PREPARING FOR PLAYBACK THEATRE LEADERSHIP COURSE

Why take anti-racism training?

An ongoing story...

Playback theatre is dedicated to the idea that everyone has a story and every voice deserves to be heard. Unhappily, our societies often discourage individuals from certain groups from speaking up, because of their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or economic class. These patterns of suppression become so ingrained that they are hardly noticed--except to those who must suffer on a daily basis because of them. This is a fact of social life.

At the School of Playback Theatre we are committed to trying our best not to perpetuate such patterns of social injustice. We also believe that to be an effective playback theatre practitioner, an awareness of how oppression works is essential to facilitating audiences and building a successful company life. We recognize that the social realities of race, ethnicity, class, gender, nationality, sexuality, and so forth have a strong impact on the development of a group, its openness to diverse membership, and its ability to welcome all tellers and their stories. If you do not possess these social awareness skills, then significant segments of the population will never want to tell a story with you on the playback theatre stage—and you won't even notice.

Just as we ask our graduates to have a grounding in psychodrama to understand the group process nature of PT, we also strongly recommend every playback practitioner to complete some reading about issues of diversity in your own community and culture, and whenever possible, take a course, at the School or elsewhere, in expanding social awareness.

We invite you to join us in this commitment to justice, and we deeply appreciate the work and exploration that you undertake for this purpose.