Abstract This article examines Playback Theatre (PBT) as a contemporary form of performance where theatre and learning combine. In PBT actors and a musician animate or playback stories from the audience in generative ways – this form being rich with potential for learning, healing and community building. Conducted over a twelve-month period with Sydney PBT 47 participants who were audience members shared their experiences of the form and revealed three essential practices of PBT, the enablers of modelling, witnessing and telling, and five dimensions of learning that flow from them. An emergent model of PBT is described as a tool for understanding this cultural ecology, and the form is foregrounded as a site for arts-based enquiry and relational forms of knowing with the benefits that flow from these productive practices.