Playback Theatre – a community engagement tool for oral history

June 2022 is Newham Heritage Month, which this year marks the ten-year anniversary of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

We decided to bring to the archive three types of stories:

Stories of volunteers at the Olympic opening ceremony 

Stories of students who live in Newham

Stories of the community who were involved in the Olympic opening ceremony and who came together to reminisce.

We assembled a collection of audio and video clips, newspaper cuttings and interviews that would interest anyone who wanted to know how the Olympics were viewed ten years later. 

Stories of the volunteers of the opening ceremony

Three zoom box, two on top with actress expressing joy, bottom box actor reaching right hand

Hundreds of volunteers gave their time and effort to the 2012 Olympic Games, making the event a huge success. Valentina Wong, from True Heart Theatre, was one of the volunteers at the opening ceremony. Through Valentina we were able to garner a fantastic response from the 2012 Olympics volunteer performers who became part of our project. We selected five volunteers of different ages and genders to represent different roles in the ceremony and take part in our interviews.

To discover more about the experiences and reminiscences of volunteers at the London 2012 Olympic opening games ceremony, click here.

The True Heart Playback team has been serving communities in London since 2006 and with this project we had the opportunity to bring Playback Theatre to young minds at Newham College.

Andy, Anisha, Candy and Ferran took turns to lead different aspects of the workshop with each workshop designed to help make the students feel more comfortable in their bodies and within the community.

It began with voice and body exercises and focused on a key concept for each session. We incorporated sociometry, questions that helped us understand who was in the room, and explore themes of volunteering, associations with sports and their neighbourhood. We observed a transformation in students over the five weeks and brought joy into the classroom. Though these students have English as their second language, their curiosity to learn and experience was truly inspiring. We hope they take the tools of playing into their work, relationships and community.

To find out about how Newham College students experienced the workshops, click here.  

Bringing the local community together to share their experiences of the London 2012 Olympic games and opening ceremony.

Trinity Centre – Red brick building cover with green plants

For our event in this year’s Newham Heritage Month we are hosting our public Playback Theatre performance for the community at the Trinity Centre in East Ham on Saturday the 25th of June.

Reminiscing London 2012 will bring the joys, surprises and disappointments of that year when London hosted the Olympics back to life. Our live Playback Theatre performance will bring us together to remember an extraordinary event. Some of us watched the games live but most of us saw it all on TV, especially our friends overseas.

Playback Theatre is spontaneous – it is theatre created through a unique collaboration between performers and audience. An audience member tells a story or moment from their life, chooses actors to play the different roles, and then watches as their story is recreated in front of their eyes.  There is no script, but there is a rhythm and sequence to a Playback Theatre performance which is given artistic shape and coherence. The conductor is the host and facilitator of the process.

This form of theatre is not limited to the stage but has been used for social work at hospice care centres, prisons, and community centres as well as at corporate organisations.

Join us for this live Playback Theatre performance event to share the unforgettable moments large and small.