This morning, Sunday, the road is quieter in the early morning. It’s damp and even colder, and I haven’t brought gloves. Today, I have a sense of where I’m going. I walk into the little town of Plainfield and head up to where I can have a long view of the stunning Vermont foliage. It was warm in bed and I didn’t want to get up. Now, I’m entirely happy I did. So, I am filled with fresh air in my lungs, and I feel happy and energetic; it’s time, after breakfast, to present the workshop we came here to Goddard, to the Power of Words Conference, to present:

Let Us Lift the Heart of Your Poem Off the Page:

A Playback Theatre & Poetry Workshop – 2018 

Kelly DuMar & Franci DuMar

Your poem has one life on the page, another when spoken aloud, and another when you, and audience members, experience your poem through Playback Theatre. Playback Theatre co-creator, Jo Salas, believes “effective artistic expression is not the exclusive province of the professional performer,” and all of us are able to “create a thing of beauty that can touch other hearts.” We’ll honor what Salas calls our “undying need for connection through aesthetic ritual.” Bring your original poems to be played back by actors and audience volunteers, using words, music, and movement – expressing your poem’s artistry, universality, truth and beauty. Short poems at any stage of development are welcome.

We wonder, as we plan, if the participants will bring their own poems, and make a back up plan in case they don’t. But they do. And each of them is beautifully crafted. And the participants are expressive and eager to move, to risk, to listen to each other, and play. I love facilitating with my daughter because we so completely trust each other’s skills and instincts. We speak wordlessly through eye contact, nods, making our facilitating – in and out of the roles of conductor and actor – seamless. We trust each other’s choices as we lead the willing participants into deeper levels of movement, expressiveness, sharing. We lift the hearts of the poems off the page in three-part stories, fluid sculpts, perspectives, and chorus. We’ve trained together and facilitated playback together before, but this is our first time using this model we’re creating to playback original poems brought by participants, and as we debrief in the car on the ride home, we’re satisfied with how our plan worked, because such wonderful participants showed up with such generous offers. We drove home through the gorgeous tree-lined highways, in the midst of the fall foliage peak.