Playback Theatre-The Early Years Interview with Jo Salas

Transcription

1 Playback Theatre-The Early Years nterview with o Salas By Fe Day This material is made publicly available by the Centre for Playback Theatre and remains the intellectual property of its author.

2 Playback Theatre the early years Transcript of interview with o Salas Shizuoka apan So guess it s like thinking so mean we just talked about what d been thinking about and was there anything that any place in particular kind of like that you thought of starting? Well when you asked me that question what did think about first of all was the was the very beginning so know when people encounter Playback Theatre now it s very highly formed you know we have the scenes, we have the fluid sculptures, we have pairs, we have the whole ritual um we have the roles of the conductor and so on well we had none of that Right We had none of that not one single thing. All we had was the idea of theatre based on real people s stories. So that s what know people don t imagine at all you know so it s onathan who had this vision very strongly and me who he told about it to immediately and we d been talking about it and beginning to play with it and we had played with that idea for a couple of months with this other improvisational group that we already were part of called t s all Grace in in Connecticut and we d played with it enough that we had done one performance with that group and mean can t imagine how rough it must have been (laughter) you know cause we really we really it was just so unformed but we did it and and it worked, we did it with an audience and there was at least one story that we still remember to this day and so the essential process worked. And then we went to moved to New York and So did that mean moving away from the from the group members? Moving away from that group yes about three hours away (coughs) ll get you some tea Shall keep talking? f can just say when onathan did talk to you about it mean did you have a reaction sort of that was mean did you get it sort of? t made um yes was attracted to the idea it made sense to me right away and he he asked me quite formally did want to be one of the people who was developing this because not everyone in our company did. Not everyone in the company that we had t s all Grace Yeah not everyone was interested.

3 And what were some of the things that the ones who weren t, what were they sort of saying? don t remember specifically except that the kind of work that we had been doing was more um we would have a general kind of theme and we would improvise around it and then we would choose a couple of um scenes so to speak or we d put together a little kind of play so to speak you know series of scenes and again it was very very this was seventies early 74 it was um you know hippy theatre we would dance on beaches and do our thing there um and it was full of great energy and so on but um not it didn t last it was influential for us but it didn t last all that long. So the people in that group were very interested in playing together and in developing these pieces and then putting them on you know finding locations usually outside to do this and ah so some of them just weren t interested in this different direction and as remember think we kept doing both for a little while and then and then this new idea which did not have a name at that point, it didn t have a name for quite a while So it was distinguished by the fact that it was responding to things in the audience that the audience said and so rather than things that you generated in the company Right and the topics that we d had in the company were were related to our lives, we had done one piece that was sort of about life and death and one that was called Happy s Own Season and the person who played Happy was dying we thought he thought as far as know he s still alive but he had an apparently terminal disease at that point and so life and death was very much on our minds and we created this piece and so it was central, very much related to our own lives but not we did not create them on the spot. They weren t set in the sense that they were not there was no written down script but some people were not interested in exploring something that was taking place on the spot that was based on other people s lives. But don t honestly remember exactly what the discussion or what people s objections were but know that some people were interested and then some other people kind of who had not been in that group also kind of joined us to begin to explore and then for for other reasons um onathan and moved away um those reasons were didn t apparently have anything to do with the work What was it work or? t was two things think can t remember, it was a long time ago. One was we wanted to have another baby and we were living at that time a stone s throw from a nuclear power plant which as nuclear power plants do regularly had little leaks of radio active material and ah we d seen people in the field across the road with geiger counters and onathan had got a very mysterious illness at one point and we we just wanted to live somewhere else and there were other horrible polluting industries around there Dow Chemicals stuff like that so we wanted to move away from there to have a baby and um and then he also had during this time of beginning to develop the idea um he had begun to do psychodrama training and ah again the sequence of his encounter with psychodrama with the beginning of Playback is something else that it s hard for us to keep it straight my memory is he had all these other kind of theatre influences at work in him including the work that we were doing and then he went to a psychodrama open session and that was like the missing piece and it was following that that he had this kind of click you know Oh yes the theatre it wasn t like it wasn t like Oh m going to do a different you know something based on psychodrama but psychodrama kind of

4 presented the missing link in a way and so then we started doing this exploring and then he realised he wanted to really learn more about psychodrama and get trained in that so he d begun training and he was offered a chance to become on the staff at the Moreno nstitute and to complete his training in that role and that was the other reason then that gave us something to move to so we moved to the area about half an hour away from the Moreno nstitute and um and once we were there we already knew this idea, don t know what we how we referred to it cause it didn t have a name t was something we really wanted to keep working on so once we were there, pretty soon after we were there onathan used the kind of psychodrama network to find people who were specifically interested in exploring this and so in that first year we had quite clear ties to the Moreno nstitute, um think after the first couple of meetings we met at a church hall down the road from the Moreno nstitute and Yeah udy talked to me about that about her something like a sort of night off or something from the psychodrama training and so coming to the meeting boards And other people were just mean think he put up kind of notices on bulletin So how many would have come? Well there were 14 or 15 who initially came maybe even more than that in the very first time and then the first year or so there were 12 or 13 people who came regularly and they all contributed something, they were all part of that initial work but what you have to imagine is you know 12 or 14 people very very diverse in terms of their backgrounds they certainly were not all psychodramatists or psychotherapists or there was a plumber who was very influential in that first group What sort of influence did? He was a very sort of brash macho guy who he was kind of might even have been a Vietnam vet m not sure about that but he had that sort of energy of like tough love somehow and he just brought a lot of kind of raw life into the group. And there was a French Canadian schoolteacher and her boyfriend who worked at BM When you think of it what were some of the things they brought? Mmm guess have to so they all mean because it was such a diverse group in terms of background what guess the point m making is that we were not all coming from similar professional orientation or life experience mean there were the French Canadian was a sort of in a way culturally conservative French Catholic background, her boyfriend was also you know in his life quite kind of conservative person and then there was udy who was very very core to the whole development of it who was kind of came from a more upper class background, had been in the Peace Corps, onathan, udy and had all been in the Peace, was in the New Zealand equivalent of that VSA and that was quite important that all three of us had had that experience of um that kind of service and that kind of adventuring in the countries And that s also was that also experiencing non-western

5 Yeah yeah absolutely, so we had all put ourselves in situations where we knew nothing about the culture and had been at this enormous disadvantage you know even though we were the privileged Westerner we were the very unprivileged outsider and we had tested ourselves in that realm and we had also felt that you know giving yourself however naïve and idealistic that is as young volunteers was important enough to let go of all your comfort and security So onathan had been in Nepal and you d been in Right d been in Sarawak in Malaysia and udy had been in Ethiopia so three very different places but we still feel that that was quite key and also that you know it was onathan udy and and then later Michael Clemente who wasn t there at the very beginning who probably had the biggest impact on how Playback grew. mean everyone did but in terms of like our convictions and our values So so tell me a bit about Michael because it s like for me he came to New Zealand and he s like a person that like know his name and everything but don t really know him. Well he was quite young when he joined us he was think maybe 23 or something and um just not long after school, he had a very strong artistic identity and um As an actor or As an actor and a musician and a visual artist because he painted, drew pictures he was suppose first and foremost an artist. And um he was quite certainly at that age quite sort of um tender and fragile in his being. He d suffered a lot he was a gay man and he had grown up suffering. He was someone who had known he was gay and therefore very different and you know a very very traditional Catholic family and he was the kind of person who other kids would say faggot faggot that kind of thing mean he was um delicate featured and he was just, he d suffered he d really suffered and at the same time he had this fire you know and not only on behalf of gay people but he was a kind of natural fighter for social justice of every kind and um he kept us on track in that way. mean he was one of the first people who really kind of challenged us to really be aware and keep growing and questioning ourselves in terms of like what are we doing? n relation to the world and injustice and so on and so he was a person of incredible integrity and great artistic power and um ll start crying if talk too much about him But it s really great to have him you know for me just to get the sense of him Yeah it became you know his revolutionariness sometimes especially in those first few years mean we were the object of it and he was sometimes angry towards us but but you know that he worked through that What would it be that he felt Um don t remember issues just remember him being like this kind of touchy young man and we were the kind of authorities and um nothing ever very deep or serious but um he and had um know we it was like my understanding about homosexuality grew through him and um that was sometimes painful because of that mean had you know there were blindnesses that had mean in a way d grown d been very best

6 friends with a boy who was gay when was in school and was just totally with this Huh? So what? you know you know it was just a and then in terms of growing up and kind of absorbing other prejudices or misunderstandings um it was through Michael that kind of came back to that place Huh? So? you know So what? but that growth was was um but we were very close you know we we really loved each other somehow we were with him through his dying and death and um And that was also that was also cause again that s been something that knew but don t know how knew that his death was part of Playback somehow? Well um he died after we had retired mean the actual official life of the company was from 75 through 86 and at the end of 86 onathan felt that he d - onathan had been increasingly travelling and teaching as Playback started to grow in other places and um he wanted to have more freedom to do that and being part of a company that met every week and performed regularly and had this huge responsibility to generate because by then five of us were being paid by Playback um he wanted to stop and we didn t consider the possibility of going on without him which is really interesting because he was very much in a leadership role which none of us felt we didn t even talk about someone else taking over. But we didn t actually stop we let go of the although at that point we d stopped our official regular sort of structure we closed our office, we let go our manager, um you know but we kept meeting sort of sporadically, we kept performing when we wanted to and in the beginning it was you know ten times a year or something people would ask us and we d do it. Michael by then was starting to get no it was till about 1990 that he was diagnosed and remember remember being at a we were performing at a conference in Washington DC and the aids quilt was there and Michael had just heard that his T-cell count was very low and remember standing there with udy looking at this aids quilt and both of us sobbing knowing what that meant. And um then it was another, it was three years before he died and um we kept performing but he got iller and iller and the last performance it turned out to be we didn t know it would be the last performance, was one that we did um that actually conducted because onathan was away and it was for a group of um residential treatment people who worked in residential treatment with kids and Michael was chosen twice to play a dying person or someone who actually died during the story and mean of course the audience had no idea consciously but they got that aura from him and the next performance that we were due to do which was like we had continued to do one big public performance every year at this place where we d performed for many years and we always got this huge audience which were our old fans and um he was too sick to do it and we decided, That s it, we re not doing any more So that was the end No more performances So in a sense he was his end was connected with the end So mean although we had officially ended before that it was when Michael was too sick to perform that we said That s it, no more Original Company performances. t was very organic it was just like it was over. But wanted to go back a bit to the very beginning before Michael came along so you know we got these people together and we had this church hall and we would just my sort of mental image of disastrous kind of ricocheting off the walls of this hall groping for the form of what this idea meant and every now and again we would come across something and we d say Well let s try you know one person comes in and does a sound and movement and and and it worked and we d go Oh yeah that worked we ll keep doing that now what shall we call it? Now mm let s call it a sculpture no let s call it

7 a how about a moving sculpture no let s call it a Fluid Sculpture and it was such a collective process mean no-one can say who created that and the ideas for these things came from many brains and um you know onathan was contributing and shaping and leading, very much leading through all of this but we were trying all kinds of things and and just finding the things that worked. t was a bit like the famous don t know, don t know if it s a true story, but the idea of the sculpture that s hidden inside the block of marble and and the sculptor is just chipping away the pieces that are not part of it think that s what we were doing. And then there was a time, don t know within two or three months where we found a name for it and we had a number of other names that we were playing with and we ended up role reversing with the names you know Ok name, you know, how do you feel about being the name? So can you remember any of the names? Well, the only one remember is the one that suggested which was believe mpromptu Life Theatre but mean Playback Theatre was a good name And can you remember who that came from? Playback Theatre? No, don t remember um don t remember. onathan s stepfather claimed that he contributed that name but m not confident that he did, he tended to claim things like that Yeah so who knows? And when it came We felt, yeah we quickly adopted that yeah yeah. So we did, and remember also feeling during that time the vision grew stronger and stronger in me of what it was and always had a very strong kind of aesthetic or artistic kind of impulse and ah felt like could really see how this could work, how beautiful it could be and how clean and clear and and remember looking around and thinking This group of people we ll never get there we ll never do it, this is not the right group of people but they were you know and it just took more time you know we grew into being a really working team So how long before it was how long from that moment when you thought this will never till you thought actually we re doing that aesthetic vision had? Well it it A couple of years? At least a couple of years maybe three years or so, three or four years and that was rehearsing but we d started performing fairly early and again looking back mean with the standards that we have for performance now mean m sure it was very rough (laughs) but it still worked. And that s one of the things about Playback isn t it? mean now to be perfectly honest mean look at people doing Playback and think what is this? You know how could this work? How could anyone be drawn by this or satisfied by this it s so just missing it s so just looks like all these people waving their

8 arms around and yet there are people in the audience going Yeah that s so wonderful it s really amazing. But mean you know we were bold as brass. So in a way you found a very strong um voice or something for the aesthetic or something do you think in the group? You and Michael? Yes did and then when Michael came along he did. was very much not from a therapy background mean subsequently got training and you now am trained and do have clinical training as a therapist and very much understand fully believe the importance having knowledge in that direction but that wasn t my world didn t wasn t in the psychodrama world um you know was involved in mean like Michael did art as a xx of the music and visual arts And so did you think at that time of your creative life as with a big stream in this other work and a big stream in Playback or did you how did it configure? The other thing about me at that time Did you compose, were you composing? Yes was writing songs, although let me think no started writing songs later, a little bit later, and it was Playback helped me enormously to grow artistically so had a strong desire and artistic direction was also very shut down in a lot of ways yeah from my younger life had grown up very shy and inhibited even though had my saw the world through an artists eyes but sort of feared somehow and Playback work that we did definitely broke me open in important ways and it was later through the work that we did through Playback that became bold enough to start writing songs. But had begun improvising with music mean d been classically trained and d begun improvising with music with Playback Um what was going to say oh yeah how did this fit into my life So had these interests mean was doing batik a lot at that point both as an artistic medium and as one of a kind cloak art to wear selling them mean had a little business selling actually to all the big to many of the big New York department stores ended up leaving that because ultimately was not interested in fashion was interested in colour and texture and so on um but the main thing was was had little kids and um so and also was was never only a stay at home mother always wanted to be doing other things but being with my well had one child when we started Playback and then fairly soon had the second one we did make that move and we did have another baby and in fact was performing the night less than 24 hours before the second one was born playing music for a Playback show um so didn t Playback was one of the things that did did not have a vision of it being my career didn t really have anything, wasn t sure just you know coming from this other generation of where women didn t have careers and So we hadn t in a sense been modelled that had we? Right and had started very young mean had my first baby at 21 so So there was in a way a primary self-definition as parent which was what we d also been given and then there were all the social changes in the woman s role at that time weren t there?

9 Right right, which was very involved in, was very involved in the feminist movement yeah so here was you know a very young mother and um with this strong artistic interest which was taking various forms, Playback being one of them and um where that was going to take me really didn t know did not have a vision of myself Now today would you have ever imagined that you could like No wouldn t have. mean don t know what would have expected. Yeah and in fact for that reasons and for other reasons remember believe it was yes am sure it was who said at one point when were talking about guess Playback had been going for a while a few years and we were starting to kind of have this excitement about how far we could go and do we want to be doing this all the time and think it was me who said this that said don t want to be full time anything mean really liked the idea of doing different things that is pretty integral to me and other people concurred. mean we were on the whole people who liked the freedom of you know having different things going on in our lives So now is it still like that for you have you still got a constellation of things? Or Well must admit mean Playback has become most of it yeah but do my life feels most balanced when do put energy into other things and you know at the moment the main other thing is writing. Yeah so mean ve managed mean music is now subsumed within Playback mean just because in my company we do a lot of singing put sort of serious time into that so that s very satisfying So wanted to ask you know like were there any as you look back were there any sort of um mistakes or failures that you think were significant or important that had a kind of influence on what happened think that and again don t know whether to call it a mistake yeah but something that we would have done differently with hindsight was the way it was always from the beginning onathan and the group and that s how we put it out to the world and very much had a lot of responsibility for doing that cause wrote everything well mean onathan did writing about Playback but wrote all the brochures the press releases and always wrote onathan Fox this onathan Fox that you know it came back to haunt me because um actually was part of all of that and later on it was very difficult to sort of retroactively explain well actually it wasn t just onathan you know it was not and actually this is not just about my pride or my ego it s about the honesty of the process And the plumber and the they were all there Yeah it wasn t and it s such a like an old model of the world that there s one veteran, there s one name there s one person and it s almost always a man you know that s the old model and that s what the world very very much wants, that s the story they want they want that story the man that we can identify that we can make famous and the truth is much more complex. And the truth is that onathan s vision was absolutely central and that was the person that we were following and the truth is that his idea would have gone nowhere at all without me and the other people in the company because it was it was like you know sperm without ovum doesn t become a baby and so retrospectively it would have been healthier for everybody and onathan very much

10 agrees as well if we had recognised that from the beginning. And carry responsibility for the way that unfolded. And yet mean there s a paradox too isn t there in that the world might not have been able to recognise it if it had been couched in the new paradigm in the way that it has say in a place like apan or you know so as a publicist you may have had exactly an accurate instinct so who knows? Yeah who knows think we could have mean now with my company which is now we ve been actually going longer than the original company did m very mindful of that, seldom use my name in promoting the company. do very strategically when feel like my name because it does have a bit of brand recognition if that will help the company ll use it but if you look at our material, you won t see my name prominently. And think actually that s something that has happened all round the world in Playback companies that leadership and all that is something that is in process and in a sense of flux which guess it always is but it s highlighted quite significantly in the Playback world think isn t it? Right the co-creativity and the shared leadership Yeah and then struggling with that with the fact that actually some people do bring people together in a visionary way and then they need other people to implement and then but yeah yeah anyway t s complex and that people resist complexity and it s the same in the political situation m very painfully aware of this process in the United States at the moment where the lies that have been told about the world they re like little sound bite lies and the truth you cannot fit into a sound bite so and so the truth doesn t get heard and it s very very apparent that that process happens and people don t truly, their minds are shut down by by television and they don t want to take the time to understand a more factitive truth And in that sense it must bring you hope that people all over the world have responded with such intensity to the work that you all in the Original Company did cause in a way that is countering soundbites t is Playback counters soundbites doesn t it? Absolutely absolutely and that feel that is the incredible strength and power of Playback that is about the absolute diametrical opposite to that it s about the multifaceted nature of reality and that it can show different personal truths and people can hold that yeah and the form can hold that. s there anything else you want to that feels great. Fantastic.