After participating in the Elevating Hearts through Theatre training session at Bosch from July 13-17, I facilitated an Image Theatre session in Urbana, IL at Heartland Baha’i School.
The session was on Friday, July 20 and lasted for one hour. I had roughly 26 participants for the session and the location was at a very empty public mall space.
To start the session, I used a google slides presentation to give the participants some background information on applied theatre, theatre through the faith, and image theatre. Then I had them split into three groups and led them through a couple warm-up activities. This really helped bring energy to the participants. After this I had each group pick a social justice issue they were passionate about and sculptor to create the image. Unfortunately I didn't do a very good job explaining the quiet environment they should try to create, and it didn't help that other groups were in close proximity at different stages of the activity. Once a group had finished their image, I took a picture of it and then told them to consult and make one change to their image that would help alleviate the social injustice. When they finished this, I took another picture and told them to find a quote in the Writings about their issue. Once I had pictures of all three groups and both of their images, I uploaded them to my Google drive and put them in the Google slides presentation.
For the debrief, I went through the groups one by one and their images. I told everyone what the issue was first and then asked them what things they saw in the image. Then I had the group whose picture it was explain their image and its different elements. After this I went to the image with the one change and facilitated a short discussion and analysis of it. The groups also read the quotations they had chosen. Due to the time limitation, we weren't able to have a very long discussion.