me in my thinking on this topic, but they include Ben Rivers, Steve Nash, Emily Conolon, Jo Salas, Hani Al Rstum, Nick Rowe, Elsa Maurício Childs, Kathy Barolsky, Norbert Ross, Soline Daccache, Pamela Freeman, Sarah Halley, Rea Dennis, Bev Hosking, Peter Hall and Jonathan Fox. I thank Steve, Jo, Peter, Norbert and Soline for their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

In Playback Theatre the image of a gathering where stories are told around a campfire serves as a kind of creation myth. It suggests a link between playback and something ancient and essential about humans in community - the idea that we have always come together to witness and honour one another’s stories, and that this impulse is hardwired into us as social beings. 

The campfire is invoked as proof that playback is more than a contemporary, experimental form of community theatre - it represents a return to a fundamental human practice. That narrative suggests that when we create the ritual space of a playback performance, we are not only working with something new, we are also remembering something old. We are tapping into patterns that predate civilisation itself. 

I would argue that this view is problematic in several ways.

First, it collapses cultural, historical, and political differences across time and context into a single imagined notion of ancient life, practice and wisdom. In doing so, it invokes a kind of primitivism: the implication is that people in earlier or “simpler” societies all had access to an authentic, common form of communal life that has since been degraded. That logic risks invoking the racist noble savage trope, even when it is unintentional.

Even more problematically, the campfire myth ignores questions of power. Ancient storytelling practices were not necessarily neutral, inclusive, egalitarian, democratic, or benign. Who was permitted to speak around those fires? Whose stories were valued, and whose were marginalised or silenced? What social functions did storytelling serve, and in whose interests? Which topics were sanctioned, and which were forbidden? By uncritically invoking the campfire, playback practitioners risk creating a reductive understanding of what “story” means, and projecting an imagined purity onto the past…and then claiming it back as their own.

Anthropological research on actual firelight gatherings complicates the romantic picture further. Polly Wiessner’s studies of the contemporary hunter-gatherer Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari found that daytime talk was largely practical and sometimes critical, while campfire conversations moved more toward storytelling, imagination, and building social connections across wider networks. But those conversations were not egalitarian free-for-alls. There were still clear patterns around who spoke, what topics were appropriate and whose stories carried more and less weight. Wiessner’s research simultaneously validates that campfire creates a distinctive quality of social space while it undermines any notion of ancient campfire democracy. If we are going to invoke the campfire at all, we might attend to what it actually reveals: that intimacy and the dynamics of power have always coexisted around the fire.

These questions also intersect with ongoing conversations about ethics within the playback community. When Western practitioners invoke “ancient” or “indigenous” wisdom to validate and justify their work, they risk appropriating cultural authority without relationship, responsibility, or accountability. The campfire myth thus functions as a way of claiming spiritual depth and universality while remaining firmly grounded in modern, Western theatrical and psychological frameworks.

Playback Theatre is, in fact, a contemporary theatre form responding to contemporary conditions, particularly our hunger for community and authentic witnessing in an era marked by fragmentation and digital distance. It does not require an ancient and romanticised lineage to legitimate that need. The form has its own integrity, emerging from its social justice roots, Moreno’s psychodrama, contemporary oral history practices, improvisational and experimental theatre, and late twentieth-century therapeutic cultures.

I wonder what the attraction is of the campfire storytelling narrative? Could it be that lets practitioners avoid examining the shaky and uncertain power dynamics of our own practice?

At best, the campfire operates as a metaphor rather than a lineage. Firelight creates intimacy. Darkness focuses attention. Ritual shapes meaning. Can we not acknowledge those resonances without claiming continuity with human practices thousands of years old?

A more honest account would recognise that Fox and Salas simply created a new ritual for witnessing stories. It draws on existing traditions, responds to real needs, and generates genuine meaning and connection. That is sufficient. Playback Theatre does not need the campfire’s blessing to stand on its own.