In our second salon we explored the theme of authority. Authority is often present in collaborations in one form or another, but is rarely discussed or even openly acknowledged. How authority is adopted, assumed, enacted or distributed can have a profound impact on our collaborations, our collaborators and ourselves. In this salon, we wanted to learn from participants how authority has manifested in their collaborations, how authority operates on an institutional as well as individual scale, and how authority has both enabled and hindered their collaborations.
For Salon #2 we invited Rebus Theatre to work with us. Rebus Theatre are based in Canberra and work with a range of techniques, including playback theatre. In playback theatre, the actors listen as members of the audience share their stories around a theme or topic, and then perform that story back to the audience. We felt this would be a great format to render visible authority, an often hidden issue in collaboration. We had three actors, one musician and one story master join us for the salon. They began with a selection of prompts and questions on authority, inviting the audience to respond with short anecdotes, which the actors then performed back as quick vignettes, before moving on to more complex and nuanced stories which were performed back as longer pieces. The performances were funny, insightful and powerful, especially for those who were able to see their experiences being enacted and validated by others. For the audience, the ability of the actors to hear an anecdote and immediately transform it into an incisive piece of theatre was fascinating, with some discussion afterwards about the nature of the collaboration between the actors in this form of improvised theatre.