SADA Playback Theatre creates safe spaces for communities to express themselves
SADA is a Lebanese non-profit organisation that focuses on using social theater and art for community building in marginalized areas.
We are present in Lebanon, Iraq, Belgium, and internationally through in-person and online activities.
Since 2017, SADA uses social theatre as a tool for Mental Health and Psychosocial Support, Dialogue, active Citizenship and Peacebuilding through different projects and programs. We reach out to various communities with a focus on refugees, women, youth, LGBT+ communities, both locally in Lebanon and internationally.
Our Vision and Mission
We are a group of young women and men of diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise and experiences. We gathered around our belief that there is a choice different than that of violence, hatred, immigration and surrender.
We gathered against intolerance, marginalisation and silencing. We gathered to create an alternative based on respect, freedom, justice and choice, an alternative that values art and culture and that creates public spaces.
What we offer
SADA Playback Theatre offers a wide range of Playback Theatre training and workshops, performances for closed groups (company employees, asylum seekers, etc.) and public Playback Theatre performances.
Moreover, SADA offers self-care and self-development through different artistic mediums and provides cultural management training (governance, finance, programming, etc.) for cultural initiatives around the world.
Where we work
Mosul, Iraq
After years of war and occupation, these communities are suffering from deep trauma. SADA’s intervention in Mosul came as a process for communal healing, inviting the community to share emotions, memories of difficult times.
Tripoli, Lebanon
Residents of two neighbourhoods - Al-Qubbeh and Jabal Mohsen - became rivals during the Lebanese civil war and frequently engaged in violence until 2015. SADA studio was created as a creative hub for relationship building and conflict reconciliation.
Gent, Belgium
SADA Playback Theatre in Gent was formed as a need to create a community and come together around the art of storytelling and improvisation. Gent group is focused on working with people of colour from forced displacement background, including Belgians.
Online and International presence
Initiated during the global pandemic that struck millions of people, SADA’s online activities act as a major psychosocial support and a safe platform where people from different backgrounds and communities can express their feelings and thoughts, then enacted on camera.
"The long struggle for equity is a struggle to be heard: to tell one’s story and know that it has been comprehended and remembered; for cumulative voices to burst out of the silence and compel change.”
— Jonathan Fox, co-founder of Playback Theatre
What is Playback Theatre
Playback Theatre is a unique form of improvisational theatre in which audience members volunteer stories from their lives and see them played back on the spot. It involves a team of actors, a musician and a conductor who guide participants safely through the process of sharing, watching and reflecting on stories that resonate in them in that particular moment.
Using structured rituals, improvisations, story sharing, and attentive listening, this art becomes a communal healing promoting empathy, compassion and acceptance. It creates a safe ritual space where any story, however ordinary, extraordinary, hidden or difficult, can be told.
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