From Chapter
Two, “A Musical Tornado”
The
next session Rafael stormed into the room, escorted by the crisis
supervisor in whose custody he’d been since lunchtime.
“I
want to play the synthesizer! By myself!”
It was
clear that something had gone seriously wrong in his day—and
that he’d been looking forward to his music session as an opportunity
to express his distress. For twenty focused minutes he improvised
first on the synth, then the conga drums, then the guitar. I sat and
listened. He had the true musician’s ability to find the music
in any instrument, regardless of how little he knew its technique.
The language of music, its inherent patterns of tone and rhythm, was
Rafael’s language. It spoke for him, giving him a voice for
feelings too distant from words.
At one
point, frustrated when he couldn’t get the sound he wanted,
he swung the guitar over his head.
“I’ll
smash the fucker!”
“Rafael!”
He put
it down gently. “I wasn’t really going to.” He sat
down again at the synthesizer and started playing. “This sounds
like movie music,” he said after a few minutes. “Like
aliens. Let’s make up a story.”
Collaboratively,
we invented a story in four scenes. Rafael created synthesizer sounds
for each part of the story, experimenting until he was satisfied.
I had never seen him so absorbed.
Rafael
and I improvised our way through the music, pausing when it was time
for him to set the synthesizer for the next phase. He was purposeful,
his playing coherent and inventive. A jaunty little theme at the beginning
of the story segued into ominous echoing bass sounds, followed by
a screeching melisma in the upper register, and finally slow, broad
chord clusters with the synthesizer’s woodwind voice. “Let's
practice one more time,” he said when we finished. We went through
it a couple more times, then taped it. “All right!” he
said, delighted, when we played it back. “Let's act the story
now.” Cued by the “soundtrack” and directed by Rafael,
I played the role of the aliens who are scary at first and then turn
out to be harmless and lonely.
“Let's
do it again!” said Rafael as the synth's final chords faded.
He wanted to do it several more times, thrilled with his creation.
It was
time to leave, always a tense moment with Rafael.
“I
want to have that tape,” he said.
“The
tape has to stay here, Rafael, because we're going to use it to record
lots of things that you do.”
“I
want it for my own!” he shouted. His peaceful mood had vanished.
“You'd
like to play it for the others upstairs, right?”
“I
want it!” at the top of his voice.
“You
could borrow it...” but Rafael had run from the room. I followed
him as he disappeared around the corner and out into the playground.
I summoned him sternly from the door. He scowled at me and ambled
back, kicking stones.
“Hey,
don't spoil it,” I said as we walked toward his classroom. “That
was wonderful, that music and the story.”
“Yeah,”
he said, his scowl instantly replaced by a happy grin. “Sorry
I ran outside, Jo. I was only pretending to be mad, you know.”
I dropped
into the nearest chair after bringing him back to Amy, wondering if
his last-minute tantrum canceled out the earlier triumphs of the session.
From Chapter
Six, "Do My Story!"
We
met for our first show, excited and a little apprehensive. Fifteen
kids scrambled into the gym, chattering their way to the folding chairs
waiting in curving rows. A pair of large scoop lamps bathed the stage
area in warm light. I stood in front of the children holding up my
hands for quietness. They settled down and we began.
“How’s
your day been so far?” I asked.
“Bad!”
“Better
than yesterday.”
“I
had to go to the crisis room.”
“Lovable!”
Calvin called out.
We acted
out their comments in high-energy “fluid sculptures,”
adding sound and movement one by one to express the teller’s
feeling. The kids roared with delight.
Doreen, a plump, sweet-faced girl from the Teresian group, came to
the teller’s chair with the first story.
“It’s about when my dog bit me,” she said. She told
the story of the mean dog, and the comfort she received from her mother
and sister; both of them, I knew, long disappeared from her life.
She chose Abel to play the dog, and he caused a near-riot when he
pretended to pee against a piece of furniture and got spanked for
it. The actors onstage waited out the screams of laughter so that
they could show the tenderness of the moment between Doreen and her
mother.
“Do
my story! Do my story!” shouted five or six kids as soon as
Doreen sat down.
My hope
with Playback Theatre was to give the children a chance to tell their
stories—to provide Playback’s accessible stage as a forum
where they could speak and be heard. I knew that they had remarkable
stories to tell, that they were full of lively response to the world
around them, and that in the rough-and-tumble of institutional life
there were few opportunities for them to be heard other than in one-on-one
therapy sessions. I thought that the ritual of Playback might prove
a strong enough frame—even in this environment—for the
children to bear witness in front of their peers.
Although
our performances followed the traditional Playback format of tellers
coming forward to tell and watch a story, we learned quickly to adapt
it so that it worked for this special audience. We found that the
children responded better to acting that was literal and concrete
rather than metaphorical. Extra attention to opening and ending shows
was called for. We sang with the children at the beginning to settle
them into receptiveness and keep them occupied as latecomers straggled
in. As the show ended we allowed time for verbal sharing, more singing,
or art activities. More children wanted to be tellers than we had
time for, and our closing activities gave the disappointed ones a
chance to express a small part of the story they didn’t tell.
In spite
of occasional frustration at not telling their stories, the children
were delighted to come to the shows, which they thought of as a treat,
not therapy.
Soon, teachers in St Mary’s school invited us to do shows in
their small classrooms. In one classroom performance, six-year-old
Courtney told a nightmare about a witch who came to her while she
was asleep and put horrible stuff on her nails and pricked her skin.
“What
was the scariest thing, Courtney?”
“I’m
scared I’ll be like the witch.”
During
the enactment she yelled at the witch: “I’m over here!”
I reminded her that Diane, the actor she’d chosen, was being
Courtney in the story, that she herself was just watching. She was
very excited. I held her closely on my knee. When it was over, I asked
her if she’d like to make up a different ending for her story.
It was at first hard for her to understand the possibility I was offering.
Then she got it. Her eyes lit up. “I want to kill the witch,
and I want my mom to hug me and say ‘Good girl.’”
With satisfaction she watched this amended scenario acted out.
Gary,
who’d been full of scathing complaints earlier, wanted to be
the next teller. But when he came to the chair, he didn’t have
a story. It wasn’t unusual for children to long for the experience
of being a teller while being not at all clear about what they wanted
to tell. It was our job to find a story, however minimal, in whatever
elements they could offer.
“Who’s
someone who might be in your story?” I asked Gary.
“My
grandma,” he responded immediately. I had heard that Gary’s
grandmother had died recently after a long illness. Soon a story emerged
about the time she had entrusted him and his brother to go to the
store for her. “She wasn’t sick, she just too busy. We
got everything and we gave her some change and she was real pleased.”
We acted
out the story, Gary calling out additional details from the side as
he remembered them. “She wanted soup!” he yelled. Without
missing a beat, the teller’s actor added soup to the grocery
items he was putting in his imaginary basket.
“Thank
you for telling us about your grandma, Gary,” I said when the
scene was over.
“Thank you for acting my story,” he said, peaceful and
gracious.
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