Debbie Tai: Playback Theatre and the Practice of Zero Distance Care

In this episode, I introduce Dai Biyun 戴碧筠, also known as Debbie Tai, a Macau theatre-maker and the co-founder, resident choreographer, and artistic director of Zero Distance Cooperative (ZDC, 零距離合作社). Working in a casino city shaped by speed, shift labor, and constant tourist traffic, Tai uses playback theatre to build something rare and necessary: a durable practice of public listening, where everyday experience can be spoken, witnessed, and held with care rather than consumed as spectacle.

The episode follows three key bodies of work. Caretakers (照顧者), developed with Comuna de Pedra (石頭公社), draws on years of story collection to stage the emotional and social realities of long-term care. Dialogues in Macau (植言物語) relocates playback theatre outdoors in Coloane, combining five-sense environmental experience, photography and writing, and live story performance to re-knit relationships among people, plants, animals, and place, especially in the wake of typhoon seasons. The Distance between the Ocean and Us, presented at the Macao City Fringe Festival, transforms cleaned marine debris into puppets for an improvised mini-stage performance, followed by participatory making and exhibition, closing the gap between coastal life and the ocean’s returning waste.

Keywords
Dai Biyun 戴碧筠, Zero Distance Cooperative (零距離合作社), Macau (澳门)，Coloane (路环), playback theatre, One-Person-One-Story theatre (一人一故事剧场), Caretakers (照顧者), Comuna de Pedra (石頭公社), applied theatre, participatory performance, community storytelling, listening as infrastructure, care labor, caregiving, long-term care, Dialogues in Macau (植言物語), typhoon memory, ecological grief, Pearl River Delta, marine debris, puppetry, marine waste transformation

Key references 

Zero Distance Cooperative. https://zdc.mo/home/

Zero Distance Cooperative. “植言物語 Dialogues in Macau.” https://zdc.mo/dialogue_in_macau/

Macao City Fringe Festival. “The Distance between the Ocean and Us – Puppetry Playback Theatre.” https://www.macaucityfringe.gov.mo/2021/en/event/8496

Macao Cultural Centre. “‘De-corps-struction’ Series 2023 – ‘Narratives’ Caretakers.” https://www.ccm.gov.mo/en/othershow/75322

International Playback Theatre Network. “What Is Playback Theatre.” https://playbacktheatrenetwork.org/what-is-playback-theatre/

Salas, Jo. Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre. 20th Anniversary ed. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publishing, 2013.  

Fox, Jonathan, and Jo Salas. Personal Stories in Public Spaces: Essays on Playback Theatre by Its Founders. New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publishing, 2021.

Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 

Li, Edmund Sheng, Anning Zhang, and Yechang Yin. “A City Profile of Macau—The Rise and Fall of a Casino City.” Cities 141 (2023): 104431.  

Zhou, Long, Yu Qin, Jialin Cheng, Huiyu Zhu, Muhan Li, Jiabin Zhang, Charlene LeBleu, Guoqiang Shen, Tian Chen, and Yu Liu. “Urban Ecosystem Services, Ecological Security Patterns and Ecological Resilience in Coastal Cities: The Impact of Land Reclamation in Macao SAR.” Journal of Environmental Management 373 (2025): 123750.  

My academic website: http://csun.academia.edu/MeiqinWang

Transcript

You are listening to Regenerative Artivism: Asian Women’s Creative Strategies for Social and Ecological Futures. I am your host, Meiqin Wang, an art historian working in contemporary Asian art and the environmental humanities. In each episode, we explore how Asian women artists, curators, and community organizers use creative, place-based practice to confront social and environmental injustice and cultivate more livable futures. Thank you for joining me. Let us begin.

Today, I want to begin with a small but telling mismatch.

Picture Macau the way it is usually packaged for the world: chandelier light, mirrored ceilings, the soft roar of air-conditioned money, and streets engineered for fast movement between casinos, hotels, and shopping arcades.

Now picture a different room. It is ordinary. A few chairs form a circle. There is a bottle of water on a folding table. The pace has changed. People have come not to buy anything, not to win anything, but to speak a story they did not know they were holding.

This is where Dai Biyun 戴碧筠 works; she is better known as Debbie Tai or Pek Kuan.  

Born in the early 1980s, Debbie Tai holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts Education. Over the past two decades, she has also become one of Macau’s most persistent builders of community arts infrastructure: a co-founder, choreographer, and artistic director of Zero Distance Cooperative 零距離合作社, or ZDC, a nonprofit collective founded in 2008.

That name, Zero Distance Cooperative, is not decorative. It signals an aspiration that is both practical and radical: reduce the distance between strangers, between public and private, between the story you think you can tell and the story you have been trained to swallow.

Because when we talk about regeneration, we often imagine ecological repair as something visibly transformative: wetlands restored, rivers cleaned, coastlines protected. Those projects are crucial. But Dai asks a different question, and she asks it from the scale of everyday life and the human nervous system.

What does regeneration look like when the primary medium is not a gallery project, but a community theatre room, a coastal house, a farm path in Coloane, and a circle of shared stories?

To answer that, we need Macau in view.

Macau is a city with unusually intense pressures on space, time, and attention. It is small, dense, and globally recognizable as a gambling capital. The casino economy is not only an industry; it is a gravitational field. It reorganizes labor, traffic, and everyday rhythms. It changes what counts as valuable time, what counts as respectable work, and what kinds of cultural life are encouraged, sponsored, or sidelined.

To live in a place like this is to live with speed as the default. Many residents work rotating shifts. Nights blur into mornings. Weekends are not always weekends. People are physically close to one another but socially separated by schedule, language, and fatigue. Macau is multilingual, shaped by Cantonese and Mandarin, Portuguese and English, and by constant tourist arrivals. That mix can be vibrant, but it can also produce a strange condition: people share streets without sharing a sense of belonging.

So when Dai builds a story circle, she is not offering a sentimental add-on to urban life. She is offering social equipment: a repeatable way of producing listening in a city that trains people to keep moving.

Macau is also a coastal place. It sits at the edge of the Pearl River Delta, with sea and river, shipping lanes and storm systems converging. Typhoons are collective events, whether or not people use the language of trauma.

And there is one more layer that Dai refuses to treat as private. Macau is also a city where many forms of care labor are essential and routinely undervalued. Care work is everywhere, yet rarely treated as public achievement. It is more often framed as private responsibility, personal virtue, or invisible depletion.

Playback theatre gives Dai a way to hold these layers together.

If playback theatre is new to you, here is the form in plain language. Audience members are invited to share a moment from their lives. It might be small. It might be life-changing. A conductor, sometimes also called a facilitator, listens and asks a few careful questions so the teller can shape what they want to share. Then, without a script, performers and a musician improvise a short piece that plays the story back to the teller and the room.

These performances can be simple in structure and still precise in feeling. Sometimes the actors build a still image that captures the emotional contour of what was said. Sometimes they use a few lines of movement and sound, like a chorus holding the mood. Sometimes they enact a longer arc with characters and a turning point. The repertoire is flexible, but the principle remains steady: the teller should recognize themselves, and the room should recognize the human stakes.

The phrase One-Person-One-Story Theatre is often used in Chinese contexts to describe playback theatre. One person offers a story. The room offers attention. The performers offer form. And then the story returns, changed not because the facts are altered, but because it has been carried by more than one body.

This is not therapy, and it is not confession. It is a ritual of public witnessing with artistic structure. The core is the ethics of listening that the form demands. In playback, the teller remains the owner of the story. The conductor’s job is not to extract drama, but to protect the teller’s agency and the group’s trust. The actors are not there to interpret the teller from above. They translate lived experience into gesture, rhythm, and image.

In a casino city, this is already a quiet rebellion. It refuses the idea that attention must be bought. It refuses the idea that only the most dramatic story deserves to be heard. And it refuses the idea that a person’s value can be measured by what they produce, what they win, or what they consume.

In ZDC’s model, storytelling is not an extra. It is the method. It is how people become a temporary public. It is how exhaustion, grief, and everyday endurance become speakable without being reduced to a moral lesson.

Let us step first into Caretaker 照顧者, because it offers the clearest view of her applied theatre direction.

Caretaker is an original production developed with Comuna de Pedra, a Macau theatre group, and produced in collaboration with the local art company Pierian Spring. The production has been staged in Macau and also traveled beyond the city, including performances in Guangzhou, where Dai served as director.

What distinguishes Caretaker is its long gestation and its research base. The work draws from five years of in-depth interviews conducted by Comuna de Pedra with caregivers, gathering first-person experiences from people who support others while rarely being noticed: social workers, nurses, family members, and institutional staff. These interviews become what Dai calls an emotional archive. They are not background material. They shape the script and the emotional map of the production.

Then there is the stage language.

Caretaker is not built as a documentary lecture. It is described as a fusion of music, illustration, and theatre, with a strong emphasis on physical theatre. Bodies and movement carry what words often cannot: repetitive labor, sudden emergencies, long stretches of vigilance, and the interior strain of care.

This is where Tai’s broader playback sensibility still resonates, even though Caretaker is not simply a playback event. Caregiving stories are rarely neat. They are made of interrupted sleep, bureaucratic paperwork, and the awkwardness of loving someone while also losing patience. They often carry embarrassment: the caregiver who cannot admit they need help, or the cared-for person who feels their dignity dissolving. These are not stories that fit easily into public culture.

Tai’s contribution, across her work, is to insist that such experience deserves form rather than silence. When care becomes performable with dignity, it becomes shareable without becoming spectacle. It also becomes legible as a social issue rather than a private weakness.

One detail of Tai’s approach is especially telling: she has argued for mixed casting, with professional performers sharing the stage with people who have actually lived the stories. This is not a gimmick. It is a politics of authorship. It refuses the usual division between those who are represented and those who represent.

And it changes the ethical temperature of the room. Once caregivers are onstage, the audience is no longer consuming someone else’s pain as content. The audience is being asked to sit in the presence of people whose time is already fragmented, whose attention is already overdrawn.

Dai has also shared an anecdote that captures this with plain clarity. During a 2022 performance connected to the long Caretaker project, a caregiver left halfway through to feed someone upstairs, apologizing as they rushed out. Dai describes that moment as clarifying: it shows the courage it takes for caregivers to attend anything at all, and it reframes the audience’s presence as a gift rather than a commodity.

From there, we can move outward, from the theatre room into the landscape, because Dai does not stay indoors. Her projects often sit at the intersection of mental health, social services, and ecological attention, rather than remaining safely inside the cultural sector.

One of the most vivid examples is a long-running platform called Dialogues In Macau (植言物語), which takes playback theatre out of conventional indoor venues and into the landscapes of Coloane, the greener, less densely built part of Macau.

In 2018, in the wake of Typhoon Hato, ZDC entered community spaces where large trees had collapsed or been removed. Plants became a mediator, a way to speak about disaster without forcing people into heroic narratives. Residents were invited to observe damaged or missing trees, articulate their feelings and thoughts, and speak from the scale of neighborhood life: water and electricity outages, isolation, fear, and the strange afterimage of a city that looks normal again while bodies remain braced for the next emergency.

This is not only psychological work. It is ecological work too, because it treats urban vegetation not as decoration but as a cohabitant whose injury registers a wider wound.

In 2019, the project continued through another typhoon season and moved into schools and universities, creating opportunities for youth and community residents to express interior responses to natural disaster. This iteration also introduced a strong visual-text component. Residents were invited ahead of time to photograph plants in their everyday neighborhoods and write community stories in relation to themes linking people, plants, environment, and livelihood. On the day of performance, photographs and writings were exhibited alongside playback theatre, creating a layered event: story on the wall, story in the body, story in the room.

You can hear what Dai is doing here. She is building a civic archive, but one made of ordinary observation rather than official documents. Plants become a proxy for memory. Photography and writing become a bridge between private feeling and public articulation. Theatre becomes the moment where those fragments return to a group as shared recognition.

By 2020, Dialogues In Macau took on an even clearer environmental-embodiment format, organized as four events, each with a subtheme: Mountain, Sea, Forest, and Animals. Participants traveled to Coloane and moved through specific sites, including the back beach area behind the popular Tam Kong Temple (谭公庙), guided by natural instructors. They observed plants, waters, and animal life with deliberate attention. They documented what they noticed through photography and short writing. Then, they performed and witnessed stories that had settled in the body during the outdoor experiences.

The prompt may sound modest, but it can be quietly transformative. When you are asked to notice plants and animals as neighbors, not scenery, you start to see street trees, potted balcony plants, and scraps of green in construction gaps as cohabitants rather than background.

One iteration also partnered with Dog World Macau for the Animals theme. That collaboration widened the ethical horizon of the project from nature appreciation to interspecies responsibility, and it was paired with additional community activities that linked storytelling to practical care.

In 2021, the project continued with a scheduled series of outdoor events, again tied to the themes of Forest, Mountain, Animals, and Sea, using an extended session format that allowed participants to move from outdoor sensing to story performance as a single afternoon arc.

If you listen closely, the method is consistent. Dialogues In Macau is not environmental education delivered as information. It is environmental education delivered as encounter, attention, and narrative return.

People do not learn about the sea first and then decide they care. They are asked to slow down enough to notice how the sea is already in their life: in memory, in weather, in fear, in debris, in longing, in the feeling of being small at the shoreline. Then those experiences are converted into story, and story is returned as performance.

That is the land-and-landscape side of Tai’s ecological practice. Now let us move fully to the sea.

If Dialogues In Macau is about re-embedding bodies in Coloane’s forest edges and paths, The Distance Between the Ocean and Us is about confronting marine waste as both material and voice.

This project was designed as an intimate interactive performance. Its starting point is a problem that many coastal communities know too well: marine debris. Waste drifts, accumulates, breaks into smaller pieces, and returns to shore, as if the ocean is forcing a conversation we keep trying to avoid.

ZDC’s response is to collect that marine waste, clean and disinfect it, and transform it into puppets. Not symbolic puppets made from new materials, but puppets that carry the texture of harm: plastic fragments, nets, and objects that once floated as debris. They become a material insistence: this is what our consumption looks like when it comes back.

The performance places these puppets on a mini stage in a small venue in Coloane. In some presentations, audiences are limited to a very small group at a time, usually eight people. That scale is not incidental. It allows the work to function less as spectacle and more as encounter.

And the encounter is structured by a daring choice: the play is told in the voice of marine waste.

That is a decision that could easily tip into preachiness. But it works here because the performance does not simply deliver a message. It improvises stories around distance: the distance between a person and the ocean, the distance between consumption and consequence, and the distance between a coastal city’s daily life and the sea that absorbs its waste.

Then Dai extends the work beyond the performance frame. After the show, audiences can join a Marine Waste Puppet-Making Workshop. There is also a Marine Waste Puppet Exhibition presented in connection with the project. So the audience moves from witness, to maker, to co-carrier of the material problem.

I am describing the structure, but the artistic logic is the real point.

In ecological art, recycled materials can become a moral badge: look, we reused something, therefore we are good. Dai avoids that trap by keeping the material tied to storytelling and relationship. The puppet is not a final product. It is an intermediary. It is a tool that helps someone speak about their distance from the ocean, and perhaps to shift that distance.

This is regenerative artivism in motion. Regeneration here is not a grand restoration of a damaged ecosystem in one dramatic gesture. It is a shift in the sensorium: the moment when a person can no longer treat marine waste as somebody else’s problem, because it has become a character on the stage, looking back.

If you are wondering why this can be effective, it is because it collapses abstraction. Marine pollution often stays far away in people’s minds, even in coastal cities. It is somewhere else’s crisis. It is the ocean as distant expanse, not as intimate neighbor. But a puppet built from waste refuses that distance. It puts the problem in your hands. It gives debris a face, a gesture, a voice. It makes disgust and grief available as shared experience, without forcing those feelings into shame.

This is Tai’s ecological intelligence: she understands that people rarely change through information alone. People also change through narrative, touch, repetition, and social reinforcement.

At this point, you might be thinking: this is theatre, yes, but it is also institution-building.

Dai is not only a director. She is an arts administrator and organizational leader. ZDC describes itself as a collective whose core members include counselors, therapists, teachers, artists, community collaborators, and environmental advocates. Its mission links art with social work, and it treats community practice as a kind of cultural firmware: the often-invisible layer that helps a social system run.

That language can sound abstract until you look at what it produces. It produces long-term thematic work rather than one-off events. It produces training and workshops in playback methods and facilitation. It produces cross-sector collaboration, where psychological care and ecological attention are not treated as separate domains. And it produces leadership programs, including Seeking The Inner Voice: Female Leadership Narrative Transformation Journey, which uses theatre, storytelling, and facilitation to cultivate women’s voice and collective capacity as relational skill: listening, hosting conflict, sustaining a group, and acting without erasing others.

In a city like Macau, this kind of slow capacity-building can function as resistance. Not resistance by confrontation, but resistance by creating alternative circuits of value that do not rely on spectacle or large capital.

Now I want to reduce the scale again, and end where we began, in a room.

Because the core of Tai’s practice is not the puppet as object, or even the performance as event. The core is the ethics of facilitation.

In playback theatre, the conductor is not a neutral referee. The conductor shapes the room, manages risk, and protects the teller’s agency. The conductor cultivates a space where people can speak across difference without being flattened into consensus.

Playback theatre, at its best, is a protocol for public empathy that does not depend on celebrity, spectacle, or expensive technology. It depends on trained bodies, shared attention, and trust built over time.

This labor is often underestimated because it looks soft. But it is demanding. It requires training, emotional stamina, and a careful boundary between art and exposure.

So we should be honest about constraints. Community arts in Macau do not operate in a vacuum. They operate in a political context where cultural projects are often asked to serve tourism, branding, or social harmony. They operate in an economic context where funding is precarious, spaces are expensive, and artists are pushed toward short-term gigs. They operate in an emotional context where facilitators can burn out, because listening is labor.

This is why Tai’s program-building is not just a production strategy. It becomes infrastructure. Small infrastructure, yes, but real: spaces, methods, schedules, and relationships that can endure beyond a single event.

Her work keeps returning to one principle: people’s stories deserve form, not extraction.

A casino city sells attention as a commodity. Dai builds attention as a commons.

That is why I am calling her practice regenerative. Regeneration here is not a heroic turnaround. It is the slow rebuilding of capacity: capacity to notice, to speak, to listen, to return to the coast without denial, to return to the caregiver without glorification, to return to the neighborhood without treating it as disposable.

At this point you might be wondering: where is the art, exactly? Is the art the stories? Is the art the performance? Is the art the community outcome?

In Tai’s practice, the answer is yes, but not in a vague way. The art is the crafting of forms that can hold what everyday life tends to spill. The art is the pacing of a room. The art is the translation of a story into movement that feels accurate without being literal. The art is the decision to end a performance at the right moment, before it becomes exposure without consent or spectacle without care.

And, crucially, the art is the creation of a public where a public does not easily exist.

So what can we take from Debbie Tai’s work?

I will name three takeaways.

First, regeneration often begins as a social technology of attention. Before we can repair environments, we often need to repair the ways we notice, the ways we listen, and the ways we treat ordinary experience as disposable.

Second, ecological practice does not have to arrive as environmental messaging. It can look like a walk in Coloane where someone realizes they have not touched soil in months. It can look like a puppet made from marine waste that refuses to let the ocean remain abstract. It can look like a room where a caregiver finally admits exhaustion, and the room does not rush to correct them.

Third, the aesthetics of regeneration are inseparable from the politics of care. Who is expected to care, and at what cost? Who is allowed to admit they cannot care alone? Who gets social support, and who gets praise instead of resources?

Tai’s work does not answer these questions with policy. It answers them with practice: repeated gatherings, repeated listening, repeated returns of story.

Let me end with one final image.

Imagine a small puppet made from something the ocean threw back: a piece of plastic, a fragment of netting, a bottle cap. Imagine it on a tiny stage in Coloane, animated in front of eight people. Imagine someone in the audience realizing, with a jolt, that the ocean is not far away. It has been receiving their lives all along.

And then imagine that person going home, not with a tidy solution, but with a new closeness: to the sea, to waste, to story, and to the quiet labor of care that keeps a city livable.

That closeness is not everything we need. But it is a necessary beginning: an art of closeness that can make room for grief, for responsibility, and for the slow work of becoming accountable to place and to each other.

Thank you for listening to regenerative artivism: Asian women’s creative strategies for social and ecological futures. If this episode brought someone or some place to mind, I invite you to continue that reflection in your own conversations and practices. You can find a short summary and a few references in the episode description in your listening app. Until next time, take care of yourself, and take care of the places that sustain you.