Anti-Slavery Campaign Interview Series. David Evans (Part 1)

Dr. Evans describes himself as growing up in fragmented settings that led to attending Baptist, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran churches. As a teenager lost in various destructive circumstances, he drew strength from biblical teaching he remembered hearing as a boy in a revivalist camp. He then moved into new life as he cried out to Jesus, “Help me.”. He has worked in various ministry contexts. While living in Washington, DC, David was the Junior/Senior High Director of an out-of-school time program on Capitol Hill. Later he served as Community Development Resource coordinator with MCC East Coast. Most recently he was co-pastor of Boonton United Methodist Church in New Jersey. Professor Evans is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the History of Christianity at The Drew Theological School. He has academic degrees from Spring Arbor College in Michigan, Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and Drew University in New Jersey. Professor Evans is interested in how white Protestant American forms of Christianity have been perceived through the eyes/experiences of people who live in the national, religious, and racial margins of the United States. He is currently working on a project exploring Methodist missionaries’ perception of Italian immigrants in early twentieth-century America as racial others. He currently is a faculty in Mission, Intercultural and Interfaith Studies at Eastern Mennonite Seminary.

PART 1: IN SEARCH OF A BLACK IDENTITY
PART 2: THEOLOGICAL & MISSIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS >>


Yago: David, you are welcome to this blog where we are exploring different ways to name, own, lament and put to rest the energies of enslavement present in today’s world. You grew up as an African-American in a marginalized position in the American society. You have suffered in many ways these oppressive energies. Discrimination was very real to you. You have been in a constant search trying to understand and deconstruct all these oppressive energies. Your will to share with us your own journey is greatly appreciated. I would like to divide this interview in two parts. The first one will cover your understanding of race and your liberation journey as an African-American in the context of an oppressive social system. The second part of this interview will focus on the theological and missiological implications of your deconstruction process.

David, please, what does it mean to you to be an African-American living in the States?

David: My status and role as an African-American signifies both a raced— pseudo-scientific, politically, socially, and systemically enforced and constructed category attributed to somatic features —identity and a chosen cultural identity.  I first recognize that in the United States other people and institutions identify my dark skin and family heritage with the Black race. I choose to use this political and social nomenclature to remind people of the invisible racial force of whiteness as the hegemonic power that defines itself over and against the Black race. But my social identity is not merely an product of white oppressive force, it is also the product of resilient human response to oppression that created new music notes, art forms, speech patterns, Christian spirituality, and family structures that provided the strength to overcome the terror, trauma, and stigma of being black in the United States.

Yago: In your house there was always this understanding that you were descendant of slaves, you were descendant of people who were oppressed. There was the invisible presence of slaves. How African-American families have been influenced by the multigenerational trauma from the time of slavery? What could be the role of memory and imagination in the perpetuation of trauma?

Toni Morrison

David: Both the implied presence of slaves and the history of slavery in cinema and texts was very much a part of my younger years. I could not understand myself, or my family, without their presence. In a way perhaps reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, slaves haunted us.  That is not to say that I was ever able to trace my family of origin back to slaves. Whether or not we had slaves in our history, it was a narrative upon which we built our self-understanding. Whereas white kids were able to trace their genealogy to famous world United States’ leaders or British royalty, my family tree ended with my grandparents’ generation. This meant that I was fascinated with black history and felt obligated to watch black history movies and read black history texts. When I saw other people with skin my hue or darker I cheered for them, felt kinship with them, and felt welcomed by them. In this way, I felt pride in my connection to slavery. We were the people who overcame the insurmountable. 

All of this history was a kind of prosthetic memory. I knew nothing first hand of Africa, the Middle Passage, Sharecropping, or the Great Migration. I was an inheritor of that history; it was given to me. By calling my memory a prosthetic, I don’t mean to suggest that it was false, but in a manner of speaking, it was someone else’s that I made my own. But there was a trauma involved with identifying so strongly with a memory that belonged to someone else. Without first hand experience of this memory, I was vulnerable to the propaganda of white history that named Africa as the dark continent, supposedly void of knowledge, civilization, technology, beauty, health, or dignity. I oscillated between self-hatred and racial pride. It was not until I was almost 18 years old that I learned Africa had cities and organized governments. Until that point, I believed what my white text books had told me, that Africa was a savage place where people like me hid in bushes and ran from lions. The images I saw on television of my contemporary racial relatives from Africa were of starved, malnourished children who relied on the white world to save them. White people seemed to imagine that dark skin signified savagery and need. They patronizingly tried to save Africans, which is probably the only way that one can conceive of saving another. Songs like “Nothing but the Blood” repeated phrases like “What can wash me white as snow?” And because colonialists had epidermailized blackness and whiteness, it was very easy to hate the “one dark blot” that was in myself. Because I was written into this racial community and I in turn imagined myself into this racial community, I was traumatized each time a white teacher, fellow church member, peer, television show, novel, or stranger terrorized me by questioning my capacity to learn, questioned my origins in the biblical narrative, called me a “nigger,” or made my race a perpetual minstrel show, I felt deeply and personally afraid and enraged. I was afraid that the power they spoke from their lips, encoded in their rules, and enforced with their violence would keep me in proverbial chains so that I would never realize the liberty that I longed for. 

But for black history month and the role of my family grandfather as educator, grandmother as politician, mother as hard worker/provider, I may have never known I was capable of being anything other than what white people had imagined for me. I, however, had the counter racial propaganda of Black scientists, Black artists, Black musicians, Black preachers, Black inventors who taught me that I could pursue my dreams.  Folks like these encouraged me to dream that there was something beautiful, powerful, and creative about my flesh. Black was beautiful and I was more than the sum of what white supremacy said of people like me. Martin Luther King Jr’s dream gave me permission to dream that the American Dream was my dream as much as it was a dream that belonged to my pale skinned stringy haired friends.

Yago: Your adolescence was quite difficult. You lived in the inner city. You were in an internal struggle with yourself, at war with yourself. You say that you rejected your very humanity. Could you share with us your struggle to find your own identity during that time? How did you internalized the systemic oppression of the American Society?

David: My childhood was difficult, but Lansing, MI did not have an inner-city like Detroit, MI. Moreover, my mother raised us on a middle class neighborhood surrounded by white people. I say that Lansing was a difficult context because it was a city deeply defined by unresolved racial tension. This was the city in which Malcolm X was raised and learned that his father had been brutally murdered by the Lansing equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan, called the Black Legion. I learned here that the word “nigger” was to be feared. In Lansing I learned that white fathers threatened to disown their daughters if they dated black men and I also learned that those white fathers would follow through on those threats. I learned here that white people suffering from white supremacist pathologies could literally kill you and simultaneously deny that racism was a factor. 

At the same time, I was encouraged to be successful. Success is not a universal concept. What one society defines as success is not necessarily how another society will define the term. In the United States, success meant what Wendell Berry identifies in his book The Hidden Wound as “getting somewhere.” This getting somewhere is an abstract concept that most people would agree has something to do with making enough money so that someday you will be free from the obligation to engage in hard labor ever again. This was the mentality that drove white people to enslave Black labor. To have slaves meant that you were successful, because you were free of hard labor. That is to say, someone else was doing it for you! I was pushed towards success, which meant I was pushed towards whiteness. I was taught to talk white, dress white, play white instruments, worship God in white styles, see white women as epitomizing beauty. I was taught to participate in the ideology that threatened most to destroy me.

I lived a bifurcated existence: I was told that I “talked white” when I used proper grammar, called an “oreo” (a chocolate sandwich cookie with a white cream filling) when I dressed in my bow-tie and cummerbund for stringed orchestra concerts. But in the sea of my white honor student peers I was very aware that my kinky hair, wide nose, and dark skin communicated to them that I was black and would never truly belong to their cliques. I learned to pursue whiteness, not consciously, but I wanted success. I wanted to be accepted, profoundly so. I wanted to have the wealth and respect that white Americans had so I dressed like white people, pursued white romance,  longed to live in white neighborhoods, and embraced white music for a number of years until I began to recognized that white people would never accept me in full, because I would always be black no matter how hard I tried to be other. So I embraced white propagandized views of blackness and lived into them. It wasn’t until college that I discovered what had happened to me. I was reading W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk when I read:

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963)

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

I fell to the floor under the weight of history. I was aware in that moment that Du Bois’s experience 100 years earlier was mine as well. I could not escape the reality that I saw the world—I saw myself—first through the eyes of the white world. This double-consciousness was a gift, but it was also further evidence of my inner divided self, black and white. And the war that would ensue for years would rage inside of me. For years, I fought the white gaze that I had internalized and then I struggled to embrace not only my dark flesh, but my true self which was shaped by and transcended my racially constructed world.

Yago: Your being  black has formed you in multiple ways. You say that you had a “black cultural education”. What do you mean by that? How would you define it?

David: Identifying with black culture resulted in friends, family, and leaders in various black communities introduced me to writers, inventors, pastors, educators, politicians, slaves, share croppers, blue collar workers, movies, books, videos, dances and artifacts that are products of African experiences in the Western world. I felt an obligation to know everything that pertained to blackness and was often required by my white peers to speak for every aspect of Black culture/society that may be related, or unrelated, to the conversation at hand. The same impulse I had to acknowledge the presence of another Black person on the sidewalk drove me to learn all that I could about black pop culture as well. I also learned that there was what Ralph  Ellison would call “lower frequencies” of history and myth that were unacknowledged by white structures of power. And probably more likely were impossible to acknowledge due to the refusal of people intoxicated by white  supremacy to see that racism is more than an individual prejudice, but rather that it is a systemic power that affects every social and cultural system in the United States. Black culture acknowledges the systemic power of racism in language, art forms, and community building. When Black communities speak of “the man” they are conjuring the image of powerful white institutions that deny access to resources and rights to people of color which negatively affects their quality of life.

I learned that Black people must work together to keep resources within their communities and create aesthetics that help form positive self-efficacy within Black children. Some of this learning was overt, like when my mother would purchase Black Encyclopaedias or take us to Black Churches like the Church of God in Christ. Other lessons were less formal: fraternal handshakes in the hallway at school, “neck check” greetings on the street, fear in the eyes of my caregivers when interacting with governmental officials. African American society represents what some have called a nation within a nation. And like any other nation, this African American nation has lessons to teach.

Yago: You say that many of the African-Americans are not trying very hard to hold to history. History has a hold on them. Why? How do you experience it?

David: Ellison has said that, “Too often history dances to political arrangements.” Given the politics of race in our nation and where black people find themselves, if we take Ellison’s statement seriously we might conclude that official histories have a role to play in the subjugation of the black race in the United States. 

James Baldwin (1924-1987)

James Baldwin suggests that white people in the United States “imagine a history that flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it).” In light of this, what incentive would African Americans have to hold onto a history that has only existed to legitimize white domination? This revisionist history does have a hold on African Americans because it is a history that authorizes police forces to racially profile and so-called criminal justice systems to disproportionately incarcerate African Americans to such an extent that the United States now holds a higher percentage of it’s minority population in prison than any other nation in the world.

Yago: You say that race is more about being raced, being named, that is about choosing. You say that race sometimes becomes a stigma. Could you say more about that? How?

David: In almost every context in United States discourse, darkness signifies something ominous, ignorant, backwards, evil, sad or depressing. The symbols of Christianity in the United States reinforce this idea. There’s a salvation bracelet that kids make at some Christian campgrounds that signifies sin as black. Demons throughout the history of Christianity have been described as dark imps. Conversely, most characters in the Bible, especially Jesus, are represented as white people. Children and adults spiritually formed in such a context implicitly learn that darkness is something to avoid. This racial manicheanism adds cosmic significance to racial folk beliefs and stigmatizes dark skin. The epitome of this phenomenon can be seen in those who teach the so-called “Curse of Ham.” Though the curse was on Canaan, they believe that not only was Ham the father of all dark skinned people on earth, but that he was stigmatized with dark skin because he looked upon Noah’s nakedness and cursed.

Yago: Can we say that a good part of African-Americans have taken the stigma of being raced and turn it into something that gives them a positive sense of identity?

From the film "12 Years a Slave"

David: One of the greatest miracles and beautiful stories of American history is the story of African descendants taking on the religion of their oppressor. That is not to suggest that all African descendants became Christians. But for those whom did, not only did they adopt a God whom they were told mandated their slavery/oppression, but they were able to see through the oppressive elements of that story and embrace a liberative element. Many of these courageous Christians constructed a liberative hermeneutic and a liberative theology that not only helped them survive chattel slavery, but also transformed the United States of America in the post-Civil War and Civil Rights eras. The spirit to love dark flesh in the face of a society that persistently denied that anything dark could be lovely is a demonstration of the resilient spirit of humanity. I think this the kind of history that led James Baldwin to say, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it..”

Yago: Could we say that the identity foundation of the African-American has still to be found?

Yago: You couldn’t trust white people, as a group, and as a social entity. You needed to know what they think the people who wanted to destroy you. You needed to be aware of what they were about. Could you share with us the main insights of this process? What methodologies did you use to get to know? What did you discover?

David: Social location implicitly served as the first “method” of knowing white oppressors, if it could be called a method. The fact is that people who live on the margins of society—have less power, less access to resources, less choice, etc…— often know about the people who have more power better than those powerful people know themselves or their context. In my academic career, however, I have become more deliberate about knowing and learning about white society. To do this, I engage in a deliberate study of the history of white religion in the United States. While American historians have studied white people for a long time, they have only been studying them as white people for around 25 years. The insights of Du Bois, Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison have served as theoretical tools for my study.

Yago: “Evans” was the name that the slave master gave to your ancestors. The only thing you know is that you are from the enslaved population. Here we are talking of the quest for home. You don’t know who you are in that sense. Could you share with us how important is to have a home?

David: One of the difficulties of with identifying with the African American narrative is that home is an elusive concept. There can be little doubt that the United States of America is “home.” But the history and present reality of this nation is that an African American can expect to be discriminated against in her homeland because she does not look like a European-American. Her ancestors were forced here in the Middle Passage. She may identify with Africa, but it is likely that she has never been there. Her culture, then, is purely American, but America denies her. Malcolm X used this disoriented experience to recommend that blacks could not know who they are, because the white man had robbed them of that knowledge. I think he is right to an extent, but what he is right about is true of everyone. Identity is constructed. Some of us may feel more stable in our identities than others, but we all have multiple origins and relationships with space, race, and nation. “Who am I?” may prove to be one of the most basic questions of human existence, yet those who live on the margins may feel the anxiety of that question more acutely than others.

Yago: You say that trauma is the past but it is also very much the present. The black body is still being used as a commodity. Could you share with us how the dominant history related to slavery keeps shaping today’s social, economical and political structures? Can we say that there is a new Jim Crow in today’s USA?

David: Since John Winthrop declared the Massachusetts settlement to be a city on a hill European Americans have suggested to their European competitors that they have a more equitable society. They have done so by exploiting a population of underclass people not formally recognized as citizens. Today those people are immigrants from Latin America. Every racial minority group has served this purpose at some point in United States history: American Indians, Africans, Asians, and today’s Latin Americans. That exploitation and oppression takes on many forms. You have rightly identified Michelle Alexander’s concept of the New Jim Crow as one of these. By stripping convicted offenders of their right to vote and visible status in the United States, white America has once again found a way to exploit the labor of a large segment of the minority population by mass incarceration, the largest of any nation in the world.  

Yago: You talk about the importance of naming and owning white institutional structures very much present because of its invisibility. We are talking of internalized organizational cultures that we don’t put into question. How important is to develop an organizational intelligence in the process of deconstructing white mentality?

David: It is essential. We live in an age where it is likely that racism thrives because of institutional policies and practices far more than because of individual or personal prejudices. But if we are only trained to see bad behavior and pejorative language, then we will perpetuate systems and institutions that negatively affect the quality of life for millions.  

Howard Thurmon (1899-1981)

Yago: Howard Thurmon says that “hatred begins when there is contact without fellowship.” What does it mean, in practice, to be diverse within an institution?

David: The fact of diversity is just that, a fact. But being diverse says nothing about the quality of that diversity. Is it an integrated diversity? Is diversity celebrated? Does everyone recognize the diversity within themselves or is diversity only perceived of as something outside of themselves? The truth is that diversity is a fact of life. For a diverse environment to thrive everyone must recognize that diversity is an essential component of a healthy ecosystem and this diversity must be welcomed and celebrated. The alternative is precisely what Thurman described here. Contact without fellowship will engender resentments between those who have more and less power. This is likely the cause of much of the conflict in the world.

Yago: You say that there are some segment of white society believing that they are just as much victims of racism as black folks. For you this is very disturbing. Why this segment of white population feels to be victim? Why is it disturbing to you?

David: As the United States attempts to move in the direction of providing equal access to goods, resources and rights, those who have attempted to hoard access for themselves feel threatened. What they often fail to know is why they feel threatened or how much power they have. Most of them have been taught to ignore power differences and to believe that everyone has the same opportunities. 

By paying attention to power and attempting to create a more equitable society some policies in the United States appear to favor a minority group over a historically empowered white group. From the white perspective, this gives people of color unfair advantages. In a vacuum this analysis would make sense. Historically, however, whites have constructed a society of unfair advantages from the beginning, they lose nothing but the ability to exploit their neighbors by correcting these injustices. What I find disturbing is that white society has more power than their any other group and have discovered that there is power in claiming victimhood. By denying that they have power, but using power to dictate the conversation they have created a very hostile relationship between diverse groups across racial, political, religious and economic lines. The failure to see this could have catastrophic consequences. 

LINK TO PART 2 (THEOLOGICAL & MISSIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS) >>

Jack Kornfield: 12 Principles of Forgiveness

                       

The acclaimed author and teacher explains the principles that are integral to the process of forgiving, according to Buddhist philosophy.

Becoming Human Again

In Integrating the New Science of Love and a Spirituality of Peace, the contributors explore the intersection between the science of attachment theory and the vision of Anabaptism. What emerges is a deeper sense of what it means to be human and a hope for a different tomorow, inspired by the kingdom of God as preached by Jesus of Nazareth.

"This book is about what it means to be human, and it may not be what you expect. Contemporary neuroscience is rapidly undermining some of our dearly held assumptions about who we are and how we function. This is not another idle academic conversation. These assumptions have been the basis of our educational and legal institutions, and changing them could have far-reaching consequences for how we structure our lives . . .

How we see ourselves is an urgent moral issue. The implications of attachment theory are personal, social, and global, and that is why this book is so important."

Howard Zehr, from the Foreword

Christian E. Early is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is coeditor with Ted Grimsrud of A Pacifist Way of Knowing (Cascade Books, 2010).

Annmarie L. Early is Professor of Counseling at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Anti-Slavery Campaign Interview Series. Roger Foster

PLAYBACK THEATRE

The intersection of Art, Social Interaction and Ritual

For more than three decades, Roger Foster served as an actor, director, producer, stage manager, lighting designer or board member with the Coshocton (Ohio) Footlight Players. An Ohio Community Theatre Association (OCTA)-certified peer guide/responder, Roger consulted with theatre directors throughout central Ohio, and served as an excerpt responder at several regional OCTAfests. A recipient of a superior in directing award at the 2002 OCTA state festival, Roger also helped to establish OCTA’s festivals for children’s theatre.   

Roger received his master’s degree in conflict transformation from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University, where he has served as Visiting Artist in the Theatre Department. Roger studied Playback Theatre with Ben Rivers, and was one of the founding members of the Inside Out Playback Theatre at EMU.

Yago: Roger, welcome to this blog where we are exploring different ways to name, own and deconstruct the energies of enslavement that keep dehumanizing today’s world. Enslavement, when internalized, creates a very narrow sense of identity; we feel unable to re-discover and re-invent ourselves. Our identities become attached to rigid narratives; there is a sense of inner imprisonment. In this interview we would like to explore with you the contribution of play-back theatre in liberating and expanding our narrow identities.

Roger: Thank you.

Yago: But first of all, we would like to know more about you. You have an experience of over 30 years in community theater organization as a director and as an actor. Could you share with us your beginnings on this field? What brought you to explore theater in your life?

Roger: I’d like to suggest that theatre in all its forms contains this essential element: it is a ritualized enactment of some sort of story.

Like everyone else, I became connected with stories long before I began participating in their enactment, or re-enactment, in anything resembling theatre. I remember my father reading Bible stories to us at family devotions, and I remember hearing stories of the biblical patriarchs and their families in Sunday school and in summertime Bible school. And I remember listening to my mother and father tell stories about their lives, with re-tellings of incidents from their childhoods, from their courtship and early married years, and also with re-tellings of many incidents involving me and my sibs. These story-telling situations taught me both the content contained in these narratives, as well as some rudimentary familiarity and experience with the process of actually telling stories.

One of the most powerful memories I have about stories is from my junior year in high school, when a small group of honor students in junior and senior class were gathered in a classroom, toward the beginning of the school year, to receive what turned out to be an invitation from a new faculty member, to participate in a newly approved and offered language course.

On the blackboard, Mr. Alan Lerner wrote out three lines of Attic Greek text:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ
Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην,

The mysterious hieroglyphic characters stood in for an idea, and that idea was the opening of the Homeric invocation section of the Iliad: “Sing, muse, of the baneful wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles.” Mr. Lerner proposed to equip volunteers from the group with the linguistic tools to read and reason with the stories of Homer. And with the stories, ideas, theories and politics of Aeschylus, Plato, Menander, and Euclid, and Pericles while we were at it.

And for the next year, I was part of a small group of students who engaged in the linguistic and philosophical—if not yet theatrical—enterprise of wrestling with Achilles’ destructive wrath, Socrates’ questions on the nature of love, Euclid’s description of the congruence among geometric forms, and the flowering of the Golden Age of the Greek city-state.

Thus began a new chapter in the life-long journey of self-discovery, with Mr. Lerner and blind Homer as guides.

About the same time, I joined a high school thespian group and participated as an actor in productions of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” and “The Miracle Worker,” William Gibson’s adaptation of Helen Keller’s autobiography “The Story of My Life.”

As an actor with the group, I collaborated in both the enactment of a story fashioned by others, and the simultaneous creation of a new story, the “story” of my interactions with other cast members, our faculty director, and production crew members. For “Miracle Worker,” that second story included an unrequited crush on the actress playing Kate Keller.

Photo credit: https://www.eventbrite.com

In college, I was the student director of a production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” a series of performances that came off fairly well, due to the efforts of the actors, and in spite of my superficial engagement with the play.

In 1976 I moved with my very young family (a wife and two sons) to Coshocton, Ohio, where I was invited to join the local amateur community theatre group, the Footlight Players. For the next 30 years, I participated with the Footlight Players as an actor, director, producer, designer and critic, collaborating in both the enactment of stories fashioned by others and the simultaneous creation of many new stories of interactions with other Footlight Players members, audiences, my family, and the community.   

Yago: Thanks for sharing your background on this field! Roger, theatre can be understood as a process where people create stories. Why is so important for humanity to create stories? How does theatre help us to become more human?

Roger: Actually, my sense is that most of the work of theatre folk involves the enactment of stories, rather than their creation. Certainly, playwrights may be understood to fashion “new” stories that provide the repertoire for companies who enact them in an unfolding process of presentation and refinement. We might, however, have stimulating and interesting discussions about the extent to which a new script is actually the creation of a new story, and the extent to which it is rather the encoding and recording of a story that has already been created in the playwright’s experience. And I’ve suggested that the pragmatic collaboration of theatre folk that moves toward the presentation of a story could itself be considered the creation of a new story, a story about the process of collaboration and working with other humans to create something of beauty.

At the heart of these stories, whether a dramatic or comic tale or the narrative of the collaborative process, is the drive to satisfy the basic human need of meaning—making. We humans appear to be the species which seeks, relentlessly, to make meaning of our existence and of our experiences. In the theatre, we continue the tradition begun by our ancestors around the primordial campfires at the end of day. Telling stories in the theatre is akin to the energetic re-enactment of the hunt; we tell these stories to help our listeners understand what it means to be human on the planet. The stories help us to be more human by providing examples of heroes and buffoons, failures and successes, to inform, to illumine, to challenge, and to inspire us as we reflect on our human condition and journey.   

Yago: It looks to me that life itself is a theatre, a performance where we are all actors and spectators at the same time; unfortunately there are also the oppressors and the oppressed. In the 1960’s Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal created a new theatrical form described as the Theatre of the Oppressed. Could you share with us what this theatrical form is all about? How is it connected to the work of Paulo Freire and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

Roger: Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) explores and describes theatrical techniques that theatre practitioners use as means of promoting social and political change. In the Theatre of the Oppressed, the audience becomes active, such that as "spect-actors" they explore, show, analyse and transform the reality in which they are living. (Source Wikipedia)

Augusto Boal presenting his workshop on the Theatre of the Oppressed.
Riverside Church. Source: Wikipedia

Paulo Freire’s influence on Boal’s theatrical work is evidenced in the dialogic nature of forms in the TO. The interactive forms are living embodiments of Freire’s understanding that “…to enter into dialogue presupposes equality amongst participants. Each must trust the others; there must be mutual respect and love (care and commitment). Each one must question what he or she knows and realizes that through dialogue existing thoughts will change and new knowledge will be created.”

Yago: I am especially intrigued by Augusto Boal’s term “spect-actor”? What does he mean by that? How does it challenge the conventional understanding of a spectator?

Roger: One of the critiques of traditional theatre is that it is organized and implemented primarily for the benefit of society’s elites. The various forms of TO seek to empower disadvantaged members of society through a number of means, principally by re-organizing the content of theatrical productions and by using processes that intentionally blur the distinction between actor and spectator.

The term “spect-actor” is technically connected to the specific TO form designated “Forum Theatre,” where those involved in the process serve the dual role of being both spectator and actor, as they both observe and create dramatic meaning and action in any performance.

Boal emphasizes the critical need to prevent the marginalization of the audience. The term "spectator" brands the participants as less than human; hence, is necessary to humanize them, to restore to them their capacity for action in all its fullness. They must also be a subject, an actor on equal plane with those accepted as actors, who in turn must also be spectators. This will eliminate any notions of the ruling class and the theatre solely portraying their ideals while the audience being the passive victims of those images. This way the spectators no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or act in their place. They free themselves; they think and act for themselves (Source: Wikipedia).

Yago: In 1975 Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas founded the first Playback Theatre company. Could you share with us the meaning and purpose of this theatrical form? How is it connected to the Theater of the Oppressed?

Jonathan Fox

Roger: Playback theatre lives at what Jonathan Fox describes as the intersection of art, social interaction, and ritual. It is an improvisational form of interactive theatre where, with the guidance of a facilitator (called the conductor), volunteer members of the audience share moments or stories from their life experience. Using a variety of improvisational forms, a group of three to six actors and musicians “play back” or enact the stories for the audience. The conductor leads the group in a brief discussion of the story, and the responses of the volunteer and the audience to the story that has been “played back.”

Like most of the forms of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), playback theatre is improvisational, and is often used in the service of promoting social change. Like Boal, Jonathan Fox was influenced by his study of Paulo Freire. Playback theatre however, is not a form of TO, nor is it connected structurally or historically to TO.

Yago: Could you go more in-depth explaining the relationship between playback theatre and ritual?

Roger: The processes and forms of playback theatre include a number of small rituals that help create a shape and container for the experience. For example, at the conclusion of an enactment, the actors always face the teller and acknowledge the teller’s contribution before returning to their seats. 

Yago: Ritual can be disconnected from life. How does playback theatre challenges repetitive and life-less ritual?

Roger: Most of the rituals embodied in the processes and forms of playback theatre are invisible to most of the participants. Some of the rituals are little more than pre-meditated but unspoken agreements among the actors about how the “performance” will proceed. For example, when the conductor indicates the actors will enact the teller’s story using the short form called “pairs,” the first actor to perform is the actor in the downstage right position. In other forms, the actor designated as the “teller’s actor” sets the stage and begins the enactment. Other rituals involve the order and locations from which actors enter and exit the playing space.

The net effect of these rituals is a smoothly flowing, connected performance that communicates to the audience a sense of the expertise of the performing group, a sense that enhances the notion of the dignity of the audience and its volunteer tellers. (“Imagine; a group this professional thinks enough of me and my story to give it their full attention and their best creative efforts!”) The perception of dignity is strengthened by the rituals (as noted above) that intentionally acknowledge the contribution of the volunteer teller.

Yago: How would you describe the underlying values, beliefs and attitudes in playback theatre?

Roger: These thoughts from co-founder Jonathan Fox, recounting his theatrical quest in the early 1970s, are instructive:

“I had discovered my métier in the theatre. It was theatre of a particular kind—without scripts, personal, informal… with all sorts of groups, including very young children, the handicapped, the elderly, and people on the street. The iconoclasm and anti-elitism fueling the experimental theatre movement fueled me, too.

From my university studies in oral epics, I understood that stories in pre-literate societies were always more than mere entertainment: they contained the knowledge of the tribe, both historical and ethical… If we could only get hold of that!

Thus Playback Theatre was grounded in an espousal of modern populist ethos, dramatic improvisation, and the ancient oral tradition.

We came on stage with nothing but our readiness to enact the thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences of whoever wanted to tell.

Our first five years of practice and performance enabled us to learn that indeed peoples’ everyday experiences could be dramatized with power.”

New members contributed ideas from the own particular arenas of expertise, including a Rogerian emphasis on acceptance and mutual respect.

“What we felt but could not in those early years articulate was the deep satisfaction of enabling these people’s stories to be heard, first by the tellers themselves, then by their peers, their helpers, and not least by us… we responded to the popular wisdom voiced in these stories and the healing power of empathy.”

Yago: Jonathan Fox wrote that one of his aims in creating playback theatre was always to make a theatre that was as good for the actors as it was for the audience. What did he mean by that?

Roger: For Fox, the underlying commitment to process (more than to a completed product) means creating an atmosphere suitable to the performers’ sharing their own stories, prior to asking audiences to share theirs. That means striving for what he describes as “a genuinely positive group life, as well as working to enchant audiences.”

As a consequence, playback theatre creates an environment of collaboration and collective work that is embodied, secondly, in the way the actors, musicians, and conductor work with the volunteer teller to create an enactment. But that environment of collaboration is developed first in the preparatory work of the troupe, where relationships of trust allow the deepening of creative skills, a situation that is as good for the actors as for the audience.

Many playback theatre actors would report that their time in a playback troupe counts among the most joyful and fulfilling work they have done in the theatre.    

Yago: Before we talked about story-telling, playback theatre is understood as a primal connection to the human storytelling tradition. How? Why do tellers tell?

Roger: Playback theatre, from its inception, has been grounded in improvisational theatre, storytelling, and psychodrama. Note that founder Jonathan Fox considers the grounding in the oral tradition as essential for gathering “the knowledge of the tribe, both historical and ethical…”

One could easily picture a playback storytelling event taking place at a contemporary version of the primordial end-of-day campfires of our ancestors, where a traveling bard invokes the spirit of a muse in the enactment of stories of the heroes and gods. At a playback event, however, the “heroes and gods” of the narrative are the volunteer tellers who—for the sake of momentary glory, for the edification of the group, or for the comforting validation the group will bestow upon them—share a moment or story from their very ordinary, everyday lives.

 

People at a playback storytelling event are sometimes surprised at the extraordinary content or meaning of the stories that people carry, even in their ordinariness. As playback theatre engages with the stories of everyday folk, the process accesses and promotes the dignity of the tellers, and in their listening participation, of the rest of the audience.

By creating the appropriately safe, welcoming and nurturing environment for such storytelling, and by facilitating the group in the storytelling processes, the playback troupe of actors, musicians, and conductor perform significantly valuable acts of service for the individuals who share their stories (either by telling or listening), as well as for the gathered community.

Yago: In playback theatre people are more interested in the process than in the result. You say that the skills are important but the goal is to do a good job with the process. It looks to me that playback theatre can be understood as a process-oriented activity. Could you explain more about this?

Roger: Folks in playback theatre are very interested in the results of the playback process, but they understand the results in ways that differ from the results one expects in traditional script-oriented performance-driven theatre. In that theatre form, the final performance is the sought-after result, with the collaborative efforts of all participants directed primarily toward reaching that goal.

Playback practitioners focus their efforts on the collaborative, improvisational process, with the understanding that the performance outcomes and the social outcomes will vary from event to event.

What they seek in addressing the process over the product is to establish an environment where participants feel safe, empowered, and validated as they work collaboratively to tell and enact the stories the group, in its collective wisdom, brings forward for examination and celebration.

 

In this context, typical theatrical skills such as acting, directing, set design, lighting and sound design, choreography, and the like are not considered essential components of the success of the process. It does help to have good acting skills, and playback musicians need to be able to improvise as well as the actors. But individuals can be successful and valuable playback practitioners even with limited experience in acting, musicianship, or group facilitation.

Yago: Play-back is also an embodied presentation of the tellers’ stories. What role the body plays in playback theatre?

Roger: Because playback theatre creates enactments, the stories “leave” the reflective brain of the person who carries the story, and “enter” the visible, auditory, and kinesthetic realm of the shared playing space. In an enactment, actors move through space, they hang their heads in despair, they hug a friend or family member, they shout or scream their frustration or anger, and they ask questions and give answers to others in the stories they are enacting. In this environment, the tellers and audience move past a merely cognitive engagement with the story elements, and share in the embodiment of those elements. As mirror neurons in the cortex engage in the hearing/seeing of the experience, (I believe) the non-acting participants (especially the volunteer tellers) experience some of the cathartic value of the storytelling process along with the actors. 

Yago: Trauma is stored in our bodies. You say that playback theatre is not always a good idea for people who have been severely traumatised. Can playback theatre misguide people and create unnecessary harm?

Roger: Practitioners who work with people whose personal history includes some severely traumatizing events, or whose personal narratives contain elements that keep them “stuck” in or “enslaved” to unhelpful processes or behaviors, often intuit—correctly, I believe—that a theatrical exploration of the clients’ stories might help them develop insight and resilience or break the bondage of an unhelpful narrative.

And this can be a good thing. But it can create some problems.

As an art form, theatre is one of the most accessible of all creative expressions, and can be practiced well with much less “professional” preparation than many other art forms. This is both a blessing and a curse: creative folks can begin to become adept practitioners of the theatre arts—at some level—quickly and with just a little training. But, although few people would consider themselves proficient as a violinist, or sculptor, or portrait artist after only a few lessons, people who want to use theatre as a therapeutic tool are not always so cautious.

Theatrical performances, in general, effectively engage many of the bodily senses as mediators of the story. Because sensory experiences serve as trigger mechanisms for our emotions, theatrical performances—even without the excess stimuli of spectacular lighting splayed along intricate set pieces, intricate choreography, lush orchestration, and a highly polished script—are consequently capable of engaging participants at a very deep emotional level. 

People whose personal story contains some recent or unresolved conflict or trauma experiences are vulnerable—in these moments of stimulation—to sometimes disturbing and sometimes disabling memories or reflections of their traumatogenic or conflict-generating experiences. In these cases, the “cure” can be as bad as, or worse than, the “disease.” 

In these situations, well-intentioned people can be misguided, and their actions can cause significant and unnecessary harm.

People often speak of this experience as something that is “re-traumatizing” the one whose story is told. I believe it is one of the most significant drawbacks to the practice of using theatre techniques to engage difficult narratives, and I have been horrified to see the evidence of such misuse.

Yago: So, could playback theatre be used in a way that is not ethical? 

Roger: I suppose that hypothetically, this kind of thing could happen. People who are inclined to behave outside of the constraints and wisdom of good ethics will find a justification for behaviors that I would consider improper.

But I think that kind of behavior is extremely unlikely from practitioners who have completed an accredited program of training in playback theatre, where ethics and a sensitivity to conflict and trauma are part of the rigour of the training. If playback or any other form of theatre were to be used in an unethical situation, I believe that would be much more likely to occur when a “practitioner,” through either neglect or arrogance, took up some techniques without appropriate training in those techniques.

From Jonathan Fox: “With experience we have learned that playback theatre can command great power. This power can be utilized for good or ill. Undertaking a playback event takes an unusual collection of skills—thus the need for training.”

Yago: In the same line, you say that play-back people are not therapists, but the process can be very therapeutic itself. How?

Roger: Although some playback theatre practitioners have training or experience in psychodrama, a Playback event is not conducted by psychotherapists, and it is not structured as a therapy session. The process of participating in a Playback event, however, can be quite therapeutic. Participants often gain insight, catharsis, and connection to an empathetic audience of persons with similar experience. Further, the self-expression of telling one’s story, mirrored in the actors’ enactments, provides an affirmation of the innate dignity of the storyteller.

Yago: You are now in the process of marrying together playback theatre technique and Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR). Could you explain to us how beneficial can be this marrying process?

Roger: In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, faculty members at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding developed a training program for first responders; the curriculum encompassed and integrated concepts from trauma awareness, conflict transformation, restorative justice, human security, and spirituality. Titled STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience), the program has developed and expanded over the years, both in terms of its offerings and its audiences.

Members of Inside Out Playback Theatre performing at EMU

Many of the members of the playback theatre troupe with which I am associated, the Inside Out Playback Theatre at Eastern Mennonite University, have taken various levels of STAR training. We believe that becoming more trauma-sensitive and more resilience-oriented in our personal lives is helping us to become better playback actors, conductors, and musicians. We believe we have a heightened awareness of trauma- or resilience-driven story elements that help us to better understand and enact a teller’s story, especially when that story contains some trauma or resilience elements.

Largely as a consequence of this training and our connection to the STAR program, we have expanded our audience as groups have invited us to work with specialized audiences such as people who are incarcerated or people who are survivors of childhood and sexual abuse.  

Yago: In the context of Eastern Mennonite University playback theatre is being used as a way to debrief the cross-cultural experience of the students. You say that “this is not about conflict but about trauma. The student needs to process a lot of stuff, they have had an experience that challenges some of their foundational assumptions about life…” Could you explain to us how beneficial playback theatre can be in this debriefing process?

Roger: The Cross-Cultural study program at EMU is unique in that it is a requirement for graduation for all undergraduates. For more than 30 years, most EMU students have completed their cross-cultural study in semester-long deep engagement (not just studies at a foreign university) in cultures outside North America, often in situations of conflict or unrest.

Alumna Liz Gannaway, graduate student Bridget Mullins, 

Theatre Department Chair Heidi Winters Vogel, 

and Senior Isaac Tice performing one student’s story.

Almost without exception, folks from North America who engage deeply in other cultures find that the experience challenges many of the foundational assumptions they carry about life. Add to this baseline that some of the students from EMU may have experienced some trauma, or secondary trauma, beyond normal culture shock, as a part of their travels.

In this circumstance, sharing stories at a playback theatre storytelling event can help students, as well as their faculty advisors, process their feelings and insights related to their cross-cultural experience. Shared stories of everyday experiences in the new culture, of re-entry to the home culture, of trauma events, and of resilience, allow the volunteer tellers (and the rest of the audience) to collaborate in the embodiment of their communal and individual experience.

Further, sharing with an audience composed of other members of their travel group allows participants to feel connected with others on the same or similar journey, often at a time when their normal support system of family and friends has grown weary of “hearing your stories again,” and is pressuring the traveler to discontinue their reflections and “get on with life here.”

In cases where student participants are dealing, successfully or unsuccessfully, with some lingering impacts of trauma, the shared storytelling in a playback event can help the students deal with their own trauma effects, as well as become informed allies with others who are processing their experiences.  

Yago: You say that one of the concerns in the cross-cultural playback theatre is how safe people feel in telling their stories. Are we talking here about the danger of re-traumatization? Could you share more about this?

Roger: At Inside Out, when we talk about safety we mean a couple of things. Playback theatre, in general, seeks to create an environment where people who are often strangers to one another feel comfortable sharing some details or moments of their lives that often turn out to be fairly intimate or confidential, stories they may have never shared in another setting or with other people. Part of the role of the conductor is to help the troupe establish this sense of safety with the whole audience, and especially with the volunteer tellers. The conductor’s demeanor is accepting and welcoming; the troupe typically begins by sharing (briefly) some moment from their own lives, both to establish some connection with the audience and to demonstrate some of the theatrical forms the audience might expect to see throughout the performance.

Because we often deal with situations where tellers may be vulnerable to “re-traumatization,” we employ a few helpful safeguards. First, we follow two tried-and-true rules of Playback procedure: tellers are informed volunteers—no one is forced or compelled to tell a story—and tellers are limited to telling their own story, and are not telling a story on behalf or in place of someone else. Nearly all cases of re-traumatizing happen when a story sharer is not in control of the telling of their story, and Playback procedures in general don’t go there.

Second, because we have some connection to the members and leaders of the cross-cultural study groups, we are usually aware in advance of existing issues that could be areas of potential difficulty. The same applies when we are dealing with specialized audiences: our pre-event preparation includes discussions with the sponsoring group’s leaders about the same kinds of issues.

Third, when we know we are dealing with an audience whose members may be carrying some stories or narratives of trauma, we ensure there is at least one mental health professional in the audience.

Yago: Let us talk about identity. You say that “what we have learnt as peace-builders is that often the conflict people have is related to identity issues. Very often peace-builders are engaged in an activity that is inviting people to re-story their lives, to expand their story. What is the contribution of playback theatre in helping to re-examine and expand people’s stories?

Roger: One of the most notable benefits of the enactment process is that volunteer tellers experience their stories as portrayed by the actors. The expression of the story is no longer limited to the continuous self-referencing loop that runs through the teller’s mind with its emotionally freighted meaning systems and self-perpetuating feedback loops. This process makes it possible, though not guaranteed, to allow the teller to perceive elements in the narrative that might seem different to another person, to see the limits of meaning the teller’s original narrative may be perpetuating. When a teller becomes an audience member listening to and watching the actors’ enactment of a similar story from a different volunteer teller, it is possible for tellers to see how incorporating elements from the story of the other could expand or revise their own narrative. These are small steps, but they can lead to large changes. 

Yago: It seems to me that one of the ways we begin to heal is when we start to lose identification with our trauma becoming objective observant of it. In play-back the spectator (teller) becomes the observer of his/her own story. Is like stepping outside yourself and looking at your own story from a different perspective. You say that people have used play-back as a way to generate dialogue between people of opposing groups. Could you give us examples? How successful has it been?

Armand Volkas

Roger: Playback practitioners have conducted storytelling sessions that included volunteer tellers from Israel and Arab countries near Israel. Notable efforts in this regard have been led by psychotherapist Armand Volkas, a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters, who uses techniques of ritual and drama in his workshops, Healing the Wounds of History, which bring together groups with a history of collective trauma between them.

Yago: You say that when our narrative is under attack then our tendency is to strengthen it, then we take the risk of becoming enslaved of what we want to protect, it becomes a limited and dysfunctional narrative. Could you explain more about this?

Roger: Most of us react defensively to what we experience as attacks on our narrative systems, particularly our identity narratives. We perceive such attacks as violations of our essential dignity. And most of us respond to such attacks by a shoring up of our defenses; we meet attacks which are aimed at “weaknesses” in our narrative systems by reinforcing our belief or our working commitment to those elements of the narrative. From this defensive posture, it is almost impossible to see that there actually might be some weaknesses or deficiencies in the logic, or validity, or the application of our narrative. And this inability to dispassionately assess our narratives leads us to stubbornly hold to them, even if they are not helpful. They can become limiting and dysfunctional, causing us to harm ourselves or fail to see ways to help ourselves. 

Yago: You say that one of the most important teachings you have received in the peacebuilding studies is that the greatest and more transformative intervention is simply listening to someone. Why is so transformative?

Roger: I’m not sure of all the dynamics involved, but this is what I believe: violations of dignity, whether intentional or unintentional, and whether small and every-day or large and acutely disruptive, form and feed most of conflicts in the world today. And that goes for conflicts at every level, from the interpersonal to organizational to community to societal. The fundamental act of listening—really listening—to someone, whether friend or foe, enemy or ally, begins the process of reversing and lifting the whole accumulated weight of the many dignity violations that reinforce the destructive narratives so many of us are carrying. Many more steps will be needed to complete the process, yes. But I believe it often begins with this fundamental intervention: listening.

That is the core of the many forms of qualitative research; it is central to narrative reconstruction; and it is the heart of playback theatre. And it’s one reason I have such great hopes for playback theatre as a force in the world.  

  

Yago: You say that in the “peacebuilding industrial complex” there are people who are not sensitive enough in understanding how difficult is to change people’s narratives, especially those narratives which are formed by suffering. You say that this is very arrogant on our side. What are the risks we face on this regard?

Roger: Some members of the helping professions, including many in the “peacebuilding industrial complex,” have surprisingly little experience or skill in the process of revising one’s personal narrative, particularly narratives that are rooted in intergenerational suffering or trauma. Some of these people are amazingly arrogant in their expectation that individuals and communities with whom they work can revise their self-referencing, self-reinforcing and unhelpful narratives quickly, efficiently, and without anguish. The failure of these “helpers” to recognize the systemic nature of these personal and community identity narratives prevents them from being empathetic, from being patient enough to stay with an enduring conflict long enough, and from avoiding doing more harm in the short term.

Fundamental to the process of “walking alongside” suffering masses of folk through history is the sensitivity of one who has worked through the process—what Henri Nouwen calls a “wounded healer”—and consequently has an empathic and a long view of the road to wholeness. That’s one reason why Moses, for example, was an important leader in the journey of his people out of slavery.

Yago: Also, the capacity of observing one’s story as performed by the actors looks to me like a mirroring phenomenon. In this regard, you say that play-back is a methodology that is congruent with discoveries in the field of neurobiology, especially about the function of “mirror neurons.” Could you expand on this?

Roger: This is a part of our emphasis on process over product, or results.

Contemporary research in the field of neurobiology suggests there are specific physiological mechanisms that contribute to learning from the stories of others. The so-called “mirror neurons” are believed to fire both when an individual acts and when the individual observes the same action performed by another [see this article by Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Craighero, Laila. (2004). "The mirror-neuron system". Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169–192.]  Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.

Many researchers in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology consider that this system provides the physiological mechanism for the coupling of perception and action; they argue that mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation.

What this suggests is that one reason people find playback theatre fulfilling is that they are able to learn effective expressions of emotions like anger, or sadness, or other forms of resilience, from the “mirrored” experience of the shared stories they witness. It helps explain why audience members often say, after a performance, “I felt like those were my stories, even though I wasn’t one of the volunteer tellers. It helped me so much just to see the story acted out.”

Yago: It looks to me that another important dimension in healing is the capacity to live in the now. Could we say that in playback theatre we are honoring the here and now of people?

Roger: Even when playback tellers share a story or moment from their long-ago past, they and the rest of the audience experience the enactment in the present moment. Thus, they see, hear, and feel the story from their present reality, which often includes a more mature or nuanced skill set to help them deal with the story and learn from it. 

Yago: To end the interview, could you share with us how meaningful and useful playback theatre has been in the healing of your own journey?

Roger: I was raised in a fairly complex and dysfunctional family system where dignity violations and trauma generated by physical and emotional harm were the norm for many members, reaching across multiple generations. A significant part of my healing journey has involved the ability to re-shape and expand my personal and family narrative. One of the many gifts the Universe has provided me for this task is the opportunity to be a part of the Inside Out Playback Theatre at EMU, where I have performed as a collaborative co-creator in the processes of story, and where I have watched some of my own stories enacted for my nurture and learning. 

Yago: Roger, I am very grateful for your sharing. This interview is a great contribution to this blog. Playback theatre is a living example of the new emerging areas of investigation in the peacebuilding field; a field that is becoming more and more integral.  

Roger: You're very welcome!