Masterclass

“Be the conductor to changes in the world"

As always, we begin the Gathering with a Masterclass on Friday afternoon. At every Gathering, someone from outside the Iberian community is invited to challenge us and take us further. This year, it will be Michele Chung, with the theme “Conduct Your Life Like a Playback Event – be the conductor to changes in the world.”

Michele Chung

Hong Kong independent artist in exile, human rights defender, third-party advocate for persons with disabilities, playbacker. Michele first watched Playback in 1997, the year Hong Kong was handed over to China. She began getting involved with the community theatre form and has applied it in many different sectors since 1999, eventually focusing on accessibility and inclusivity. Michele graduated from the former School of Playback Theatre in 2004, became the president of IPTN in 2015, and stepped down after two years. She is blunt, honest, and direct as a trainer, but also humble and with an acute awareness of inclusion and exclusion and of the fact that we are all human. She hates to write about herself, so it would be nice for you to come and join the workshop and conduct her story to get to know her, while she shares with you her learnings and reflections in her 25 years of Playback work, both in facilitation and performances.

Conduct Your Life Like a Playback Event – be the conductor to changes in the world

“Be the change you want to see in the world” – this Gandhi quote has been my purpose for living for many years. However, there comes a point when “being the change” is not enough. I have discovered that on top of that, we also need to be the conductor to those changes, meaning the conduit that allows the changes to pass through us and be channeled out, hopefully forming a circuit in parallel. As a playbacker, I believe the best way to do it is by applying our skills in conducting to genuinely become the conductor not just of a playback event, but of our own life.

A parallel circuit has two or more paths for current to flow through. Unlike a circuit in series, when one path is cut off, the others won’t be affected. A Playback event should be conducted in the same way, where we design the structure, flow and questions in a way that even if one of the stories fails to capture the essence, the other stories together can still continue to flow and connect with the audience. We would be lying to ourselves if we were to think that we can do every single story justice in an improvised form. Therefore, a conductor’s job is to make sure that when a “miss” occurs, that does not mean the demise of the entire show, but only a small glitch that can be supported by pulling red threads. Like rewiring the circuit to make the light bulb illuminate again.

In the first part of the workshop, we will be looking into this structure of a parallel circuit of conducting a playback event, including workshops and performances. After the break, we will come back and experiment with the ways such strategies can be applied in real life to facilitate changes in the real world.