Telling real people’s stories can offer moments of deep sharing
UNIVERSITY of Sydney academic and verbatim theatre storyteller Dr Paul Dwyer speaks to Carla Lever in this Q&A.
Paul, you’re a theatremaker who works with real people’s stories. Why is this form of storytelling important to you?
For me, storytelling is about relationships: both with your audience, but also with the people who share their stories with you.
In a place like Australia, until indigenous and white people find ways to tell stories together, reconciliation is just a political buzzword. So a lot of the theatre I’ve made has been documentary-style, where we tell real stories around important events. These become moments of deep sharing.
So storytelling can allow for meaningful inter-cultural conversations?
Yes! A really important thing for me as a non-indigenous person is that I’m not there to tell the stories of indigenous people, but to tell stories alongside them. But it is important that a little bit – just a little bit – of my story is in there too!
People need to see white people carry the weight of representing the story of the oppressors. My story is never the big story – white people get to tell their stories all the time in many ways – but it isn’t invisible.
Some of the most important stories in theatre are the ones that don’t even make it into the play. To go on tour with Auntie Rhonda Dickson – she’s a local Aboriginal elder here in Sydney – to be talking about each other’s families and finding points of connection like what football team or recipes we enjoy . . . all these things are very important too.
It sounds like a beautiful way of engaging with people and their lives. But it can be powerful too. Have you found that telling stories allows people to process emotional experiences?
Absolutely. There was a show worked on called Beautiful One Day with indigenous people from a place called Palm Island, where there was a horrific case of an Aboriginal man who died in police custody.
The community had been talked about a lot and they still felt after years that the story had not been properly
Itold. The show that toured in Australia and London told a version of the events that finally involved their perspectives. Your latest show – Grace Under Pressure – looks closely at stories coming out of medical training here in Australia. Can you tell us more?
Often we think of health workers – particularly doctors – as being incredibly privileged people. And sometimes they are!
Actually, though, their training experiences can be really difficult, with high pressure and enormous amounts of bullying, sexual harassment and racial abuse: young doctors are committing suicide at alarming rates.
Grace Under Pressure is a project that draws from 40 hours of interviews with health professionals. In bringing those stories to the stage, we’re trying to contribute to the process of culture change from below.
So healing can happen not only with drugs, but with words too. Can theatre really change things in the medical field?
It certainly makes it a little harder for people to say “oh this is isn’t happening”. In health sciences, people are most swayed by hard stats, but all of that research has already been done and there’s been minimal response.
It’s actually the individual, rich stories like the kind that we hope to tell that tend to cut through and force people to change how things are done.
Read more about Grace Under Pressure at: https://www.thebiganxiety. org/events/grace-under-pressure
Reading and telling stories with your children is a powerful gift to them. It builds knowledge, language, imagination and school success! For more information about the Nal’ibali campaign, or to access children’s stories in a range of SA languages, visit: www.nalibali.org.