Image Theatre Workshops examples
Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners are often requested to deliver workshops on TO in various settings and most of the time it is expected from them to make the beneficiaries of those workshops some sort of experts in only 3 hours. The sad part is that some practitioners accept the challenge and squeeze in those 3 hours everything (including Forum Theatre) – as a result, there is a superficial understanding of the methods (but claimed to be known now at deeper levels), there are emotional risks for the beneficiaries as they were rushed in the process and also (maybe worst) huge misunderstandings of how these methods are supposed to work and what they were designed for. There are people who tend to believe that Forum Theatre is a training method and have no clue about oppression and the community change that can come through FT and for which it was developed to begin with. We believe that each TO facilitator(of any method) has a responsibility in how they treat the method, how they introduce it to the others and what kind of message they are sending across in this regard and this responsibility shouldn’t be underestimated or overlooked.
Because in Image Theatre shorter time is needed for the preparation and also for the implementation phase, it is a handy method for quick initiatives and also for workshops settings. If you do want to deliver a TO workshop an Image Theatre one is adequate and can be easily introduced to the participants and it can also be easily adapted to other contexts.
The structure of a 3-hour or 1-day workshop focuses on warming up the group, expressing emotions, working with their bodies and postures, image theatre preparation and then Image Theatre. The assumptions are that the group doesn’t know each other from before.
The activities are inspired from the Forum Theatre curriculum and they will not be detailed here as they can be found described in the previous pages.