Lights and sounds.

Before you begin the long reading, plug in your headphones and enjoy the video:

What you have just seen is one of the stages through which playback theatre is approached, and one of the main key points in playback is the music which accompanies the actors. This was one of the first tries me and my group had at using sounds to describe emotion or mood, and it was really surprising that we had successfully created a story just by music!

There were a few stages that Peter brought us through first before we were able to capture the intention of music in this particular form of theatre.

1) We started using sounds through the simple means of a soundscape; in which Peter tells us a story while we are all seated in a circle and we all added in sounds according to the story. For example, when he says 'And a wolf started howling in the distance', someone from the group would howl. Or in this case, since we were all really excited, about ten people howled. We had a round of this before we proceeded to split up into smaller groups of about 5-6 people.

2) Our next task was to recreate the entire story using ONLY sounds. Challenging? Yes. But considering we had a head start on the story, and we already had a rough gage on what sounds we wanted to use during the trial run, it was not impossible. It did take us some time to get focused into what kind of sounds we wanted to use. We experimented with the words we could use, the rhythms, the tunes we already knew and the pitch of our voices.


3) The third step is what the video is. Someone had to act out to our sound story and wow, it was definitely tough to try to get a connection to our actors via the sounds we make! We had to somehow guess what the actors were about to do and change our music according to what they were acting, and not only that, the actors too had to listen carefully to change their acting to the mood of our music. The musicians and the actors had to work together, listening and watching each other carefully to be able to create a successful playback.

Some of the instruments we used:

A guitar.

A ukulele. 

And a tin can yup

The next  thing we had to do was split into groups of four where two were the actors and two were the musicians and we had to re-create Peter's story on the happiest day of his life.

Here is Raeha's group with their rendition of the story!

It was definitely easier this time round to re-create the story, because not only do we have music, we are also allowed to add in our own dialogue to make the work more true to the emotions.

Another thing I noticed was that to do playback, you need to have a certain bond with your fellow group members. You know those kind when you look at your best friend and you both know EXACTLY what each other are thinking? Yes, that is very important. And this kind of bond is usually nurtured over the years. Playback rarely gives you enough time to discuss entirely what kind of plot you are going to go with, so you have to trust your teammates guts, and yours, to make the recreation a success. A lot of 'yes and....'s have to be incorporated into playback because in the real thing, it's just a lot of improvisation and building up on the ideas of other people, which sometimes isn't really an easy thing to do when you don't have the same frequency as the others in your group. It requires a lot of dynamics, sorry I meant, impromptu dynamics in playback.