Theatre village, one of theatre houses in Kathmandu, organized playback theatre for a month after April Earthquake in 2015. The main purpose of the playback theatre was listening traumatic stories of earthquake victims, trauma healing through participatory engagement in the story and building collective among audience. Internationally practiced methodology of playback theatre was telling, participatory listening, performance and dialogue. Few interested audience told own story of earthquake experience in front of conductor, performance artists, and audience then artists performed on the plot of the story. All of participants and artists sunk into the story and expressed empathy. The overarching questions guiding this study are: what are audience members’ experiences of the post earthquake playback theatre performance? How does post quake playback theatre help in the process of trauma healing and social belonging?
The playback theatre form offers a contemporary ritual framework from within which individuals can engage with one another at the margins and pursue the magical interactions that Berman (1990) claims as ‘life giving’. A story-based performance form, playback theatre is derivative of the oral tradition (Goody 2010) merging culturally relevant arts with sacred ritual, personal story and community gatherings. Storytelling is culturally expressive technology of healing and entertaining among the pre-literate community. Narrative scholars argue that enabling such intimate interactions to occur in a public forum paves the way for societal and personal reform through the personal stories. In term of post quake trauma healing and social building, the process of playback theatre could be analyzed Victor Turner’ ritual theory of liminality. Van Gennep’s three phase schema comprises a separation phase, a liminal (transition, threshold) phase and a re-entry phase (Turner 1969). The first phase is pre-liminal phase is painful, insecurity feeling and quite a different world of the storyteller. The second phase that Turner and Gennep called liminal or the phase of ambiguity and confusion is quite similar at the phase of telling and performance. The images of oral narrative and participatory engagement are elementary forms of collective belonging among the participants. Turner (1982) claims that this liminal space invokes “anti-structure” and facilitates an experience of “communitas” which Gennep (1960) called incorporation.
Literature from performance and ritual theory provides a framework for the inquiry. Theory about stories and storytelling offers a complementary lens that acknowledges the centrality of personal story in playback theatre. The research has undertaken using an ethnographic approach that draws on participant observation, informal group and individual interviews and researcher reflexivity. Audience members engage in the post earthquake playback theatre performance as participants and spectators are respondents. The study found that participatory engagement on story generate inter subjective feelings which are useful for trauma healing and collective belonging. The political economic status and differences in physical dispositions are not obstacles to humanistic communication since they are positioned at the same level of the ontological scale.