The Bridge: TowardRelational AestheticInquiry in the MontrealLife Stories Project

Nisha Sajnani, Warren Linds, Lisa Ndejuru, Alan Wong, andMembers of the Living Histories Ensemble

This is the story of the Bridge, an original interactive theatre form that brings audiencesand actors into a dialogical relationship marked by the principle of ‘‘shared authority’’(Frisch xx) and relational aesthetic inquiry (Springgay, Irwin, and Kind). This formemerged from the reflective practice of our troupe, the Living Histories Ensemble(LHE)1, a socially-engaged improvisational theatre collective exploring the intersectionsof oral history, performance, trauma, and emergent inquiry within a Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project titled Life Stories of Montrealers Dis-placed by War, Genocide, and Human Rights Violations.

Of the project’s seven core working groups—each of which is comprised of bothacademic and community partners—four are focused on creating a digital archive oflife 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 politicalviolence under the Duvalier regime in Haiti. The remaining working groups are con-cerned with the realities of refugee youth, with the integration of oral histories intoeducational curricula, and with their circulation through radio, film, music, theatre, andnew media toward reconfiguring notions of Canadian history, identity, citizenship, andsocial responsibility.

The Living Histories Ensemble (LHE) arose from a collaboration between the OralHistory and Performance working group of the Life Stories project and Creative Alter-natives, a network of creative social innovators and a community organization with along history of providing training on the arts in health care, education, and advocacyin Montreal. Our Ensemble is comprised of a multilingual and multi-ethnic group ofCanadians 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 Ensembleplay back stories offered by survivor-educators associated with theMontreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, October 2010.All photographs by David Ward / lab six and a half

Artful communion: the Living Histories Playback Ensemble debriefsand reflects following a community ‘‘conversation.’’

Coexisting with/responding to suffering: players improvise divergent,contiguous responses to a genocide researcher’s disturbing story,June 2009.

Bearing witness through spontaneous gesture: playing back theexperiences of interviewers and researchers participating in thecommunity-university project Life Stories of Montrealers Displacedby Genocide, War and Other Human Rights Abuses, June 2009.

A tableau of associations: meeting and reflecting each teller’sstory.

ctr 148 fall 2011 19

We are artist-scholars diversely experienced in theatre-basedfacilitation, drama therapy, and community organizing, aswell as various forms of improvisation. We also share a depthof experience in Playback Theatre (PT), a specific form ofnon-scripted theatre developed by Jonathan Fox and Jo Salasin 1975 that involves the spontaneous enactment of livedexperience through a variety of improvised forms (Fox).

A typical Playback Theatre performance involves a‘‘Conductor,’’ a facilitator who invites stories from audiencemembers (referred to as ‘‘tellers’’) and ushers these narra-tives onto the stage where they are interpreted by actorsand underscored by a musician. After each enactment, theconductor invites individual tellers and the audience to com-ment on their experiences of bearing witness. We chose PTbecause of the flexible container(s) it creates for the sharingof oral histories within a collective setting. The relevanceof PT as a form of community-engaged theatre practice hasbeen related to its capacity to:

1) counter-oppressive, dominant narratives by providingspace for marginalized stories to be heard (Fox, Salas);

2) acknowledge differing perspectives and facilitate recon-ciliation (Volkas, Hutt and Hosking);

3) facilitate a ‘‘culture of remembrance,’’ wherein ordinaryand extraordinary lived experiences are valued andmemorialized (Feldhendler); and

4) foster a spirit of collaborative and aesthetic inquiryamong actors and audiences (McKenna; Sajnani et al.).

PT has also had to contend with important challengessuch as the potential trap of reproducing culturally homo-genizing representations of another’s experience, therebyreplicating the very power dynamics that sustain harmfulmarginalization (Rowe). There is also the challenge of simul-taneous dramaturgy, wherein PT actors are called to inter-pret immediately each teller’s experience in ways that are

neither emotionally indulgent, nor too literal, nor overlyintellectualized. Breathable metaphors that can exist in thespace between, what Robert Landy refers to as ‘‘aestheticdistance,’’ are especially important when traversing the un-predictable emotional geography of displacement and socialcohesion. Perhaps the greatest challenge of PT lies deepwithin its structural aesthetic, which presents the conductor,actors, and musician as impartial and benign in what Foxrefers to as ‘‘acts of service’’ to another’s experience (Sajnaniand Johnson).

During one of our rehearsals in the early autumn of2009, we began to experiment with the Rhapsody, a formin which the actors stand in a straight line with their backsto the audience. One by one, in random order, they turnclockwise to face the audience and reflect back their inter-pretation of the teller’s experience, returning to face theback wall when another actor turns to address the audience.Their ‘‘rotating voices’’ end in a still image after each actorhas spoken at least twice.

Our experimentation was prompted in part by pastcriticisms we had heard of PT, particularly following a per-formance we had done as part of the International Day forSharing Life Stories in May 2009. These criticisms focusedprimarily on what was perceived to be the overtly confes-sional nature of PT, in that audience members would recountoften very personal and deeply emotional narratives in apublic setting and entrust the ensuing interpretation to com-plete strangers in the Ensemble. Like priests in a confessionalbooth, we held their stories in our possession and assumedtheir consent to our interpretation while giving nothing ofourselves in return. This, in effect, worked against the spiritof shared authority, which Michael Frisch articulates as‘‘what should not only be the distribution of knowledge

Struggling to connect in a liminal space: a community conversationin the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, February 2010.

Navigating an emotional terrain: responding to a story told by a childsurvivor of the Shoa, at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre,October 2010.

20 The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project

from those who have it to those who do not, but a more pro-found sharing of knowledges’’ (our emphasis) (xxii). Thus, toa number of observers, it appeared that we had forsaken thesharing in favour of the telling.

We chose to adapt the Rhapsody so that the teller’s storywould be met with a sharing of the actors’ own memoriesbefore returning to an embodied reflection of the tellers’ ex-perience. In a performance for the Canadian Association forTheatre Research at the 2010 Congress of the Social Scienceand Humanities, an audience member described what he hadwitnessed by referring to Peggy Phelan’s metaphor of thebridge. Phelan asserts that we will never completely under-stand that which is different from ourselves, but that weneed to see this inevitability as generative: ‘‘It is in theattempt to walk (and live) on the rackety bridge betweenself and other—and not the attempt to arrive at one side orthe other—that we discover real hope’’ (174). We found theBridge to be a suitable name for the encounter that this formencourages.

By ‘‘performing process’’ (Mundel 147), the Bridge at-tempts to interrupt assumptions that the interpretationoffered by the actors is in any way definitive or authoritative,but rather an assemblage of the associations that arise as eachactor attempts to meet the teller. This liminal space, formedwhen beings encounter one another, becomes a space of

un/knowing and flux, wherein the knowledges that ariseare ambiguous, open-ended, and surprising, often leaving us(Ensemble and audience) in a state of aisthesis, ‘‘a breathingin, or taking in, of the world, the gasp, ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of thebreath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response’’(Hillman 107).

‘‘So Much’’: An example of the BridgeThis is a transcript of an example of the Bridge performedwithin the context of a conference titled, Remembering War,Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, NewMedia, and the Arts, held in Montreal, 5–8 November 2009.Nisha Sajnani, our Conductor, provided the audience with abrief history of our practice as well as a summary of thequestions that our Ensemble had been grappling with.

Nisha: One of our questions has been about the value of cir-culating memories, especially memories of ‘‘displacement.’’What is the relationship between sharing these stories andmoving towards a culture of ‘‘never again?’’ What aboutmemories of being ‘‘placed,’’ if there is such a state? Wehave also been reflecting on what is gained by translatingoral histories into metaphors in performance. Can poetic re-flections, such as those offered in PT, facilitate our collectivecapacities to coexist with and respond to suffering? Finally, inwhat ways does this medium permit us to ‘‘share authority?’’So far, you will have noticed that our team has been playingyour stories back while appearing neutral. We have beenexperimenting with how to connect our experiences–ourbodies, our histories—with that of each teller through atechnique we’ve been calling the ‘‘Bridge.’’ We’d like tomodel it for you. Warren is going to share an experiencefrom his life that relates to the questions we’ve been attend-ing to in this project. However, instead of playing backWarren’s experience immediately, the actors are going toreflect on their own experiences relating to what they arehearing Warren say, then they are going to come back tooffer 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 ofthe TV documentaries, pictures, films showed bodies stackedup during the Holocaust. None of my family were survivorsor were related to anyone who had been murdered. Later onI found out there were some, but I didn’t know that at the

PT actors are called to interpretimmediately each teller’s experiencein ways that are neither emotionallyindulgent, nor too literal, nor overly

intellectualized.

Phelan asserts that we will nevercompletely understand that whichis different from ourselves, but thatwe need to see this inevitability

as generative.

Celebrating possibilities amidst difficult memories at the MontrealHolocaust Memorial Centre, October 2010.

ctr 148 fall 2011 21

time. And I remember shielding myself, wanting to stop. Idon’t want to watch this anymore. It’s too much. Why dowe have to keep seeing this? I recall from the film Fridaynight when the film had been shown about the women killedin Iran, and it was minutes upon minutes of recitation andpictures and dissonant music over and over again, of thesewomen. As far as I’m concerned, one person killed isenough. 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 itoff. Let’s watch.

(Actors turn their backs to the audience in the form of theRhapsody as musician [Alan] plays a steady percussive rhythm.)

Lisa: (Turns to face audience, beat.) I remember in 1994, sittingin Montreal at my uncle’s place on Jeanne Mance street,watching TV, and clicking back and forth (Motions as if usingTV remote control.) from the Balkan situation to the Rwandansituation. There were faxes coming in, telephone calls. Andit was this non-stop thing. And I was wondering, okay, thisis not a football game—

Lucy: (Turns, beat.) I remember when I was in high schooland my teacher started talking about the Holocaust, and Isaid, ‘‘What’s the Holocaust?’’ And she just looked at meincredulously and said, ‘‘You don’t know about the Holo-caust?’’ And I just thought, ‘‘No one told me. I don’t knowabout this. How come no one told me about this?’’—

Deborah: (Turns, beat.) I remember growing up with a lot ofsilence. My grandfather was from Poland. He lost all of hisfamily there. There was this constant silence. It just wasn’tspoken about. They didn’t say anything—

Joliane: (Turns, beat.) I was a bike tour guide, and we werecrossing Slovakia to get to Poland. I remember going with allthe people I was guiding at the time—there were abouttwenty—for the first time to Auschwitz. I remember goinginto the parking lot and seeing all these buses and buses—

Lisa: (Turns, beat.)—and then on the TV screen there wasthis picture of hacking and hacking (Motions with arms as ifhacking at someone with machete.) and I was just (Mouth open,sound of shock.), and then hacking and hacking (Slashing airwith arms.)—and I thought, this can’t be happening (Clutcheshead.)—and hacking and hacking (More hacking motions.)—how come we can film it but we can’t stop it? And then itwould loop all over every time, all the time, all this hackingand hacking, and I was, this can’t be happening, this can’t behappening—

Lucy: (Turns, beat.) How am I supposed to know if I don’tknow the story? How am I supposed to know if I don’tknow the story? (Freezes.)

Deborah: (Turns, beat.) How am I supposed to understand ifI haven’t heard anything? (Freezes.)

Joliane: (Turns, beat.) It just felt so strange to go into thatplace and seeing everything for real that I’ve seen in picturesover and over and the gates and the trees—the trees! Thetrees! The same trees! (Stretches arms vertically as if measuringthe 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, wecan’t get out of it. (Freezes.)

(Musician taps a bell for five beats. Silence. He then plays atransitional melody on the xylophone as actors move into a‘‘fluid sculpture,’’ wherein the actors create a physical collage ofsound and movement inspired by the teller’s [Warren’s] story.)

(Lisa moves to front and crouches down, one arm stretchedout 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 turnsher back to the audience and folds her arms, exclaiming, ‘‘Nomore! No more! No more!’’ and repeats this refrain from thisposition. Deborah steps forward and positions herself just toJoliane’s right side and stretches out her left arm towards theaudience, remaining still. Lucy steps forward and positions herselfto 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 upondeath upon death.’’ They become still and the music stops. Thesculpture is held for five seconds, then the actors return to theiroriginal line, facing the audience.)

Nisha: Warren, is there anything else you would like to sayabout your experience?

The Bridge: actors reflect, then rotate in turn to offer the teller arelated personal experience.

22 The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project

Warren: Well, it was like within me there was a fascinationwith it—almost like I want to look, but I don’t want tolook. I want to know why I’m turning it off a little bitmore ... not why I’m turning off ... but why, why is thereso much?

Nisha: So much ... suffering?

Warren: So much.

Nisha: So much. Thank you.

The response to the Bridge has been encouraging. Inhis editorial for alt.theatre: Cultural Diversity and the Stage, inwhich he discusses the Life Stories project and our Ensemble’swork, Edward Little writes:

Traditionally [in Playback Theatre], the performers workto shut down ‘‘self-talk’’—to put aside their personalresponses to the stories told in order to concentrate onlistening deeply to the story and playing it back ‘objec-tively’ ... [T]he [Bridge] demands a more complexapproach to deep listening to both self and the other. Itforegrounds the potential for both positive and negativeimplications proceeding from personal subject positionsrelating to bias, assumption, and judgment. The [Bridge]requires that each member of the ensemble attempt tomeet the teller in the story rather than simply playing itback—to approach, in Greenspan’s words, becoming‘‘partners in a conversation.’’ (7)

We have drawn on the Bridge in performances with agroup of child survivors of the Holocaust, with Haitian youthworkers after the recent earthquake in Haiti, with new im-migrants and refugees who have suffered persecution becauseof their sexual orientation, as part of the annual Commemo-ration of the Rwandan genocide, and with mixed assembliesof the Life Stories project. The audience members whosestories have been responded to through this form have saidthat it ‘‘dimensionalized’’ their perspective on their story andmade the actors ‘‘real people.’’ They have also remarkedthat it felt ‘‘honest’’; consequently, they felt they could takemore risks in sharing important stories. Playback actors whohave experienced this form have reflected on how it requiresa risk to ‘‘leap’’ both into and out of embodiment. Nick

Rowe makes this more explicit as he raises the paradox inPT of stressing the importance of the actor’s self along with‘‘the desire to relinquish the self in order to yield to thestory’’ (105), thus using ‘‘our own experience to help usbetter listen to the experiences of others’’ (Howard 168).

The ‘‘aesthethic’’ possibilities of the Bridge, that is tosay its potential as an ethical approach to community-engagedaesthetic practice, continue to unfold. In the context of theproject’s ideal of shared authority and in PT’s mission to‘‘draw people closer,’’ the Bridge affords an opportunity forPT actors to draw closer to the communities with whomthey work. It brings us nearer to Rowe’s call for PT actorsto respond with humanity, in its beauty and failure, towardfinding ways of artfully communing in laughter as well asloss. It also presents us with what Mieke Bal refers to as aninteractive way of meaning-making, a ‘‘groping’’ process ofdiscovery that should be evaluated based on its ability to pro-vide access to phenomena not otherwise attainable. In thisway, the Bridge becomes, in the words of Springgay, Irwin,and Kind, ‘‘a passage to somewhere else’’ (909).

Note1 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 Fontbute, Paul Gareau,Margarita Guitterez, Dramane Kobe, Warren Linds, LucyLu, Sergio Mendez, Laura Mora, Meena Murugesan, LisaNdejuru, Chu-Lynne Ng, Mira Rozenberg, Nisha Sajnani,Deborah Simon, and Alan Wong.

Works CitedBal, 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 inthe Nonscripted Theatre. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala, 1994. Print.

Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning ofOral and Public History. Albany: State U of New York P, 1990.Print.

Hillman, James. ‘‘Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to theWorld.’’ The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World.Ed. James Hillman. Dallas: Spring, 1992. 89–130. Print.

Audience members whose stories havebeen responded to through this formhave said that it ‘‘dimensionalized’’their perspective on their story andmade the actors ‘‘real people.’’

It foregrounds the potential for bothpositive and negative implicationsproceeding from personal subject

positions relating to bias, assumption,and judgement. The [Bridge] requiresthat each member of the ensembleattempt to meet the teller in the storyrather than simply playing it back.

ctr 148 fall 2011 23

Howard, Peggy. ‘‘Interpreting the Evaluation Experience throughEmbodiment, Conversation and Anecdote.’’ Qualitative Studies inEducation 9.2 (1996):167–80. Print.

Hutt, Jenny, and Bev Hosking. ‘‘Playback Theatre: A CreativeResource for Reconciliation. A working paper of RecastingReconciliation through Culture and the Arts.’’ Brandeis.edu.2004. Web. 28 Jan. 2011.

Landy, Robert. Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role inDrama, 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 PlaybackTheatre—A Soulful Construct.’’ Gathering Voices: Essays on Play-back Theatre. Eds. Jonathan Fox and Heinrich Dauber. New Palz,NY: Tusitala, 1999. 172–184. Print.

Mundel, Ingrid. ‘‘Radical Storytelling: Performing Processes inCanadian 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 inPlayback Theatre. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2007. Print.

Sajnani, Nisha and David Read Johnson. ‘‘Opening Up PlaybackTheatre: Perspectives from Theatre of the Oppressed andDevelopmental Transformations.’’ Creative Alternatives 2011.Web. 2 Feb. 2011.

Sajnani, Nisha, Alan Wong, Warren Linds, Lisa Ndejuru, andMembers of the Living Histories Theatre Ensemble. ‘‘TurningTogether: Playback Theatre, Oral History, and Arts-BasedResearch in the Montreal Life Stories Project.’’ RememberingWar, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History,New Media and the Arts. Eds. Steven High, Ry Duong, andEdward Little. Toronto: U of Toronto P. (Forthcoming.) Print.

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 Therapyin Collective Trauma and Intercultural Conflict Resolution.’’Current Approaches in Drama Therapy. Eds. David Read Johnson andRenee 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 alsofind more information on the Montreal Life Stories Projectat www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca.

Nisha Sajnani, PhD RDT, is director of Creative Alternatives, onfaculty at New York University and Yale University, President-Electof the National Association for Drama Therapy, and researcher oforal history, trauma, arts-based inquiry, critical improvisation, andengaged pedagogy.

Warren Linds, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department ofApplied Human Sciences, Concordia University and researcher inperformative inquiry and applied theatre.

Lisa Ndejuru is a psychotherapist, an artist/activist in the Rwandan-Canadian community, a member of the Montreal Life Stories projectsteering committee, and a PhD student at Concordia University.

Alan Wong is a PhD candidate in Concordia University’s SpecialIndividualized Program, focusing on issues of diversity, citizenship,and identity in Canada.

24 The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project