Students in my workshops and readers of my article published recently on Jo Salas’ site (and on this blog) have asked me about tools they can use to help identify the social dimensions of stories, either in the moment of telling or retrospectively, when reviewing performances. Below are four questions we can ask ourselves while listening to stories that we suspect may have important social dimensions. It will be easier to work out the answer to the questions if we have an active sociological imagination, awareness of social justice issues, and an understanding of the dynamics of injustice and the impact of unjust social norms and practices.

1. Who, and who else?

As well as the teller, who else shares this story? The question isn’t only about how many people share it, but whether it fits into a pattern. If the teller’s experience is one of many similar experiences, with similar causes and similar outcomes, falling repeatedly on people in a similar position, then it’s a social, systemic and structural issue, however personal it is in the telling. For example, not many people identify as transgender, but disproportionate harm falls on those people, as part of a pattern of prejudice and discrimination against gender-non conformance. A story can belong to a small minority, even to just a few people in the room, and still be entirely structural. Equally, something that happens to lots of people can be random bad luck if there’s no pattern to who it happens to and why.

Also think about who doesn’t have this issue. What protects them? Sometimes the protection is obvious: money, citizenship, the right accent, the right body, the right postcode. Often it’s invisible, especially to those who have it, because protection is mostly experienced as the absence of a problem. People who’ve never had to think about something rarely notice that not having to think about it is a privilege. Asking what protects others shows that the difference between the teller and those who don’t share their story is a matter of position, not character, competence or luck. It also gives the enactment somewhere to look beyond the teller: at the institutions, groups and social arrangements that are, quietly, part of the story too.

2. Time and history?

What happens when we think of this story in the context of time and history? What events of the past and what legacies, rules, laws, traditions, social changes, etc., have a presence or have echoes in the teller’s story?

Stories carry the past inside them, even when nobody in the story mentions it. A teller’s experience at a job interview, in a hospital waiting room, at a border crossing or a family dinner is shaped by decisions made long before they were born: who was allowed to own land, vote, marry, migrate, work or be educated; which languages were punished and which rewarded; which wars were fought and which grievances were never resolved. These legacies don’t stay in the past. They live on in where people live, what they inherit, who they trust, what they fear and what they expect from those in power.

Without a sense of history, a story can look like a one-off collision between individuals. With it, we can see that the teller has walked into something already in motion. History also helps us notice change: what’s different now from a generation ago, what’s been won, what’s been lost, and what has  stayed the same. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a story is that it could have been told, almost word for word, fifty years earlier!

3. What conditions made this story possible?

Stories don’t happen in a vacuum. Something made this experience possible, likely or even inevitable: a policy, a workplace culture, a religious teaching, a political decision, the choices of someone with power, or the everyday behaviour of others that went unchallenged. Naming those conditions moves the story from “this happened to me” to “this happened to me because…”. 

That shift matters. Without it, the teller can be left holding the story as a private misfortune or personal failing. With it, we can see that the teller was acted upon by forces larger than themselves, and that those forces have names, owners and histories. It also lets the enactment show the machinery behind the moment, not just the moment itself.

4. Who benefits, and who pays?

Most patterns of harm persist because someone or some entity gains from them: money, power, convenience, status, or simply not having to change. Asking who benefits helps us see why a problem endures even when it’s obviously unfair, and stops us enacting the story as if it were just the inevitable nature of things, an accident of fate or a misunderstanding. Sometimes the beneficiaries are distant institutions; sometimes they’re people in the room, including us.

The cost, meanwhile, is rarely shared equitably. It lands hardest on particular groups, often those with the least power to bear its burden or refuse it, and it can be paid in many currencies: health, safety, money, time, dignity, opportunity, belonging. The teller may be paying a cost they’ve learned to expect or treat as normal. Holding both sides of the question together lets us honour what the teller has carried, and shows the audience that the price of “how things are” is being paid by real people, often silently, so that others don’t have to.

What we do with what we see

Once we’ve recognised a story’s social dimensions, deciding whether to include them in an enactment is an ethical decision, not just an aesthetic or artistic one.

For example, consider Mary’s story, reproduced below. To leave women’s fear of men’s violence out of her story has consequences. It turns a widely shared, well-founded fear into the teller’s personal anxiety, as if it were something about her rather than something systemically true about the world she lives in. It also quietly reassures anyone in the audience who would prefer not to think about it. 

Silence isn’t neutral. When we omit the social dimension, we’re still making a statement, usually one that leaves the status quo unexamined and unquestioned. That doesn’t mean every enactment has to name every social dimension or structure. It just means we should make that choice consciously, knowing what’s at stake for the teller, the audience and our community, rather than defaulting to the personal because it feels safer or more familiar.

Mary’s story, told in 1985

After being separated from her friends in a crowded nightclub district a young woman is walking home alone. As she walks she hears footsteps behind her. Aware that she is being followed through the dark streets, she hurries, panicking a little, walking as fast as she can but trying not to attract attention to her vulnerability. She gets home and with relief opens the door of her house and locks it behind her. Outside, in the dark, she hears the footsteps pause, and then move on.