Image Theatre Research Articles

The use of Image Theatre to examine the acculturation process of Taiwanese international performing arts students in New York City

Abstract Acculturation is a complicated and evolving process. International performing arts students in New York City face particular stressors during their acculturation to the United States. Through the use of Image Theatre, the author examined the acculturation experiences of five Taiwanese international students in the performing arts. Seven themes emerged: acculturation stress in educational setting; social isolation and feelings of otherness; the role of gossip; acceptance; the importance of reaching towards one’s dreams; alliance and reliance; and togetherness.

The Imagistic Theatre of Robert Whitman

ABSTRACT:This essay discusses the experimental theatre of Robert Whitman who, in 1960, turned toward performance with the sensibility of a process-oriented painter and sculptor. More specifically, it addresses the role that perception plays in both the creation and the reception of three of his less often studied performances: Architecture (1972), Northern Dark (1987), and, more recently, Passport (2011). As part of a larger intermedia trend in American art of the 1950s and early 1960s to create audio-visual “Happenings” that seek to “intensify” and “renew perceptual experience,” these postdramatic event-structures interweave film into complex imagistic sequences that are both felt and understood cognitively, live and mediated. In a discussion of the remedial intent implicit in Whitman’s theatre of vision, termed a “theatre of images” by Bonnie Maranca, the article relies on early American process philosophy to clarify the nature and the effects of embodied experience that these works seek to elicit.

Creating Vignettes of Early Onset Dementia: An Exercise in Public Sociology

Drawing on core principles of public sociology, this article discusses the creation of four theatrical vignettes about living with early onset dementia (symptoms of dementia pre-65). The vignettes were developed through an Image Theatre workshop, involving families living with early onset dementia. They were designed to capture key themes, issues and experiences that emerged from the group’s collective experience. While the content of the vignettes speaks to a range of key sociological debates (especially in relation to the lived experience of time, risk, social exclusion and stigma in dementia) the process of creating and using the vignettes represents the first empirical application of a (public) sociological approach to ‘person-centredness’ in dementia; which views persons as ‘dividual’ and selves as transactive. We conclude by advocating for a rich and diverse public sociology of dementia in the 21st century.

EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE IN IRAQ: FROM CHITHEER'S MASKS (1979-1990) TO ALTAYEB'S IZAYZA (2014-2015)

Theatre in Iraq can be considered as mainly political since its early beginnings in the late nineteenth century. The political nature of Iraqi theatre stems from the realization of Iraqi theatre makers of the influence of theatre on people. An obvious example is Yousif Al Ani’s 1958 play, Ana Umk Ya Shaker (I am your mother, Shaker), which almost caused a revolution after the first performance. Such is the power of theatre for Iraqi theatre practitioners, causing the authorities to impose strong censorship over theatre since then. Nonetheless, Iraqi theatre makers such as Kereem Chitheer (1961-2005), continued to experiment and produce theatre even in their own houses, though in many cases their texts existed for several years only on paper, without being staged. Chitheer’s The Masks is one of the experimental plays that had to wait for more than ten years before it was actually performed, because of its daring themes, in addition to the playwright’s awareness of the personal risk that he was taking by writing this play. The play was written in 1979, yet received its first performance in 1990, in Iraq, after failed attempts to produce it during the 1980s. Chitheer's play belongs to what Iraqi theatre critics describe as “Image Theatre”. It is a play which reveals the violent and cruel reality of the Iraqi modern history of war, lack of freedom, and miseries. He presents his message through a play that breaks every single rule for Iraqi traditional theatre, where the audience is led into a house full of movable images. In this stage/ gallery /theatre/ house, the audience embark upon a journey where they meet historical, modern, and symbolic tyrants, dictators, literary men, as well as ordinary people, telling their stories of pains and suffering. Chitheer does not even spare Adam and Eve in The Masks , they recognize these miseries as their own fault from eating the wrong apple in the first place, and try in vain to fix their original mistake. This study reveals these and similar theatre practices which occurred until the recently performed play of Bassim Altayeb, Izayza . The latter is a devised performance that was developed through workshops led by Altayeb with a group of more than 50 young performers. The play consists of several episodes presented inside the yard and rooms of the traditional house of Iraqi Theatre Forum in Baghdad, where audience members are invited as guests. Inside this house, the audience has the chance to watch what goes on in the different rooms of the house. Some of these scenes allow only one audience member at a time, and the performer has a private conversation with them, thus creating a sense of intimacy and closeness. The play is based on the idea of “Izayza”, which is a traditional Iraqi term for a curse or a spell that is cast on a house to start problems. The audience wanders around the rooms of the house to find out the problems this house suffers. The house represents Iraq in general, and the performers are representatives of the audience members in this house, that is, Iraqi society. This essay tries to shed a comprehensive light on The Masks and Izayza , as plays about the consciousness of Iraqi theatre makers about their reality, as well as their determination to create innovative theatre practices to convey their messages. The paper will also briefly mention other theatre works by other theatre practitioners who tried to follow the same pattern of experimental and unconventional theatrical performances. Keywords: Iraqi experimental theatre, theatre and politics, Kereem Chitheer, Bassim Altayeb

The Power of Illusion

In this article, I examine how two English theatrical phenomena used stage technology to produce illusions for certain political ends. The two phenomena of interest are the court masque of the early 1600s and the illegitimate genres of the late Georgian London theatre. My focus will be on the latter, through an examination of the pantomime The Picture of Paris – opening at Covent Garden in 1790. Whereas a political reading of the court masque is well established in theatre studies, the same cannot be said regarding a political understanding of the theatre culture of the late Georgian period. Furthermore, those who have focused on the political aspects of this theatre culture have not been interested in the role played by stage technology. This is where this article aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge. Although the court masques and the illegitimate genres used much of the same stage technology, they differed in how they used it and to what political ends. Whereas the masque could be understood as a conservative statement of royal powers, asserting their right to rule, the illegitimate genres approached the governing powers and policies in a more subversive manner. Late Georgian cultural politics, censoring the spoken word on stage and patenting the performance of tragedy and comedy, gave rise to new theatrical genres where visual aspects – by legal necessity – took centre stage. The resulting spectacular theatre of action and visual image was exempt from government censorship, making possible a special kind of political freedom of expression in these genres. It was during performance, through their use of dumb shows, setting, stage machinery and special effects that government criticism could unfold within these genres.

Theatre of the Commons: a theatrical inquiry into the democratic engagement of former refugee families in Canadian public high school communities

Background: This paper describes the creation of a theatrical commons that aimed to broaden and deepen democratic engagement between diverse citizens in one public school community in Manitoba, Canada.Purpose and method: The researchers considered how Forum and Image Theatre provided former refugee youth, guardians, parents and the general public with the opportunity to name and invent different possibilities to address complex school community challenges at an individual and at a policy level. The study utilised critical participatory action research that drew heavily on the theatrical imaginations of Augusto Boal and David Diamond.Main arguments and conclusions: Three recommendations were derived from the findings as they related to the research questions and literature: (1) that Image and Forum Theatre can be used to connect public education to the pursuit of transformative democracy; (2) that Image and Forum Theatre would be a useful means of informing system planning and reflection, and; (3) that a theatrical commons has value for creating space for marginalised voices to influence decision-making.

Creating dialogue by storytelling

PurposeThe objective of this paper is to develop practice and theory from Augusto Boal's dialogue technique (Image Theatre) for organisational use. The paper aims to examine how the members in an organisation create dialogue together by using a dramaturgical storytelling framework where the dialogue emerges from storytelling facilitated by symbolic representations of still images.Design/methodology/approachThe study follows the lines of participatory action and art‐based research. The data are collected from 13 dramaturgical work story storytelling sessions in four different organisations. The research design belongs to the tradition of research‐based theatre, which implies artful inquiry, scripting and performance in research.FindingsThe paper presents a model for organisational dialogue. The model illustrates the dramaturgical storytelling of work story which influences problem shifting in a positive way.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitations of this study are related to the scope of the research. The Scandinavian cultural context facilitates an open, bottom up process. More case studies in different kinds of environments should be conducted. In the future it might be advantageous to conduct more longitudinal studies on how organisations can nurture continuous dialogue.Practical implicationsWork story as a dialogue practice facilitated members from the same occupational groups to share experiences with each other and construct common interests by investigating unstructured and uncertain social situations at work.Originality/valueThe paper combines research fields that explore art‐based initiatives within organisations, workplace learning and innovation research.

Theatre of Images: Record of a Process

Theatre of Images: Record of a Process Brian C. Russo In the summer of 2008, I traveled to Universidad Javeriana, Cali, Colombia, to take part in the E.F.E. (Español Funcional para Extranjeros) program. This is a Spanish language course offered as part of The Twinning Agreement, a faculty exchange arrangement between Gonzaga and Seattle Universities in the US, and Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. US faculty travel to Javeriana, study Spanish for six weeks, and are asked to initiate a project with faculty counterparts from Javeriana. Projects reflect the interest of faculty and have ranged from water treatment to ministry or, in my case, theatre. I was paired with Juan Palencia (English) and John Alex Castillo (Media) who both assisted me in carrying out my project, which was to locate a group of actors, theatre enthusiasts, and acting students, and hold a workshop on basic acting technique. I hoped that from this workshop, the group might develop a performance that could be presented to an audience from Javeriana and the surrounding community. As my time was short, my expectations were modest. Happily, seven participants committed to the work, and we presented a short, original folk play, La maldición de Doña Luz, based on a story about a witch, a magical bird, and a proud boy that one of our group brought in. An audience attended and enjoyed the performance; the actors too were satisfied with the experience. Ultimately, the project was considered a success. I hoped that if I ever had the opportunity to return, I could work on a piece of more depth, hopefully with more experienced actors. I had just that opportunity in the summer of 2010. Gonzaga University, being a Catholic and Jesuit institution, concerns itself with social justice issues and service learning. So when, at a planning session for Colombia, a colleague spoke of his work on forgiveness and reconciliation, I was interested—perhaps [End Page 157] this could be the focus of my theatre work. He encouraged me, citing the example of South Africa, where theatre has served as a vehicle to explore this theme. I emailed my counterpart, John Alex Castillo, told him of my proposed theme (forgiveness and reconciliation), and I was happy to hear that he wanted to work on this project; fortunately, he would be free of artistic commitments during the weeks of my stay. My fantasy of the project went something like this: actors would gather stories from Colombia’s recent troubled past and we would dramatize them. The reality turned out differently. When I met with John Alex in Colombia, we decided that we did want to work with stories of forgiveness and reconciliation, perhaps in a form of documentary theatre. Also, members of the experimental troupe Altergesto (Other Gesture) he founded over ten years ago would also be available. This was great news because it fulfilled my hope of working with experienced artists, as opposed to newcomers; new actor resistance and self-consciousness would not be a barrier. We also decided that we wished to involve the audience, making them true participants in the work. John Alex suggested that to aid audience participation, we present in a non-traditional or “found space.” This all sounded great, but there was a tension in our process before we even began: how to present stories while also actively involving the audience in a non-traditional space? Stories suggest plot and character, the stuff of traditional acting and directing, which also implies the traditional role of the audience as passive spectators, consumers of stories. This style of presentation would not produce the outcome we sought in terms of our audience or space. We would work through this contradiction in the first weeks of our meetings. By the end of the first week and a half, we had gathered material of two forms: 1. Five stories around ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation brought back by our actors. 2. Three extended improvisations around our theme: a. negative space explorations, b. finding gestures to express forgiveness and reconciliation, c. repetition exercises around our theme. The gathering of stories and improvisations were attempts to try and find a language to express what...

A silent revolution: ‘Image Theatre’ as a system of decolonisation

This article summarises the ways in which Image Theatre, a practice originally developed by Augusto Boal which continues to be developed in the hands of applied theatre practitioners and critical arts educators worldwide, can be used as a pedagogical and dramaturgical system of decolonisation at the level of communities and individuals. Through reference to two examples from my own work, I argue in this article that Image Theatre is a unique cultural practice that can be used to facilitate counter-discursive stories that are shaped by participants’ invitation to play in the space between aesthetic representation and social reality. In this way, Image Theatre may invoke an in-between space similar to the post-colonial concept of hybridity which offers educators a way of transforming and reinventing meaning as well as creating new strategies for decolonising practice.

Augusto Boal's Treatment of the Socratic Method Teaching Techniques used in with Drama in Education

The study theater techniques of Augusto Boal's (Forum Theatre, Image Theatre, et al.) in the process of drama addressing with the Socratic method. These techniques are used in the process of drama education, events and situations, the oppressor and the oppressed in perspective by looking at an improvised fiction to produce solutions to problem situations solutions that are trying to reproduce. Socratic gaze, solution phase, will make possible for asking questions about the essence of situations.Augusto Boal's drama techniques in the process applications, a participant oppressor/oppressed status is expected to produce solutions to the situation that stimulates problem. The participant in the role of oppressed/oppressor appropriate to the situation as a role/roles undertakes. Oppressed, take part in a role in changing the position of the oppressor. In this way, finds opportunity to assess the situation from two points of each. Socratic method is used at this point. Actions are the product of ideas. Only by changing the actions, changes in thought can not be created. For thought to make a change, focused on thought. Oppressed, what will happen after playing a role, the oppressor? How do we make a new lack of the oppressed the oppressor? The oppressor, the oppressor rather give up, how? The words of Socrates’ questions, such as a midwife of ideas is thought to be provided to as the midwife. Actions that make up the focus on ideas, the real problem is much action, thought, intended to show stems.

P01-460 - Communitarian campaign against the stigma of schizophrenia: “be on the stage”

The use of cultural approaches addressing stigma and discrimination promotes acceptance by raising consciousness. People with schizophrenia are often stigmatized by others.Discrimination associated with common myths contributes to social exclusion and treatment delay, creating a barrier to recovery.This paper aims to present the development, implementation and evaluation of an anti-stigma campaign in the context of primary health care and local community using theatrical techniques.In the Health Centre waiting rooms the invisible theatre technique was implemented, consisting in the performance of a previously rehearsed script without informing the public that it was a play, aiming to provoke debate and clarify problems related to social inequality and discrimination. The play script addressed common myths related to schizophrenia: People with schizophrenia are usually dangerous and violent; People with schizophrenia are unlikely to recover; Schizophrenia, as other mental conditions is a sign of weakness and not a true medical illness and others. In the local community, street performances were implemented based on image theatre techniques consisting in the use of living body imagery to address the myths described above.Behavioural responses to the intervention were assessed using Likert type scale. Most of the people in both the settings were paying attention to the performances and dialogues. People watching street performances, however, were more active in expressing opinions or making specific questions related to the subject.Further research on the impact of anti-stigma campaigns using theatre techniques is needed. These strategies may provide an effective approach to fight stigma in communitarian settings.

"We Cry On the Inside": Image Theatre and Rwanda's Culture of Silence

"We Cry On the Inside": Image Theatre and Rwanda's Culture of Silence

Youth as knowledge producers: Towards changing gendered patterns in rural schools with participatory arts-based approaches to HIV and AIDS

abstract Drawing on work with participatory arts-based approaches and research employed in the collaborative National Research Foundation-funded Youth as Knowledge Producers (YAKP) project (2007) in the rural area of Vulindlela, this article considers how, by paying attention to youth constructions of gender and sexuality, pre-service teachers' interaction with rural learners in the era of HIV and AIDS can be transformed, and arts-based participatory approaches can be used to move towards greater equality of rights for young people in rural areas. Our research findings to date show that arts-based approaches are effective in drawing forward known social expectations, but suggest that working to change or broaden these requires deeper thought. Here through a description, review and analysis of collage field work and some findings on image theatre, I consider how collage (and image theatre) can be used to explore HIV and AIDS issues and gender and identity construction with pre-service teachers and with learners in rural contexts. Some of the challenges to using these methods, and how critical thinking around gender construction and its impact on sexual violence can be enhanced for pre-service teachers and learners in the context of rural schools are also discussed.

Theatre of Image and Action: Robertson Davies and The Golden Age of Melodrama

Robertson Davies distinguished himself by his fervent commitment to artistic forms that would ‘change and enlarge us.’ Characterizing his life as ‘pickled in melodrama,’ he argued for melodrama as an observable daily phenomenon, worthy of scholarly attention and possessing a powerful reforming spirit capable of inspiring social change. When Davies' instructional video Lady Soul and the Devil's Burning Throne: The Golden Age of Melodrama (1979) – a rare assemblage of photographic stills and clips from early film melodramas – is examined in conjunction with his letters, lectures, and novels, we see his understanding of melodrama as an art form that stresses human potential, reflects a reality in which right triumphs over wrong, and depicts the common man not as he is but as he would be if only a few things were put right.

Theatre of Image and Action: Robertson Davies and <i>The Golden Age of Melodrama</i>

Abstract Robertson Davies distinguished himself by his fervent commitment to artistic forms that would ‘change and enlarge us.’ Characterizing his life as ‘pickled in melodrama,’ he argued for melodrama as an observable daily phenomenon, worthy of scholarly attention and possessing a powerful reforming spirit capable of inspiring social change. When Davies' instructional video Lady Soul and the Devil's Burning Throne: The Golden Age of Melodrama (1979) – a rare assemblage of photographic stills and clips from early film melodramas – is examined in conjunction with his letters, lectures, and novels, we see his understanding of melodrama as an art form that stresses human potential, reflects a reality in which right triumphs over wrong, and depicts the common man not as he is but as he would be if only a few things were put right.

Staged Photography and the Performance of Autofacture: Cross-Genre Impersonation in Cindy Sherman’s Self-Portraits

This paper will use Roland Barthes’ observation of staged photography as a primitive form of theatre as its theoretical point of departure in order to reconcile both the theatrical and visual codes at play in Cindy Sherman’s self-portraiture of the 1980s and 1990s and the relevance of this to performance studies today. Accordingly, Sherman’s creations provoke and challenge the theoretical discourses of visual and performances cultures in their staging of the crises in representation and reception of the image and the genre. This may be reconciled with the enduring preoccupation of a theatre of images in contemporary performance-making in Western culture, effected by the deconstruction of character. Through her self-fashioning, Sherman’s ‘subject’ acquires an object-like status bearing the layered signification of historical costume, detectable prostheses, ill-fitting wigs, beards and grotesquely unnatural make-up that interpolates with the desires and expectations of the spectator in unraveling the meanings of these signs. The foregrounding of these signs function as a Verfremdsdungseffekt of identity; one of the legacies of Bertolt Brecht’s experiments in the theatre. Staged photography therefore is a liminal and challenging genre which calls into question the philosophical dichotomy of representation as truth or representation as fabrication; the latter being at the heart of the anti-theatrical prejudice, evident in historical literature. In presenting herself as the impostor of art and cinematic history in her self-portraiture, Cindy Sherman’s performance appears histrionic, in a way that has roots in psychoanalytic theories of visual culture. However, Sherman’s achievement of deconstructed imitation calls a number of theoretical assumptions into question about the processes of authorship and the unity of genre. The limits of the visible ‘subject’ are all destabilised to suggest the powerful arrangement of an impersonation.

Theoria Negativa: Making Sense of Boal's Reading of Aristotle

Theoria Negativa:Making Sense of Boal’s Reading of Aristotle Paul Dwyer (bio) Judging by the proliferation of recent works by and about Augusto Boal, as well as the number of course readers and critical anthologies in which his work is excerpted, his place in the canon of modern theatre theory seems assured.1 This critical consensus might almost seem too cosy given that Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques are usually regarded as a means to help effect progressive, perhaps radical social change. Thus, Douglas Paterson and Mark Weinberg (in an interview with Boal) puzzle over the fact that "people in established critical circles have not come after you. We would think there would be a ground-swell of resistance, because by taking on the Aristotelian structure, you are critiquing one of the fundamental grounds of the way western theatre is practiced" ("We Are All Theater" 18). Of course, the short answer to this puzzle is that it is no puzzle at all: Boal's celebrated critique of Aristotle is itself firmly grounded in a theoretical position that is familiar to many "established" and supportive critics as having been staked out by Brecht a good fifty years earlier.2 The real puzzle, I wish to argue, is that so many critics and academics (not to mention their students) still seem to take Boal's reading of Aristotle's Poetics at face value, rather than examining the way Boal, like Brecht, first constructs – and then demolishes – the "Aristotle" he needs in order to suit his own rhetorical purposes. As Drew Milne puts it, the basic strategy is a "negation of Aristotelianism as the poetics of oppression [which] makes Boal's poetics of the oppressed the positive term to that which is negated" (116). I should stress at the outset that my purpose here is not so much to salvage the reputation of Aristotle as to highlight the problematic justifications of TO which arise from Boal's apparent desire to "have done" with Aristotle once and for all. I would also add that this critique of Aristotle can only really make sense (and here it makes good sense) when the theatrical and political context in which Boal was writing is kept very closely in mind: while offering an [End Page 635] oversimplified view of the relations between theatre, theory, and the state in Ancient Greece, he nevertheless provides a compelling account of the struggle to make theatre a tool for progressive social change under a regime as brutal and coercive as the military dictatorship that took control of Brazil after the coups of 1964 and 1968. However, this is not the context in which Boal's work is now most enthusiastically being taken up by theatre practitioners in North America, Europe, Australia, and other "First-World" settings, practitioners who are typically engaged in state-subsidised health, welfare, and education programs. For this "new breed of cultural workers," dubbed "TO 'multipliers'" by Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz (5, 7), I suggest that a return encounter with Aristotle's Poetics is long overdue. A careful review of Boal's critique of Aristotle shows not only that it is a tendentious reading in many parts but also that it leads to an unlikely claim for TO as a radical alternative. To the extent that contemporary TO practitioners are content simply to recycle Boal's anti-Aristotelian rhetoric, they are obscuring the magnitude of the task that faces them, namely to refashion the theory and practice of TO for deployment in fields – like public health, education, and welfare – that are saturated with multiple, competing discourses and where no theatre-worker is ever "outside the system." This is not to suggest that TO practice is not still evolving in interesting ways, nor that it has completely lost its progressive political edge. Some adaptations and extensions of TO (such as the "Rainbow of Desire" and other, more introspective uses of Image Theatre) have been strongly promoted by Boal as a means of accommodating the shift in context from his early work in Latin America to work in First-World settings. Other innovations have grown from the interaction between "TO multipliers" and community workers in related areas...

Embodying creativity through Boal's Image Theatre: a practitioner dialogue with Emma Coats

IJWOE welcomes dialogue between practitioners and academics. This article consists of a dialogue with Emma Coats. Her practical use of the body as an informative medium is strikingly interesting. Firstly she offers a vocabulary that will be new to many (at least, new outside the Performing Arts) and which may prompt a rather 'different take' on organisations, notwithstanding what social scientists learned about the dramatic basis of encounters and about social roles, via Goffman. But the experience of impasse and not knowing what to do next is not just the experience of, say the health practitioners with whom Emma does most of her work. Academics get stuck too, both with concepts which show signs of 'going nowhere' and stuck also in their own organisations. In this case, 'Image Theatre', as Coats calls it, is of quite a different relevance to the academic than they might first think. In backtranslating from Coats' to a social science understanding of, say 'emotion in organisations', academics may be reminded that they are also 'practitioners' themselves. Here then, is a reminder that the practitioner and the academic can be united by separate languages.

Theatre of Images: The mask as a metalanguage in indigenous African drama

The study of indigenous African Community Drama can be argued to have gone through three predominant phases of theatre scholarship namely: Denial, Validation and Descriptive Analysis. In this essay I want to go beyond these primary forms of academic discourse and theorize the artform from a semiotic perspective.

Experiential Learning: Using comic strips as ‘reflective tools’ in adult learning

Abstract This paper critically examines the theory and practice of creatively using newspapers and comics as techniques for personal and group reflection in outdoor education and corporate management development. Comics and newspapers embrace imagery, humour, and storytelling and they can be used to express and convey meaning of selected events through images and scripts. Whilst these media can lend themselves to the process of mirroring back learners' perceptions of dialogue, events and actions, we discovered a number of pitfalls in their application to learning events. This paper describes a process of experiential learning in practice where students and facilitators used a series of experiments to create and test out such reflection tools, either manually or through computer aided techniques. The paper explores the practicalities of these techniques and concludes by making recommendations for good practice in their design and innovative use. Introduction This paper is based on experiments involving experiential learning in practice by academics, training practitioners and mature students with an outdoor education background. These experiments involved using cartoons as a reflective tool on recent masters-level residential programs. We have also introduced these techniques on commercial outdoor management development courses. What follows is an examination of our new understanding of the theory and practice of using cartoons as a reflective tool for experiential educators. We share our findings and thoughts on what can happen when things do and don't go as planned, and offer some advice and suggestions for good practice for teachers and outdoor/experiential educators. Our willingness to experiment and take risks has deepened our awareness and understanding of these techniques, and enhanced our knowledge and skills. Background - Designing Creative Reflection Benson in his excellent book on creative groupwork refers to the J Ching or Book of Changes: The clever group worker should use allegories, figures, wondrous speech or other hidden, round about ways, to convey meaning and resolve difficult situations (Benson, 1987, p 203). There are many creative and exciting ways to convey meaning. Storytelling has been used for thousands of years and also offers great potential as an aid to experiential learning. Stories, anecdotes, metaphors, art and poetry can all be used as reflective tools to enhance understanding. In drama, there are many approaches that can be utilised. Image theatre, for example, is a series of exercises and games designed to uncover the essential truths about societies and cultures. Dramaturgy has more recently gain the centre stage in development training in various locations around the world (Martin & Leberman, 2000). What has been happening over the last few years is the crossing over of design and delivery techniques from one discipline into other disciplines (in particular, development trainers continue to experiment with techniques borrowed from theatre, art and therapy). This has generated a lot of exciting new methods that help us to learn about, explain and reflect upon our behaviour and thoughts. This paper focusses on the use of cartoon images as a reflective tool, which embraces art, humour and Storytelling. We recognise that the use of cartoons is a visual orientation technique, and that programme designers consider incorporating a mix of other sensory orientations (tactile, auditory and olfactory) to stimulate learners in a more holistic manner. Shell Executives Back in the early eighties CoUn used an artist to assist in his training program for Shell executives in their prestigious Lensbury Club on the Thames. The delegates were people who were close to retirement, and to help them to move into semi-retirement they were asked to work with a Shell initiative, designed to help environmental projects. It was called the Shell Better Britain campaign. …