Guest: Jo Salas, co-founder of Playback Theatre, international trainer, and author of "Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre," talks about an upcoming event featuring Ben Rivers, the director of the Freedom Bus Project in the West Bank.
Our interview with Jo covered many aspects of Playback Theatre and its integration with the Freedom Bus.
The Freedom Bus tours the West Bank giving performances to Palestinians based on stories suggested from their audiences. The theory of live theater as a way to better understand human emotions is as old as Aristotle's Poetics. But Playback Theatre adds another dimension in that the stories are factual and come from the actual viewers of the drama.
We talked about some of the stores that were done on the Freedom Bus tour. One in particular resonated with me, an account of a Palestinian shepherd who comes back after being arrested by the Israeli Defense Force to find his sheep missing. Even the telling of the story helped me understand the meanness of the occupation, as well as its trivial indignities that make life impossible to live.
Later I listened to Ben Rivers and watched a sample of Playback's work.
