ABSTRACT
As playback theatre slowly spread from the original group outwards through a combination of word of mouth and trainings the people offered, audience tellers began to offer very serious stories, even though they did not explicitly seek them. In 1999 at a global playback theatre conference, one participant suggested a kind of flying theatre squad that could travel to communities in crisis, such as the Balkan wars dominating the news at the time. Salas, who was naming an approach that had been practiced by playback theatre practitioners in different configurations since the first workshops in the 70s, defined this configuration as the participant performance model (PPM). Another approach to assessing the effectiveness of any playback theatre performance, including those using the PPM approach, is to note the level of narrative reticulation-the extent to which the individually emergent narratives are linked. For PPM to work, especially in settings of social disruption, special attention must be paid to a few vulnerable areas.
