A participatory arts application of Playback Theatre to transitional justice in Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

Responding to transitional justice circumstances in Sri Lanka, Theatre of Friendship connects groups from Tamil, Sinhala and Muslim backgrounds. We use Playback Theatre as a participatory arts approach to transitional justice, working to build covenantal pluralism. As our work has evolved, we have extended the principle of emergence within Playback Theatre to broaden the mix of artistic disciplines we use. This gives us greater scope to adapt, which in turn encourages local ownership.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitional justice
• participatory arts
• Playback Theatre
• Sri Lanka
• adaptive peacebuilding

Introduction

Theatre of Friendship is a grassroots network established to contribute to transitional justice in Sri Lanka. It was launched in 2012, three years after the civil war ended, building on a collection of previous projects. The intention was to establish a network that used Playback Theatre to build cross-cultural understanding and solidarity where social and structural divisions exist due to civil war and colonial legacies. We selected Playback Theatre because it provides a structured listening practice, which creates a conduit for nuanced multi-layered dialogue. Playback Theatre is widely acknowledged for its capacity to ‘foster compassion, empathy, and connection in order to counter the forces that threaten to drive us apart’ (Salas [2020] 2021, 193). This capacity is tested in situations where the broader context is characterised by political instability. Cynthia Cohen proposes that bringing arts practices into these settings demands that ‘artists, and those responsible for their education, need to develop their knowledge of transitional justice principles’ (2020, 3). In this article, we do this by applying principles of covenantal pluralism (DeVotta 2020) and adaptive peacebuilding (de Coning 2021) to the challenges we have faced in the decade since Theatre of Friendship began. Covenantal pluralism refers to a paradigm of citizenship that is characterised not just by legalistic equality, but also by relational expressions of solidarity (Stewart, Seiple, and Hoover 2020). Adaptive peacebuilding refers to iterative strategies for peacebuilding that engage with complexity and promote local ownership (de Coning 2021).

Playback provides a ritual structure for attentive listening. One person, referred to as the ‘teller’, responds to the open invitation to the audience to share a true story from their life, which is facilitated by the ‘conductor’. Immediately afterwards, performers improvise a theatrical enactment of that story, framed and accompanied by live improvised music. This shifts viewpoints, the teller now watching their story from the outside, while those on stage who were listening step in and embody the story, highlighting the meaning they understand this story has for the teller. Following this enactment, the teller is invited to respond, speaking to the relative accuracy of the performers’ interpretation, and to their experience of watching their story played out. The audience listens attentively to the story as it is told, watches it enacted, and then hears the commentary from the teller. This careful eliciting, enacting and witnessing of personal stories can be understood as a live process of oral history interviewing and listening. When the next teller volunteers from the audience, their story responds directly or indirectly to previous stories told. This generates a dialogic layer of meaning making, which Playback co-founder Jonathan Fox refers to as ‘narrative reticulation’, whereby a ‘dynamic balance’ is maintained between ‘story, atmosphere, spontaneity, and guidance – allowing a flow of interconnected stories’ ([2018] 2021, 161). Crucial to this meaning making is the concept of emergence, which refers to a dialogic process where ‘stories, told in a genuinely inclusive atmosphere, connect to each other to create a rich network of associations and meanings’ (Salas [2020] 2021, 177).

We established Theatre of Friendship with the intention of using Playback Theatre to catalyse cross-cultural understanding between participants from across the country’s ethno-religious divide, aiming to undermine the polarising power of partisan politics and media (Selvarajah 2020). Participants warmly embraced the opportunity to build cross-cultural friendships and to explore Playback techniques. Through our work over ten years, we have found cause to extend the principle of emergence so that it functions within the Playback Theatre form and extends out into the use of other artistic forms. The main catalysts for adapting our artistic practice have been Playback Theatre’s reliance on spoken language, the importance of sharing artistic ownership among the network, and the need to adapt to unstable political circumstances.

Activating community-based cross-cultural engagement aligns with Neil DeVotta’s (2020) conceptualisation of covenantal pluralism as a sustainable approach to transitional justice, which means going beyond tolerating diversity to actively promote mutual respect and protection of Others. Fostering local ownership through collaboration with war-affected communities aligns with Cedric de Coning’s (2021) conceptualisation of adaptive peacebuilding. We position our work at this nexus, identifying the blend of Playback Theatre and complementary arts practices as participatory arts (Shefik 2018). Each of these is framed as alternative and additional to legalistic approaches to peacebuilding and transitional justice. Constructed through grassroots and civil-society community engagement, covenantal pluralism provides an alternative to conventional legal and constitutional pluralism, which only takes effect if championed by the state. Adaptive peacebuilding addresses limits to top-down interventionist approaches, following the principle that ‘the more inclusive, participatory, emergent and adaptive the process is, the more likely the outcomes from it will be self-sustainable’ (de Coning 2021, 271). Consistent with this, Shefik (2018) insists that arts-based approaches to transitional justice should focus on process and participation, adapting to each context. We extend on this, arguing that the forms participatory arts take in these spaces similarly need to adapt.

This article is built on discussions held between the authors: three founding members of Theatre of Friendship, each located differently within the project. Rev Joshua Sivagnanam and Shashika De Silva each have multiple insider positionalities as Sri Lankans, as the former and current Presidents of Theatre of Friendship respectively, and in other transitional justice and community building work they do across Sri Lanka, all of which informs their contribution to this article. Rev Joshua has direct experience of war and of top-down peacebuilding and transitional justice processes from his previous role as parish priest in Jaffna, and current role as Director of Kaveri Kala Manram (KKM), an NGO established to empower communities in Sri Lanka’s Northern provinces. Shashika works in peace and conflict resolution through his role as Director of Initiatives of Change Sri Lanka, introducing restorative justice methods in schools, and through Rise Up Sri Lanka, which drives a policy agenda of addressing structural violence. Cymbeline has insider positionality as co-founder of Theatre of Friendship and longstanding Playback Theatre practitioner. She also has outsider positionality as an Australian, originally connected to Sri Lanka through enduring ties with the Australian Buddhist Vihara.

We conclude this introduction with a verbatim dialogue, edited from conversations between the three authors held via Zoom, auto transcribed, then corrected as needed. We adopt this format to demonstrate the relationship between our different positionalities, and the dialogic reflexivity we have used to construct this article. We use transcribed dialogue where relevant through the article, adopting the same structure of identification throughout. Next, we present a brief literature review of peacebuilding and transitional justice specific to Sri Lanka, looking at covenantal pluralism and adaptive peacebuilding. We locate our Playback Theatre work within a frame of participatory arts, then provide a case study of Theatre of Friendship, followed by a discussion.

Verbatim

Rev Joshua Sivagnanam (RJS): I see this article like a mirror to understand where we have been in the past, how Theatre of Friendship impacts our lives and how we might proceed, how we might move forward in the future.

Shashika De Silva (SDS): I can say Theatre of Friendship was kind of the better experience I have ever had of peacebuilding stuff in Sri Lanka. I have gone through a lot of projects, attended a lot of workshops in peacebuilding and conflict resolution. But in Theatre of Friendship for the last I don't know, 10 years? we never used these transitional justice or peacebuilding banners in our workshops. But we have done the work. We have created the connections. Relationships with each other are very deep. Those are the best connections I’ve made than any other workshops I've been in.

RJS: I also understand and have the same feeling as Shashika. Theatre of Friendship is mostly making strong connections with people. Because the Playback brings out the emotions from the heart. That is, I think the most important thing. Most of the other tools bring out thoughts and ideas. Playback mostly brings out emotions and feelings.

SDS: We have connected very deeply with each other. We shared the life there. We were human beings there. I mean, everyone was very honest, not acting someone else, you know. They are behaving as themselves and understanding each other very deeply, their life, what they have gone through in their life. They’re very good friends. Always they are in my heart.

RJS: Those connections with people grow from feelings, negative or positive. We put each other in front of ourselves like a mirror and bring out our inner heart. The emotion is come out. The sad emotion, and the wounded emotion were put there, and other light emotions also come out. If we want to do any healing or any transitional justice, we need that emotional relief, emotional release is most important.

SDS: And also, only after years of doing work, we were able to directly talk about the issues. So, since we were able to build that kind of trust among ourselves, then people can share their own deep feelings, ones that they have experienced during the war, especially the political ideas. It only happened because of the duration of the work that we have been doing for the past years, that helps to open, you know, we were like brothers and sisters and relatives, so they know that they have the safe space to share that stuff. So, that is a very important thing in our work.

CB: I think I'm hearing you say two main things. One is about longevity. So, when we meet, we know that we'll meet again, and then we do meet again and again and there's a commitment to those relationships.

SDS: Right. And because of that commitment to those relationships, then that's what creates a safe space, a sense of safety.

CB: You also said something about not being under a banner of peacebuilding but being there for friendship and for theatre. So, because we didn't go straight towards the big issues, they could emerge in their own time.

SDS: Also, our Playback storytelling encouraged them to speak naturally rather than forcing to talk about some hidden traumatic stories kept for years with themselves.

RJS: One thing I want to say is that Playback Theatre is not one methodology. Playback Theatre is transforming itself with the people’s experience. It becomes contextualised, you know, Playback is changed by its context. You brought it to us in one form. We had to digest it to make it work for our communities.

SDS: If you think about Sri Lanka as a whole country, I would say, we failed our reconciliation process because the government hasn't had the sustainable practices or processes or plan. But compared to the country, the Theatre of Friendship has done the work.

Peacebuilding and transitional justice

Peacebuilding and transitional justice are evolving fields, each established in the late twentieth century with a degree of cross-disciplinarity. We adopt the conceptual configuration that views transitional justice as a branch of peacebuilding (Fairey and Kerr 2020). We also adopt the concept of ‘transitional justice settings’ (de Coning 2021, 257) to denote conditions of major social or structural change in which state-sanctioned injustice has been perpetrated, noting that not all transitional justice settings are post-war and not all involve a clear political transition (Fisher 2020). This is applicable to Sri Lanka, where a decisive end to civil war did not catalyse a clear political transition. Transitional justice and peacebuilding both stretch across top-down and grassroots mechanisms, which Wendy Lambourne refers to as ‘politico-legal state-based, backward-looking retributive framework[s]’ and ‘psychosocial, community based, forward-looking restorative approaches’ (2021, 46). This continuum signals a departure from previously accepted binaries, war and peace increasingly seen as ‘dynamic space[s] of contestation between competing meanings’ (Zunino 2019, 34). This gives rise to questions such as: ‘What is it that is ‘over’? And for whom? How is the ‘end’ manifest in social practice?’ (Gagnon, Senders, and Brown 2014, 1). The ambiguity these questions point to is manifest in ongoing political instability in Sri Lanka. The promise of change implied in transitional justice indicates momentum towards sustainable peace, but assessing the effectiveness of this is fraught, calling into question which measures are valid and whose perspective is accepted or reliable.

Sri Lanka’s civil war

Sri Lanka’s civil war was fought from 1983 to 2009 between the Sinhalese majority government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who sought a separate Tamil state in the northern and eastern regions. The war ended with a comprehensive defeat of the LTTE, dismantling their alternative administration and bringing those regions under militarised government control (Bass and Amarasingam 2016). Catalysts for war trace to colonial and post-colonial governance, with the transfer of power from Britain to independence itself inequitable, omitting minority participation in negotiations (Athukorala and Jayasuriya 2015). In 1948, the newly independent country was established as a unitary state with centralised power in Colombo, blocking the establishment of a federal system that could better represent regional needs and minority concerns (Welikala 2016). In a backlash against perceived colonial elevation of the Tamil minority, the newly formed majority Sinhalese government acted swiftly to solidify dominance through legislation such as the 1949 Citizenship Act and the 1965 Official Language Act. The Official Language Act made Sinhalese the sole national language, strengthening Sinhalese majoritarianism (Athukorala and Jayasuriya 2015). The Citizenship Act removed citizenship from ‘Indian Tamils’, descendants of indentured labourers brought by British colonials in the 19th and 20th centuries (Vijayapalan 2014). This effectively halved the voting Tamil population. Despite citizenship later being granted, a legal distinction remains between ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’ and ‘Indian Tamils’ (www.statistics.gov.lk).

Structural inequities such as these alienated Tamils from mainstream politics, spawning separatist movements, the strongest of which was the LTTE. Tensions between Sinhala and Tamil nationalisms activated the Tamil diaspora in the UK, Canada, USA, Australia, India and Singapore. An LTTE attack on government military forces was the catalyst for the violent eruption of the 1983 Black July riots in which Sinhala nationalists targeted Tamils in Colombo and other parts of the country. Following these, the government rushed through a constitutional amendment making it illegal for politicians to support agitation for secession. Tamil representatives elected on a platform calling for a separate state were forced to step down from parliament, creating a vacuum in Tamil politics, through which militant resistance surged (Athukorala and Jayasuriya 2015).

Transitional justice and peacebuilding in Sri Lanka

Following the war, the primary politico-legal transitional justice mechanism was the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), which the Sri Lankan government initiated under international pressure to investigate alleged human rights violations. It focused narrowly on the final days of the war and was located in Colombo, where it was inaccessible to the most war affected communities. When it toured briefly to the north and east, many who came forward were turned away, and those who did testify were not given witness protection or other safety measures (De Alwis 2016). Central to the LLRC was the notion of reconciliation, a framing Guruparan dismisses as code for a ‘victor’s peace’ characterised by ongoing militarisation of minority regions and ‘continued criminalisation of the politics of self-determination’ (2016, 22). Widely seen as an example of what Zunino (2019) critiques as political use of transitional justice mechanisms to evade intractable problems, many view it as a smokescreen to avert a piercing and expansive UN investigation of alleged war crimes (Wickramasinghe 2015). The LLRC is broadly acknowledged to have fallen short of encouraging widespread truth telling or listening practices beyond or even within its limited scope (Thiranagama 2013).

Arguing for pluralist approaches to transitional justice, scholars identify ongoing structural and ideological hurdles, many of which predate the war. Challenging the discourse of a war driven by ethnic polarisation, Thiranagama insists that contemporary ethnic polarisation is ‘a consequence (not the cause) of ethnic conflict and war (2013, 95). She substantiates this by tracing Sri Lanka’s heterogeneous origins as they became ‘deeply marked’ by British colonial restructures, which explicitly racialised regions for bureaucratic expedience. Identifying racialised polarisation as part of a ‘much wider British colonial imaginary in South Asia’, she sees ongoing challenges of this legacy not just in Sri Lanka’s inherited state structures impeding social and structural pluralism, but also in a collective imagination that views ‘this world of ethnic community as natural noncolonial national substance’ (Thiranagama 2013, 96). Similarly claiming heterogenous origin stories, Palihapitiya argues that:

Before the more recent crystallizing of the Sinhala and Tamil ethnic identities based on postcolonial politics, it can be reasonably assumed that Indo-Aryan and Proto-Dravidian languages, as well as Buddhism and Hinduism, had a common influence on the inhabitants of Sri Lanka (2011, 79).

Despite such claims of heterogeneity, ancient history is also used to legitimate a Sinhalese Buddhist nationalist ideology in which ‘non-Buddhists live in Sri Lanka thanks to the majority community’s benevolence’ (DeVotta 2007, 30). The application of this ‘mytho-historical’ (DeVotta 2020, 52) discourse threatens contemporary pluralism through structural inequalities such as linguistic marginalisation, ethnocentric governance, and ethnoreligious agitprop and violence, most clearly seen in the sharp rise of Islamophobia over the past decade (Gamage 2021). Currently, rising illiberalism coincides with decreasing pluralism, forming what DeVotta describes as a ‘majoritarian zeitgeist’ (2020, 51), expressed as ‘schadenfreude nationalism … a sense of satisfaction derived by seeing ethnoreligious opponents put down and mortified’ (56).

This constellation of challenges is extensively theorised (Gamage 2021; Ramakrishna 2021; Thiranagama 2013; Wickramasinghe 2015) and widely reported by international entities (Amnesty International 2021; Human Rights Watch 2022) and in local news (see for example Malji 2021; Srinivasan 2021). However, DeVotta insists there is precedent for increasing pluralism, arguing for a covenantal form that goes beyond ‘merely tolerating diversity’, to ‘integrating minorities as important and unique entities in the national narrative’ (2020, 50). By contrast, conventional politico-legal pluralism is only as effective as its real-world application. For example, Cunningham and Ladd investigated the extent to which curriculum-centred approaches to peacebuilding were effectively enacted within Sri Lankan secondary schools. They detail key elements in the curriculum that could support peacebuilding including truth-seeking, social cohesion, and active citizenship. Despite these promising strategies, their findings indicate that ‘between the ages of 14 and 19, an important stage of intellectual and social development, students do not receive any detailed preparation for life in a pluralist democracy’ (2018, 581). They suggest that Sri Lanka has ‘not sufficiently ‘settled’ its recent history to allow it into the curriculum’ (585), noting similar reticence in post-war school contexts in Uganda and Cambodia. This notion of a stage in transitional justice where recent history is not sufficiently ‘settled’ is a contributing factor to adjustments we have made to artistic practices within Theatre of Friendship, where we have prioritised allowing for multiple understandings and positionalities to coexist without forcing contestation between them.

Covenantal pluralism counters the risk of pluralist policies falling short of implementation, by taking steps towards real-world reciprocal understanding, enacted by individuals and groups, supporting relationships of mutual concern to grow over time. DeVotta identifies examples of civil society groups, community leaders and individual politicians who drive pluralist peacebuilding agendas in Sri Lanka. He cites a strong degree of religious freedom across all faiths, evidenced by 89.2% of respondents to the 2019 Values and Attitudes Survey who indicated that they freely practice their religion (Center for Policy Alternatives, cited in DeVotta 2020, 57). He also identifies individual champions found among religious leaders who promote interfaith participation, encouraging their communities to celebrate significant events across all the religious calendars, and in some cases actively speaking out against inter-ethnic agitation within their communities. He contends that such active forms of engagement with and protection of Others are ‘the best way to minimize communal dissension and violence’ (51).

Religious cross-pollination of this kind has precedence in popular Sri Lankan Buddhism, where Hindu and Muslim mythologies and traditions can be found (Wickramasinghe 2015). This is supported by Cunningham and Ladd’s finding from interviews with staff and students in six schools from different regions, that ‘nearly all interviewees, adult and student, declared an interest in the festivals and customs of others’ (2018, 580). This echoes the enthusiastic interest Theatre of Friendship participants have consistently shown in each other, demonstrated as far back as 2012, just three years after the war ended. The opportunity to befriend and listen to each other has invariably been met with openness and interest.

Playback Theatre as participatory arts

Playback Theatre generates collective meaning-making through dialogical performances in which all performers and audience members have an active role. A teller, who volunteers from the audience, recounts a true story from their life while the rest of the audience and the performers listen attentively. The story is enacted by performers and witnessed by the audience, followed by a dialogical process of reflection and response with the teller invited to comment, then an invitation to the audience for another story. The active nature of each role in this sequence of witnessing and creative embodiment heightens the potential for intercultural understanding. This aligns with participatory arts, which Sherin Shefik (2018) contends make a unique contribute to transitional justice by illuminating realities of lived experience obscured by official or dominant narratives. This can increase empathy, repairing social fabric through processes of collective meaning-making. Participatory arts are built around engagement and dialogue, so all aspects of collaborative artistic exploration are equally important, from heightened performances to conversations over lunch. Framing Playback Theatre as a form of participatory arts allows for a porousness, in which our artistic practices adapt in response to circumstances arising externally or from within our work.

Theatre of Friendship is a network of groups from the NGO and independent arts sectors, drawing together participants from communities historically divided by violence (see ‘Formation of Theatre of Friendship’ below for detailed description of each group). Each event is hosted by one of the four member groups, individual participation determined by affiliation with one of the member groups. Events are structured as intensives, held over multiple days with the host group arranging onsite catering and accommodation and participants arranging their travel to the event location. This creates a closed group environment, allowing for a safe space to be generated throughout the event. The structure of each event incorporates Playback Theatre alongside other performance-oriented activities such as physical and vocal warm-ups, drama games, traditional songs and dances, and skill-sharing sessions led by group members and international collaborators.

The Playback Theatre component is structured in such a way that roles of teller, performer and audience switch regularly. Playback co-founder Jo Salas refers to this ‘in house’ reciprocal performance cycle as the ‘participant performance model’. Our work deviates from her concept of the performing team being drawn from the ‘same community’, which she suggests makes story enactments ‘convincing and satisfying to the audience because actors draw on the life experience they share with the audience’ ([2011] 2021, 264). Instead, we construct cross-cultural, multi-linguistic spaces, so the very absence of shared life experience is the rationale for hearing and performing each other’s personal stories. This is common to transitional justice settings, where conditions for covenantal pluralism don’t ‘spring forth spontaneously and ‘naturally’; they must be made’ (De Alwis 2009, 91). Dirnstorfer and Saud report their solution to this challenge in ‘EnActing Dialogue’, a transitional justice project in Nepal that also uses Playback Theatre for peacebuilding, which is to select actors ‘in a balanced way regarding their background concerning the conflict’ (2020, 131). We applied a similar principle when we established Theatre of Friendship, inviting groups from regions that had been separated by war. However, it would be reductive to balance representation simply along the lines drawn by civil war. In recent gatherings, participants have discussed ongoing social divisions in Sri Lanka including gender, generation, caste, socio-economic status and employment prospects. To make war-time divisions into the axis around which we organise our network would risk crystalising that line of polarisation.

While our spaces of connectivity are orchestrated, the content within those spaces develops dialogically, through participation and reciprocity, in line with the Playback concept of emergence. This evolves in ways that are indeterminate, circuitous, multidirectional, our collective meaning-making always open to degrees of ambiguity. This can be said of arts practices in general, and of Playback Theatre in particular, which works through a ‘non-cognitive’ form of ‘embodied, imaginative dialogue’ (Salas [2006] 2021, 129). Catherine Cole (2014) points out that this commitment to indeterminacy places arts practices at odds with normative and empirical objectives of transitional justice. This tension must be reconciled if Playback Theatre is to be integrated into ‘top-down’ peacebuilding mechanisms as Dirnstorfer and Saud (2020, 126) suggest is optimal. For example, they advocate the involvement of politicians and government representatives within ‘EnActing Dialogue’. However, Theatre of Friendship doesn’t aim for complementarity with top-down transitional justice approaches, the small-scale grassroots nature of our work and the very absence of officials, are key factors in building cross-cultural trust over time.

Working in ways that defy linear empirical objectives demands an alternative frame for considering impact. Interrogating how much the outcomes of brief intensives can translate to social benefits beyond the crucible of performative spaces, Sally Mackey (2016) insists that they must set something in motion. Here, the ongoing nature of our network means that what we have set in motion continues indefinitely, even during periods when our events are irregular, for example the extended interruption caused by COVID-19. Through participants’ enduring engagement over time, we have incrementally, iteratively created what Shefik refers to as a ‘working model of wholeness’ (2018, 331), towards which everyone participating shares a degree of responsibility. This domain of shared responsibility is key to Shefik’s theory of change for how participatory arts can serve transitional justice. She acknowledges that this is just a glimpse of wholeness that won’t mend politico-legal divisions, just as individual examples of covenantal pluralism will not change Sri Lanka’s majoritarian structure. Rather, each tries to ‘nudge societal change processes towards sustaining peace’ (de Coning 2021, 258). We can see this ‘nudging’ of societal change processes where collaborations have sprung up between participating groups and individuals, growing from the connections established within Theatre of Friendship but occurring outside of the network. Collaborations expanding outside our network indicate another dimension to what we have set in motion, the transitional justice implications of which are worth deeper consideration than we have scope for in this paper.

Formation of theatre of friendship

Our work began with a pilot project in 2012, organised around intensive Playback Theatre training for each of the participating groups from four regions: Jaffna, Galle, Hatton and Colombo. This was followed by a national gathering that brought those groups together. Led by Cymbeline, a collection of international collaborators from Australia, India, Germany and the UK volunteered to travel to Sri Lanka to provide Playback Theatre training. Each brought experience from time spent working in one or more Playback companies and/or training with the School of Playback Theatre. The international team spent four days in Colombo planning and preparing before travelling in teams to the groups’ locations, where they delivered foundational training in Playback Theatre. This gave participants a uniform theatrical methodology with which to collaborate at the national gathering. The trainings focused on acting, music, and conducting, the role of moderator that elicits and facilitates the sharing of stories.

The conductor role is crucial to facilitating inter-cultural listening, so we prioritised it in this initial training, and have returned to it extensively since. In this early training, we focused on developing the sense of story needed for structuring a well-rounded narrative from a memory shared by the teller, attuning to the teller energetically, noticing non-verbal cues such as quality of voice, identifying connections between stories as the performance unfolds, and managing the split focus of attention between teller, audience, and performers. Crucial to this training was heightening conductors’ alertness to the teller’s emotional register, acknowledging that emotions are influenced by cultural norms, but also experienced and expressed differently by each individual. We considered questions that would encourage participants to tell stories that held personal meaning, without pushing them into uncomfortable memories or presuming familiarity with their circumstances. We had much discussion about navigating topics that appeared safe but may be triggering for some. An example participants raised was the topic of school, which could be awkward for people whose schooling had been disrupted by war. Over the years, we have honed conducting skills by reflectively examining examples from our shared Playback work and developing strategies together for how to apply our observations.

Each of the collaborating groups had distinct motivations for becoming involved. The group from Hatton were connected to the Centre for Social Concern, a Jesuit organisation providing front-line services and advocacy for the plantation sector, which is synonymous with ‘Indian Tamils’ (DeVotta 2007). This group, called ‘Mountain Flower’, had participated in Playback workshops with Cymbeline and another of the international collaborators in 2007, then had trained with another Playback practitioner from the UK in intervening years. They hosted the first national gathering at a Jesuit centre near Kandy. The team from Galle had participated in Playback workshops Cymbeline ran with another of the international collaborators in 2006 and 2007 within a post-tsunami project led by UK organisation ‘Fun for Life’. The group was comprised of actors and aspiring actors, motivated to participate in this project primarily for skills development. The team from Jaffna were employees of KKM. They had been using agit prop and street theatre forms to work with heavily war affected communities in the north. Rev Joshua was keen to add Playback to their collection of community engagement resources, and also to connect with Sinhala communities, whom they remained cut off from despite the war having ended. The team from Colombo, which Shashika came with, were part of an experimental theatre company, working in physical and devised performance forms. They were interested in expanding their artistic vocabulary and also excited by the opportunity to meet people from those regions they had been separated from by war. Over the years, these participating groups have changed and evolved, but participants from each group have remained involved throughout, with all four groups represented at each gathering, the most recent of which was held in December 2019.

Playback Theatre is language-reliant, needing the teller’s story to be understood so that the performing team can play it out and the audience can follow. Working across languages remains a central challenge when these groups and international collaborators come together. We manage this by pausing the teller for translation across three languages (Tamil, Sinhala and English), with translators located behind the teller and conductor chairs, to the side of the stage. We don’t formally translate enactments, actors needing to heighten all means of non-linguistic communication they can find to signal their intentions to each other and to audiences, for example physicality and vocal quality. In that first national gathering, Playback took place in the large group and in break out workshops. The final night was devoted to a performance event, divided into four parts with each participating group performing for the rest of us. As one of the international collaborators recalled:

Stories. Striving to find a hospital that will look after a woman with no money when her labour has complications. Stories. A sister married to a man whose poverty turned him to alcohol and alcohol to violence. Stories. Militia running riot through the streets one night with clubs and machetes. Stories. (Spoonful [Arts Health Institute], June, 2014)

Joshua refers to the stories that were told in a similar way, pointing out that there was a tendency to share difficult stories, but that there was a range of different kinds of stories shared:

RJS: The emotion is come out. The sad emotion, and the wounded emotion were put there, and other light emotions also came out.

One of the women from Jaffna told a painful war story, which was conducted and enacted by the team from Colombo. The story was told in Tamil, translated into English and Sinhala, and enacted in Sinhala with individual translation into Tamil for the teller. The performers took care, listening respectfully, holding the space with haunting improvised music, and acting the story as best they could. Their performance had the theatrical coherence of an experienced performing team, which elevated the moment and demonstrated concern and willingness to hear what their new friend had recounted. The performers’ limited understanding of direct war experiences also showed through, making visible the otherwise invisible impact of war and how differently it effected each community. When the enactment ended, the conductor invited the teller to comment on her experience of watching it. Her response was minimal but indicated that she had seen her story in their enactment. The sense of care and responsibility those performers felt was exhibited again the following morning when members from the performing team sat with the teller for breakfast. They had no language to ask her how she was, or how she felt having told and watched that Playback story, but they expressed solidarity in silence, a demonstration of the protective, supportive camaraderie indicative of covenantal pluralism.

Later that year, members from each of the four groups met and decided to establish a network based on the following vision:

Facilitating deep listening, recognition of others, and acknowledgement of each person’s relevance and dignity, Theatre of Friendship aims to form long term cross-cultural alliances in Sri Lanka (Internal Theatre of Friendship documentation 2012).

Since then, our activities have been constructed around regular national gatherings, all of which have been attended by the original four groups, with some variations, and one or more international collaborators, maintaining strong links with the international Playback community.

Expanding our concept of emergence

In the interest of sharing ownership of the network, we made a conscious move away from the construct of an ‘expert position’ held by the international team in their role of Playback trainers (McCormack and Henry 2017, 232). Activating local leadership allowed us to draw on the participants’ broad existing skill base and artistic interests. Leadership offered by local participants strengthens our Playback work by informing it with local knowledge and culturally informed stagecraft. It also opens into a wider sphere of artistic practice. While Playback remains central, incorporating participants’ suggestions allows for the kind of shared ownership and collective decision-making de Coning describes as the ‘feedback loops critical for self-organisation to emerge and become sustainable’ (2021, 258). Adaptations that have sprung up include collective visual arts pieces, non-verbal movement work, rehearsed theatre developed together, and a debate proposed and facilitated by a group of Theatre of Friendship women, interrogating how ready Sri Lanka is for women’s empowerment.

We note that there is a strong tradition within Playback Theatre of incorporating multiple art forms into workshops and performances, so there is precedent in moving in an out of the Playback form. We see benefit in extending on that interdisciplinarity, in keeping with the iterative principle of adaptive peacebuilding. A vivid example of this is the Flag Forest installation we created at the 3rd national gathering, 2014. Our hosts had planned a day-long hike into the mountains, leading to Playback performances for remote village communities. They were calling it ‘Climbing the Mountain Together’, viewing it as a metaphor for claiming agency in finding a pathway forward in the process of transitional justice. However, a steep rise in political volatility at that time led to concern that our culturally diverse cohort would be met with suspicion by the general public. This is an example of the caution needed due to Sri Lanka not being sufficiently ‘settled’ as Cunningham and Ladd suggest (2018, 585). We developed an alternative activity that responded to that instability, not directly addressing the politics of the moment, but addressing each other in a way that matched the external volatility more urgently than the personal story structure of Playback. Each participant wrote a small message to the collective, then sought each other’s assistance to translate that message into the other two languages. The outcome was an installation of flags, each written in the three languages, which we traversed together in silence.

Emergence from misunderstanding

It happens at times that a Playback performance fails to capture the story told. An important nuance may be missed, an unconscious bias revealed or a difference in beliefs exposed. This can diminish the teller’s experience or exacerbate social divisions, undermining pluralism rather than building it. It is worth noting that when a Playback performance falls short, much is still made visible. Points of breakdown indicate what is particularly difficult to hear or to understand. Missed sections can indicate avoidance of something uncomfortable. Inaccuracies can expose lack of familiarity with culture, region, religion, or social norms that aren’t shared. People don’t necessarily know what they don’t know, so finding gaps in the ability to play one another’s stories can activate new levels of sensitivity to others that was not possible when those gaps were invisible. In such instances, the teller’s opportunity to speak after the enactment is particularly important. However, it’s likely that absences or misunderstandings will be hard to articulate, particularly in the charged performative moment.

Recognising potential benefit in these moments supports Jordaan and Coetzee’s (2017) claim that Playback Theatre’s primary purpose is to encourage re-evaluation among performers and audiences of their social locatedness. However, to achieve such reevaluation requires meeting two parallel challenges. The most immediate is that examining ‘mistakes’ too intensively can threaten the sense of safety participants feel when they step forward to play each other’s stories. This underlines a delicate balance between protecting the safety of telling and also the safety of performing. The other challenge is tackling deeper discomforts that can be triggered by examining circumstantial differences, particularly if they expose systemic inequality. This tension is heightened by the pressures of different experiences and understandings of ‘truth’, performers understanding a story through the prism of their own positionality. It can be tempting to brush these moments aside in a rush towards affirmation of good intentions and small successes within the enactment.

It is worth considering Cohen’s caution that ‘the effectiveness of arts-based transitional justice initiatives depends in large part on the aesthetic and ethical sensibilities’ (2020, 2). Dennis identifies this task of ‘representing culturally specific yet unfamiliar worlds’ as the ‘tension between aesthetics and accountability in representation’ (2008, 211). Barolsky and Halley examine the affective experience a performer has of the story, recognising that ‘affective flows would shape our ability to make aesthetic choices which were part of the broader ethical act’ (2021, 254). In a transitional justice context, characterised by ‘crosscutting cleavages based on class, caste, gender, and regional differences’ (DeVotta 2020, 50), the ethics of such moments compel us to engage carefully with aesthetics that signify identity or positionality. One option we have explored in Theatre of Friendship for giving more space to illuminating what is unknown, is making time to develop and present small, rehearsed pieces of theatre. This allows the dialogic work that springs from Playback Theatre to grow differently, making space for detailed exploration and negotiation of cultural difference that can easily be missed in the intensity of improvisation. Once again, this is an example of emergence taking us out beyond the Playback methodology.

Taking an expansive view of intercultural listening, we have evolved the range of drama and ritual activities we use throughout an event to heighten participants’ sensitivity to each other, so that listening operates at many levels not just linguistic. This is supported by the movement of leadership from one to another, participants adapting to facilitation in their language or in translation, group norms adapting to changing leadership. In the warm-up space, we learn each other’s cultural songs and dances, do mirroring exercises and blindfold guiding activities. These have the effect of bringing people into encounters with each other that demand close observation and receptivity without words. Some participants have facilitated ritual processes such as guided meditation, introducing a spiritual dimension to how we receive and work with each other. These modes of communication that are not reliant on language lay a foundation that supports our work that does involve speaking and listening. We have also seen an increase in participants learning each other’s languages over the years.

Playback in contexts of trauma

Risks associated with a trauma context call into question the applicability of Playback Theatre (McCormack and Henry 2017). While there are instances of Playback Theatre being used for the purpose of integrating trauma in therapeutic settings, Salas reports anecdotal evidence indicating this is only effective in later stages of trauma recovery after an ‘essential first phase of establishing safety’ ([2020] 2021, 217). This bears out in the discussion between the authors, in which Rev Joshua addressed the issue of when Playback is most valuable:

RJS: I strongly believe Playback Theatre gives to people proof they are resilient despite all kind of disasters. This means Playback Theatre is not the start tool of problem solving, but it is powerful as the last tool.

An important consideration in Theatre of Friendship is that war is only one among a myriad of factors that have caused significant trauma in Sri Lanka’s recent history. Reportage of the 2022 economic collapse has brought global attention to Sri Lanka’s economic and political volatility (see for example BBC News, May 10, 2022). In the discussion between the authors, Shashika spoke about traumatic events, many of which haven’t reach the news:

SDS: Sri Lankan people have faced many traumas over decades even without realising that they are in deep trauma. It's happening one after another or a few at once. Example: war, tsunami, flooding, landslides, micro finances trap, family members going to labour jobs in the Middle East which separate children from parents, addiction for alcohol, poverty, unemployment, political instability, economic crisis, inflation, sexual violence, domestic violence, discrimination against minorities. All create some sort of trauma, which are rarely addressed professionally.

The prevalence of trauma makes it impossible to confirm if some or all Theatre of Friendship participants have established the conditions of safety Salas proposes as essential. Recognising the likelihood of unresolved trauma being present in our cohort, we have adopted risk minimisation strategies. These include starting each day with grounding activities that bring participants into their bodies and heighten sensitivity to the environment. We have made sure to have a mental health professional present at each event since our first gathering. At some gatherings, we have made dedicated time for participants to debrief within their own group, where they have consistency of relationships from their daily lives, some knowledge of each other’s circumstances and the benefit of shared language. In Shashika’s reflections on instances when participants have shared stories about traumatic experiences, the group’s response has demonstrated the protective concern that indicates growing covenantal pluralism:

SDS: Through some of our Theatre of Friendship gatherings, we have unofficially addressed traumas our team members were going through at that time. We have given care, love, companionship, listening, safe space to overcome some of their traumatic experiences.

We embrace Salas’ recommendations regarding Playback in settings where trauma is present, noting that transitional justice contexts pose a particularly strong likelihood that audiences will bring ‘their own traumatised eyes’ (Salas [2020] 2021, 219) to each other’s stories. Recognising that large scale injustice generates shared and personal trauma, we add to Salas’ list of cautions the suggestion that Playback practitioners anticipate the probability that even after acute collective trauma, unrelated, less visible, traumas will be present. We see value in limiting Playback to where is it best suited and being ready to shift to a more expansive range of participatory artistic practices where it isn’t.

Conclusion

Theatre of Friendship began as a Playback Theatre project, applying existing knowledge of the social potentialities of the form to a transitional justice context. Challenges associated with language, artistic ownership and political instability have informed the development of our Playback work, and also led us to expand into other artistic practices. Working in translation limits the degree of nuance in how and what we can communicate, in particular the degree to which conductors can actively facilitate the telling of a story. We have experimented with how best to work in translation, and incorporated non-verbal and rehearsed performance practices, each allowing for different ways to make meaning together.

As local participants took greater ownership, driving the direction of the network, their existing artistic skills came to the fore. Expanding our artistic vocabulary strengthens our Playback work, but also extends us into alternative artistic practices. Given the rich tradition of incorporating multiple performance forms into Playback spaces, demarcation between being in and departing from a Playback process is ambiguous, particularly as we always return to Playback at key points in any event. Elasticity of artistic form strengthens our alignment with adaptive peacebuilding, increasing our capacity to respond to changing circumstances. Allowing the very structure of our events to respond to shifting external circumstances generates a different kind of shared meaning making, in which participants apprehend and negotiate the world together. This supports participants to bring their own values and concerns to how they orient themselves within this cross-cultural space.

Equally important is the temporality of our work. The network structure we have established means that each activity we mount is part of a longitudinal commitment to building community and remaining connected indefinitely. This has made room for the social impact of our work to occur incrementally, not driven towards specific outcomes or aligned with top-down approaches to transitional justice. Over time, we see the crucible of our artistically driven process normalising cultural cross-pollination. This foundation allows us to build common ground, which in turn makes it possible to explore differentials between people’s circumstances. Collectively, these processes generate social potentialities, an imaginatively driven sense of agency that supports participants to disrupt prevailing narratives inside and outside of Theatre of Friendship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).