The Bridge: Toward
Relational Aesthetic
Inquiry in the Montreal
Life Stories Project
Nisha Sajnani, Warren Linds, Lisa Ndejuru, Alan Wong, and
Members of the Living Histories Ensemble
This is the story of the Bridge, an original interactive theatre form that brings audiences
and actors into a dialogical relationship marked by the principle of ‘‘shared authority’’
(Frisch xx) and relational aesthetic inquiry (Springgay, Irwin, and Kind). This form
emerged from the reflective practice of our troupe, the Living Histories Ensemble
(LHE)1, a socially-engaged improvisational theatre collective exploring the intersections
of oral history, performance, trauma, and emergent inquiry within a Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project titled Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Human Rights Violations.
Of the project’s seven core working groups—each of which is comprised of both
academic and community partners—four are focused on creating a digital archive of
life stories related to mass atrocities and crimes against humanity, specifically The Shoah,
the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the political
violence under the Duvalier regime in Haiti. The remaining working groups are concerned with the realities of refugee youth, with the integration of oral histories into
educational curricula, and with their circulation through radio, film, music, theatre, and
new media toward reconfiguring notions of Canadian history, identity, citizenship, and
social responsibility.
The Living Histories Ensemble (LHE) arose from a collaboration between the Oral
History and Performance working group of the Life Stories project and Creative Alternatives, a network of creative social innovators and a community organization with a
long history of providing training on the arts in health care, education, and advocacy
in Montreal. Our Ensemble is comprised of a multilingual and multi-ethnic group of
Canadians who have had to negotiate histories of displacement and collective violence.
Nisha Sajnani / 8 ctr 148 fall 2011
doi: 10.3138/ctr.148.18
Silences and secrets: members of the Living Histories Ensemble
play back stories offered by survivor-educators associated with the
Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, October 2010.
Coexisting with/responding to suffering: players improvise divergent,
contiguous responses to a genocide researcher’s disturbing story,
June 2009.
All photographs by David Ward / lab six and a half
Bearing witness through spontaneous gesture: playing back the
experiences of interviewers and researchers participating in the
community-university project Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced
by Genocide, War and Other Human Rights Abuses, June 2009.
Artful communion: the Living Histories Playback Ensemble debriefs
and reflects following a community ‘‘conversation.’’
ctr 148 fall 2011
A tableau of associations: meeting and reflecting each teller’s
story.
19
Struggling to connect in a liminal space: a community conversation
in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, February 2010.
We are artist-scholars diversely experienced in theatre-based
facilitation, drama therapy, and community organizing, as
well as various forms of improvisation. We also share a depth
of experience in Playback Theatre (PT), a specific form of
non-scripted theatre developed by Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas
in 1975 that involves the spontaneous enactment of lived
experience through a variety of improvised forms (Fox).
A typical Playback Theatre performance involves a
‘‘Conductor,’’ a facilitator who invites stories from audience
members (referred to as ‘‘tellers’’) and ushers these narratives onto the stage where they are interpreted by actors
and underscored by a musician. After each enactment, the
conductor invites individual tellers and the audience to comment on their experiences of bearing witness. We chose PT
because of the flexible container(s) it creates for the sharing
of oral histories within a collective setting. The relevance
of PT as a form of community-engaged theatre practice has
been related to its capacity to:
1)
2)
3)
4)
counter-oppressive, dominant narratives by providing
space for marginalized stories to be heard (Fox, Salas);
acknowledge differing perspectives and facilitate reconciliation (Volkas, Hutt and Hosking);
facilitate a ‘‘culture of remembrance,’’ wherein ordinary
and extraordinary lived experiences are valued and
memorialized (Feldhendler); and
foster a spirit of collaborative and aesthetic inquiry
among actors and audiences (McKenna; Sajnani et al.).
PT has also had to contend with important challenges
such as the potential trap of reproducing culturally homogenizing representations of another’s experience, thereby
replicating the very power dynamics that sustain harmful
marginalization (Rowe). There is also the challenge of simultaneous dramaturgy, wherein PT actors are called to interpret immediately each teller’s experience in ways that are
20
neither emotionally indulgent, nor too literal, nor overly
intellectualized. Breathable metaphors that can exist in the
space between, what Robert Landy refers to as ‘‘aesthetic
distance,’’ are especially important when traversing the unpredictable emotional geography of displacement and social
cohesion. Perhaps the greatest challenge of PT lies deep
within its structural aesthetic, which presents the conductor,
actors, and musician as impartial and benign in what Fox
refers to as ‘‘acts of service’’ to another’s experience (Sajnani
and Johnson).
During one of our rehearsals in the early autumn of
2009, we began to experiment with the Rhapsody, a form
in which the actors stand in a straight line with their backs
to the audience. One by one, in random order, they turn
clockwise to face the audience and reflect back their interpretation of the teller’s experience, returning to face the
back wall when another actor turns to address the audience.
Their ‘‘rotating voices’’ end in a still image after each actor
has spoken at least twice.
Navigating an emotional terrain: responding to a story told by a child
survivor of the Shoa, at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre,
October 2010.
Our experimentation was prompted in part by past
criticisms we had heard of PT, particularly following a performance we had done as part of the International Day for
Sharing Life Stories in May 2009. These criticisms focused
primarily on what was perceived to be the overtly confessional nature of PT, in that audience members would recount
often very personal and deeply emotional narratives in a
public setting and entrust the ensuing interpretation to complete strangers in the Ensemble. Like priests in a confessional
booth, we held their stories in our possession and assumed
their consent to our interpretation while giving nothing of
ourselves in return. This, in effect, worked against the spirit
of shared authority, which Michael Frisch articulates as
‘‘what should not only be the distribution of knowledge
The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project
un/knowing and flux, wherein the knowledges that arise
are ambiguous, open-ended, and surprising, often leaving us
(Ensemble and audience) in a state of aisthesis, ‘‘a breathing
in, or taking in, of the world, the gasp, ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the
breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response’’
(Hillman 107).
‘‘So Much’’: An example of the Bridge
Celebrating possibilities amidst difficult memories at the Montreal
Holocaust Memorial Centre, October 2010.
from those who have it to those who do not, but a more profound sharing of knowledges’’ (our emphasis) (xxii). Thus, to
a number of observers, it appeared that we had forsaken the
sharing in favour of the telling.
We chose to adapt the Rhapsody so that the teller’s story
would be met with a sharing of the actors’ own memories
before returning to an embodied reflection of the tellers’ experience. In a performance for the Canadian Association for
Theatre Research at the 2010 Congress of the Social Science
and Humanities, an audience member described what he had
witnessed by referring to Peggy Phelan’s metaphor of the
bridge. Phelan asserts that we will never completely understand that which is different from ourselves, but that we
need to see this inevitability as generative: ‘‘It is in the
attempt to walk (and live) on the rackety bridge between
self and other—and not the attempt to arrive at one side or
the other—that we discover real hope’’ (174). We found the
Bridge to be a suitable name for the encounter that this form
encourages.
PT actors are called to interpret
immediately each teller’s experience
in ways that are neither emotionally
indulgent, nor too literal, nor overly
intellectualized.
By ‘‘performing process’’ (Mündel 147), the Bridge attempts to interrupt assumptions that the interpretation
offered by the actors is in any way definitive or authoritative,
but rather an assemblage of the associations that arise as each
actor attempts to meet the teller. This liminal space, formed
when beings encounter one another, becomes a space of
ctr 148 fall 2011
This is a transcript of an example of the Bridge performed
within the context of a conference titled, Remembering War,
Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, New
Media, and the Arts, held in Montreal, 5–8 November 2009.
Nisha Sajnani, our Conductor, provided the audience with a
brief history of our practice as well as a summary of the
questions that our Ensemble had been grappling with.
Phelan asserts that we will never
completely understand that which
is different from ourselves, but that
we need to see this inevitability
as generative.
Nisha: One of our questions has been about the value of circulating memories, especially memories of ‘‘displacement.’’
What is the relationship between sharing these stories and
moving towards a culture of ‘‘never again?’’ What about
memories of being ‘‘placed,’’ if there is such a state? We
have also been reflecting on what is gained by translating
oral histories into metaphors in performance. Can poetic reflections, such as those offered in PT, facilitate our collective
capacities to coexist with and respond to suffering? Finally, in
what ways does this medium permit us to ‘‘share authority?’’
So far, you will have noticed that our team has been playing
your stories back while appearing neutral. We have been
experimenting with how to connect our experiences–our
bodies, our histories—with that of each teller through a
technique we’ve been calling the ‘‘Bridge.’’ We’d like to
model it for you. Warren is going to share an experience
from his life that relates to the questions we’ve been attending to in this project. However, instead of playing back
Warren’s experience immediately, the actors are going to
reflect on their own experiences relating to what they are
hearing Warren say, then they are going to come back to
offer a poetic reflection of Warren’s story.
Warren: (Sits next to the Conductor, facing the audience.)
When I was growing up as a child, I remember that a lot of
the TV documentaries, pictures, films showed bodies stacked
up during the Holocaust. None of my family were survivors
or were related to anyone who had been murdered. Later on
I found out there were some, but I didn’t know that at the
21
Joliane: (Turns, beat.) I was a bike tour guide, and we were
crossing Slovakia to get to Poland. I remember going with all
the people I was guiding at the time—there were about
twenty—for the first time to Auschwitz. I remember going
into the parking lot and seeing all these buses and buses—
The Bridge: actors reflect, then rotate in turn to offer the teller a
related personal experience.
time. And I remember shielding myself, wanting to stop. I
don’t want to watch this anymore. It’s too much. Why do
we have to keep seeing this? I recall from the film Friday
night when the film had been shown about the women killed
in Iran, and it was minutes upon minutes of recitation and
pictures and dissonant music over and over again, of these
women. As far as I’m concerned, one person killed is
enough. But this kind of loop ... I find myself wondering,
‘‘Okay, I know. I know we died in the Holocaust. I know.
It’s enough, this fatigue of feeling washing over me as a child.
Nisha: This fatigue of feeling washing over you.
Warren: And wanting to turn it off.
Nisha: (To actors.) A fatigue of feeling and wanting to turn it
off. Let’s watch.
(Actors turn their backs to the audience in the form of the
Rhapsody as musician [Alan] plays a steady percussive rhythm.)
Lisa: (Turns to face audience, beat.) I remember in 1994, sitting
in Montreal at my uncle’s place on Jeanne Mance street,
watching TV, and clicking back and forth (Motions as if using
TV remote control.) from the Balkan situation to the Rwandan
situation. There were faxes coming in, telephone calls. And
it was this non-stop thing. And I was wondering, okay, this
is not a football game—
Lucy: (Turns, beat.) I remember when I was in high school
and my teacher started talking about the Holocaust, and I
said, ‘‘What’s the Holocaust?’’ And she just looked at me
incredulously and said, ‘‘You don’t know about the Holocaust?’’ And I just thought, ‘‘No one told me. I don’t know
about this. How come no one told me about this?’’—
Deborah: (Turns, beat.) I remember growing up with a lot of
silence. My grandfather was from Poland. He lost all of his
family there. There was this constant silence. It just wasn’t
spoken about. They didn’t say anything—
22
Lisa: (Turns, beat.)—and then on the TV screen there was
this picture of hacking and hacking (Motions with arms as if
hacking at someone with machete.) and I was just (Mouth open,
sound of shock.), and then hacking and hacking (Slashing air
with arms.)—and I thought, this can’t be happening (Clutches
head.)—and hacking and hacking (More hacking motions.)—
how come we can film it but we can’t stop it? And then it
would loop all over every time, all the time, all this hacking
and hacking, and I was, this can’t be happening, this can’t be
happening—
Lucy: (Turns, beat.) How am I supposed to know if I don’t
know the story? How am I supposed to know if I don’t
know the story? (Freezes.)
Deborah: (Turns, beat.) How am I supposed to understand if
I haven’t heard anything? (Freezes.)
Joliane: (Turns, beat.) It just felt so strange to go into that
place and seeing everything for real that I’ve seen in pictures
over and over and the gates and the trees—the trees! The
trees! The same trees! (Stretches arms vertically as if measuring
the height of a tree, freezes.)
Lisa: (Turns, beat.) It’s very strange to think that this hacking,
hacking thing, even today, we’re still working on this, we
can’t get out of it. (Freezes.)
(Musician taps a bell for five beats. Silence. He then plays a
transitional melody on the xylophone as actors move into a
‘‘fluid sculpture,’’ wherein the actors create a physical collage of
sound and movement inspired by the teller’s [Warren’s] story.)
(Lisa moves to front and crouches down, one arm stretched
out behind her and the other folded with palm turned outward,
obscuring her face, which is turned away from the audience.
Joliane steps forward and positions herself behind Lisa. She turns
her back to the audience and folds her arms, exclaiming, ‘‘No
more! No more! No more!’’ and repeats this refrain from this
position. Deborah steps forward and positions herself just to
Joliane’s right side and stretches out her left arm towards the
audience, remaining still. Lucy steps forward and positions herself
to Deborah’s right, then turns at a 90! angle from the audience,
then moves her arms in a clockwise motion across her torso,
chanting, ‘‘This constant loop, this constant loop, death upon
death upon death.’’ They become still and the music stops. The
sculpture is held for five seconds, then the actors return to their
original line, facing the audience.)
Nisha: Warren, is there anything else you would like to say
about your experience?
The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project
It foregrounds the potential for both
positive and negative implications
proceeding from personal subject
positions relating to bias, assumption,
and judgement. The [Bridge] requires
that each member of the ensemble
attempt to meet the teller in the story
rather than simply playing it back.
Warren: Well, it was like within me there was a fascination
with it—almost like I want to look, but I don’t want to
look. I want to know why I’m turning it off a little bit
more ... not why I’m turning off ... but why, why is there
so much?
Nisha: So much ... suffering?
Warren: So much.
Nisha: So much. Thank you.
The response to the Bridge has been encouraging. In
his editorial for alt.theatre: Cultural Diversity and the Stage, in
which he discusses the Life Stories project and our Ensemble’s
work, Edward Little writes:
Traditionally [in Playback Theatre], the performers work
to shut down ‘‘self-talk’’—to put aside their personal
responses to the stories told in order to concentrate on
listening deeply to the story and playing it back ‘objectively’ ... [T]he [Bridge] demands a more complex
approach to deep listening to both self and the other. It
foregrounds the potential for both positive and negative
implications proceeding from personal subject positions
relating to bias, assumption, and judgment. The [Bridge]
requires that each member of the ensemble attempt to
meet the teller in the story rather than simply playing it
back—to approach, in Greenspan’s words, becoming
‘‘partners in a conversation.’’ (7)
We have drawn on the Bridge in performances with a
group of child survivors of the Holocaust, with Haitian youth
workers after the recent earthquake in Haiti, with new immigrants and refugees who have suffered persecution because
of their sexual orientation, as part of the annual Commemoration of the Rwandan genocide, and with mixed assemblies
of the Life Stories project. The audience members whose
stories have been responded to through this form have said
that it ‘‘dimensionalized’’ their perspective on their story and
made the actors ‘‘real people.’’ They have also remarked
that it felt ‘‘honest’’; consequently, they felt they could take
more risks in sharing important stories. Playback actors who
have experienced this form have reflected on how it requires
a risk to ‘‘leap’’ both into and out of embodiment. Nick
ctr 148 fall 2011
Rowe makes this more explicit as he raises the paradox in
PT of stressing the importance of the actor’s self along with
‘‘the desire to relinquish the self in order to yield to the
story’’ (105), thus using ‘‘our own experience to help us
better listen to the experiences of others’’ (Howard 168).
Audience members whose stories have
been responded to through this form
have said that it ‘‘dimensionalized’’
their perspective on their story and
made the actors ‘‘real people.’’
The ‘‘aesthethic’’ possibilities of the Bridge, that is to
say its potential as an ethical approach to community-engaged
aesthetic practice, continue to unfold. In the context of the
project’s ideal of shared authority and in PT’s mission to
‘‘draw people closer,’’ the Bridge affords an opportunity for
PT actors to draw closer to the communities with whom
they work. It brings us nearer to Rowe’s call for PT actors
to respond with humanity, in its beauty and failure, toward
finding ways of artfully communing in laughter as well as
loss. It also presents us with what Mieke Bal refers to as an
interactive way of meaning-making, a ‘‘groping’’ process of
discovery that should be evaluated based on its ability to provide access to phenomena not otherwise attainable. In this
way, the Bridge becomes, in the words of Springgay, Irwin,
and Kind, ‘‘a passage to somewhere else’’ (909).
Note
1
Over the past four years of this project, members of the Living
Histories Ensemble (LHE) have included (in alphabetical order)
Joliane Allaire, Florise Boyard, Emily Burkes-Nossiter,
Catherine Dajczman, Bernard Fontbuté, Paul Gareau,
Margarita Guitterez, Dramane Kobe, Warren Linds, Lucy
Lu, Sergio Mendez, Laura Mora, Meena Murugesan, Lisa
Ndejuru, Chu-Lynne Ng, Mira Rozenberg, Nisha Sajnani,
Deborah Simon, and Alan Wong.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide.
Toronto, ON: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print.
Feldhendler, Daniel. ‘‘A Culture of Remembrance.’’ Interplay 12.2
(2001):8–10. Print.
Fox, Jonathan. Acts of Service: Spontaneity, Commitment, Tradition in
the Nonscripted Theatre. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala, 1994. Print.
Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of
Oral and Public History. Albany: State U of New York P, 1990.
Print.
Hillman, James. ‘‘Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the
World.’’ The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World.
Ed. James Hillman. Dallas: Spring, 1992. 89–130. Print.
23
Howard, Peggy. ‘‘Interpreting the Evaluation Experience through
Embodiment, Conversation and Anecdote.’’ Qualitative Studies in
Education 9.2 (1996):167–80. Print.
Hutt, Jenny, and Bev Hosking. ‘‘Playback Theatre: A Creative
Resource for Reconciliation. A working paper of Recasting
Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts.’’ Brandeis.edu.
2004. Web. 28 Jan. 2011.
Landy, Robert. Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in
Drama, Therapy, and Everyday Life. New York: Guilford, 1993.
Print.
Little, Edward. ‘‘Editorial.’’ alt.theatre 7.2 (2009): 6–9. Print.
McKenna, Tarquam. ‘‘Layers of Meaning: Research and Playback
Theatre—A Soulful Construct.’’ Gathering Voices: Essays on Playback Theatre. Eds. Jonathan Fox and Heinrich Dauber. New Palz,
NY: Tusitala, 1999. 172–184. Print.
Mündel, Ingrid. ‘‘Radical Storytelling: Performing Processes in
Canadian Popular Theatre.’’ Theatre Research in Canada 24.1–2
(2003):147–170. Print.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York:
Routledge, 1993. Print.
Rowe, Nick. Playing the Other: Dramatizing Personal Narratives in
Playback Theatre. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2007. Print.
Sajnani, Nisha and David Read Johnson. ‘‘Opening Up Playback
Theatre: Perspectives from Theatre of the Oppressed and
Developmental Transformations.’’ Creative Alternatives 2011.
Web. 2 Feb. 2011.
Sajnani, Nisha, Alan Wong, Warren Linds, Lisa Ndejuru, and
Members of the Living Histories Theatre Ensemble. ‘‘Turning
Together: Playback Theatre, Oral History, and Arts-Based
Research in the Montreal Life Stories Project.’’ Remembering
War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History,
New Media and the Arts. Eds. Steven High, Ry Duong, and
Edward Little. Toronto: U of Toronto P. (Forthcoming.) Print.
24
Salas, Jo. Improvising Real Life. Personal Story in Playback Theatre.
New Palz, NY: Tusitala, 1993. Print.
Springgay, Stephanie, Rita Irwin, and Sylvia Wilson Kind.
‘‘A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text.’’
Qualitative Inquiry 11.6 (2005): 897–912. Print.
Volkas, Armand. ‘‘Healing the Wounds of History: Drama Therapy
in Collective Trauma and Intercultural Conflict Resolution.’’
Current Approaches in Drama Therapy. Eds. David Read Johnson and
Renee Emunah. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 2009. 145–
171. Print.
For more information on the Living Histories Ensemble
(LHE), please see www.creativealternatives.co. You may also
find more information on the Montreal Life Stories Project
at www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca.
Nisha Sajnani, PhD RDT, is director of Creative Alternatives, on
faculty at New York University and Yale University, President-Elect
of the National Association for Drama Therapy, and researcher of
oral history, trauma, arts-based inquiry, critical improvisation, and
engaged pedagogy.
Warren Linds, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Applied Human Sciences, Concordia University and researcher in
performative inquiry and applied theatre.
Lisa Ndejuru is a psychotherapist, an artist/activist in the RwandanCanadian community, a member of the Montreal Life Stories project
steering committee, and a PhD student at Concordia University.
Alan Wong is a PhD candidate in Concordia University’s Special
Individualized Program, focusing on issues of diversity, citizenship,
and identity in Canada.
The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project