Collective Imagining: Collaborative Story Telling through Image Theater

Abstract

This article is a dialogue between two practitioners of Image theater—a technique which involves using the body to share stories. Working in Quebec and Scotland, we discuss the potential ways such a form of performative inquiry (FELS, 1998) can, through an online medium, be documented and disseminated in ways that are coherent with, and build on, the principles of interactive theater. Our hope is that such an exploration will enable the participants in the work, ourselves, and our readers as performative social science researchers, so that we may engage as spect-actors (BOAL, 1979) with the material and build communities of practice through reflection on action (praxis). A key aspect we consider is ways in which physical dialogue through the body evolves—first as a method of enacting the world, where collective meaning emerges and secondly, as a concept that uses symbolic/metaphoric aesthetic language through what one colleague calls "body-storming" (like "brain-storming," but with the emotional and sensory body as a source and language of expression). URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0802568

Keywords

• performative inquiry
• storytelling
• embodied knowing
• practitioner research
• image
• imagining