Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors: Image Theatre Exercises for Rehearsal

The director stops the run. “Before we go again, I want everyone to make a frozen picture of this scene. No words. Just show me what’s going on between these people.” Half the cast looks at the floor. You’ve learned the lines, you know the blocking, and now you’re being asked to be a statue.

If that has happened to you, you’ve met the work of Augusto Boal, even if nobody said his name. Frozen pictures, hand-following games, and “complete the image” exercises turn up in drama classrooms and rehearsal rooms all over the world, and many of them come from one book.

The short version: Boal built a set of games to wake up the body and a technique called image theatre to think about situations through frozen pictures instead of talk. He made them for social and political theater, but they work in any rehearsal. A few minutes of image work can show a cast what a scene is really about, where the power sits, and where it shifts, before anyone says a line.

Who Augusto Boal was

Boal was a Brazilian theater director and teacher, the founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed, and the author of several books about it. The activist handbook Beautiful Trouble’s entry on the Theatre of the Oppressed says he began developing it in Brazil in the 1950s, then kept working in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and France while in exile from Brazil’s military dictatorship. The same entry describes the method as an arsenal of theatre techniques and games.

When he died in 2009, TheaterMania’s obituary described the Theatre of the Oppressed as an international movement and noted that he had led workshops around the world. It lists his books, including Theatre of the Oppressed, The Rainbow of Desire, Legislative Theatre, and Games for Actors and Non-Actors, the games book.

That last book came out in English in 1992, translated by Adrian Jackson and published by Routledge, according to Mick Wallis’s review in Theatre Research International. The UT Austin lesson plans cited below work from the 2002 second edition.

One idea from Boal is worth knowing before you play anything. He called participants spect-actors. Beautiful Trouble explains the term as the idea that everybody is at once an actor and a spectator. In his games, the people watching are never just an audience. They read the image, name what they see, and often step in to change it.

The idea underneath: your body is already thinking

Boal’s games aren’t warm-ups in the loosening-up sense. They rest on a claim about how bodies and minds connect. The New South Wales Department of Education’s teaching resource on Boal’s arsenal quotes him: “A bodily movement is a thought and a thought expresses itself in a corporeal form.”

For an actor, that’s a useful way to look at a stuck scene. If your body is doing the same thing every night, standing the same way, holding your hands the same way, then your thinking in the scene is probably stuck too. Change what the body is doing and you often change what the character is thinking.

The same resource sorts the games in the book into five groups. Boal called them feeling what we touch, listening to what we hear, dynamising the senses, seeing what we look at, and the memory of the senses. You don’t need to memorize the categories. What matters is the direction they point: from your own body, out to other bodies, and then to the images bodies make together.

Three games that wake up the body

These come from Games for Actors and Non-Actors and are described in published lesson plans that credit Boal. Each needs nothing but some open floor and a few minutes.

The circle and the cross

The University of Texas at Austin’s Drama-Based Pedagogy site describes it as a variation in its “Write Your Name” lesson. With your right hand, draw a circle in the air, then stop. With your left hand, draw a cross. Then try both at once. The page admits very few people manage it, and that’s the point.

The NSW resource files the circle and the cross under the first of Boal’s groups, feeling what we touch. Here’s how we’d put it in rehearsal terms. When the trick fails, you feel how strongly your body wants to do the same thing on both sides. That same pull is what makes two characters in a scene start mirroring each other’s energy when they shouldn’t.

Colombian Hypnosis

This pair game is a staple of drama lesson plans. In UT Austin’s version, listed as Columbian Hypnosis, one partner holds a palm about six inches from the other’s face. The follower imagines being hypnotized and keeps the same distance from the hand, wherever it goes. The leader moves around the room, then the partners switch.

The reflection questions are the useful part. Which did you prefer, leading or being led? What does it have to do with trust, and with power? In our experience, leading is often harder than it looks, because you’re responsible for someone else’s body. Following can feel either safe or humiliating, depending on how you’re led.

That’s a whole relationship in two minutes. UT’s page also suggests a power shift variation: after everyone has played both roles, the follower tries to take control while still keeping the rules.

Complete the Image (pair version)

Partners shake hands, look at each other, and freeze. One unfreezes, looks at the frozen picture, and adds a new position that changes it. Both hold for two or three seconds, then the other partner moves. UT Austin’s Complete the Image lesson runs this silently for five to fifteen minutes, sometimes with a called-out theme such as jealousy or family. One of its side-coaching lines is worth keeping for any rehearsal: react to what your partner is doing.

Image theatre: think with pictures, not explanations

Beautiful Trouble describes image theatre as inviting spect-actors to form a tableau of frozen poses that dramatize an oppressive situation. The image then becomes a starting point for reflection, for example by building an ideal image and the steps toward it. In a rehearsal room, that gives you a way to talk about a scene without anybody explaining their character.

The group version of Complete the Image shows the basic method. Two volunteers shake hands and freeze, faces included. The leader asks the watchers what they see and what makes them say that, then what’s happening between the two people. Collect as many readings as you can. Then one person sits down, a new person joins the one still frozen, and the group reads the new image.

Notice the order: describe first, then interpret. “Her hand is on his shoulder and he’s turned away” comes before “she’s comforting him.” That habit alone makes a cast better at reading each other on stage, because it forces you to look at what’s actually there.

Real and ideal images

The image theatre exercise that translates most directly to scripted work is UT Austin’s Real/Ideal Images. Actors make a frozen image of a situation as it really is. The watchers say what they notice. Then the group discusses what the ideal version would look like, and the same actors make that image. Finally the watchers compare: what changed, and what stayed the same?

The page adds a note that matters for a cast. When the image involves several people, keep the same characters in both pictures, so the audience can follow how the relationship changes. A scene is exactly that: the same people, in a different arrangement, by the end.

Using image work on a scripted scene

Here’s one way to bring this into a scene you’re rehearsing. It’s our adaptation of the exercises above, not a game from Boal’s book. Take this moment near the end of Act III of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, just after Helmer has finished a long speech forgiving Nora:

NORA: Yes, Torvald, I have changed my things now.

HELMER: But what for?—so late as this.

NORA: I shall not sleep tonight.

HELMER: But, my dear Nora—

NORA: It is not so very late. Sit down here, Torvald. You and I have much to say to one another.

HELMER: Nora—what is this?—this cold, set face?

NORA: Sit down. It will take some time; I have a lot to talk over with you.

HELMER: You alarm me, Nora!—and I don’t understand you.

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act III, translated by R. Farquharson Sharp (Standard Ebooks)

Through most of the play, Helmer is the one giving Nora instructions. In eight lines, Nora starts giving them. “Sit down” twice. It’s a power shift you can see, which makes it ideal for images. Work it in four passes:

• Make the first image. Without the script, the two actors freeze in a picture of the relationship as it stands when Nora walks in: who is higher, who is closer, where each is looking. The rest of the cast describes what they see before anyone interprets it.
• Make the last image. Now freeze the relationship as it stands after “this is a settling of accounts,” which Nora says in her very next line. Keep the same two people and change only how they’re arranged. The watchers say what changed and what stayed the same.
• Find the steps between. Build two or three images that get from the first picture to the last, and ask the group which line each one belongs to. Often a cast discovers that the shift isn’t on the line they assumed. It might happen on the silence before “Sit down,” or on the moment Helmer gives in and sits.
• Run the lines. Play the scene with the words, and let your bodies pass through the images you found without freezing in them. Afterward, ask the watchers the same question as before: did the relationship change where we said it would?

You can add a fifth pass with Colombian Hypnosis. Have Helmer lead Nora with his palm for the first four lines, and then let her take over the lead on “Sit down here, Torvald.” Then put the hands away and play it again. Both actors usually remember the moment the lead changed hands, and that memory stays in the scene. The whole play is in our library of public-domain plays if you want to keep going.

How to run Boal games in a class or rehearsal

If you’re the teacher, the director, or the actor who volunteered to lead warm-ups, a few habits from the lesson plans above make the games safer and more useful:

• Check in first. UT’s Colombian Hypnosis lesson has partners tell each other about any physical needs or limits that day, and sets boundaries for where pairs may move.
• Keep it silent. Image work is about what bodies say. “This is a silent activity” is the first side-coaching line on the Complete the Image page.
• Ask for description before interpretation. “What do you see?” comes before “What’s going on?” every time.
• Let everyone play both sides. Lead and follow, sculpt and be sculpted, watch and be watched. The switch is where most of the learning happens.
• Tie it back to the scene. A game that doesn’t return to the script within a few minutes is just a game. Ask what the cast saw that they can use, then run the scene while they still feel it.
• Respect where the work comes from. Boal made these tools so people could look hard at real situations of power. Even when you use them only for a scene, they work best when you take that seriously.

If you know Viola Spolin’s work, you’ll see the family resemblance. Our guide to Spolin’s theater games covers her point of concentration and side-coaching. The difference is the target: Spolin’s games pull your attention onto a problem in the room, while Boal’s image work makes the relationship itself visible. Both pair well with Viewpoints, which trains the same wide awareness of other bodies in space, and with our guide to status in acting, which gives you a language for the shifts the images reveal.

Carrying the images into your line work at home

Most of Boal’s games need a group, but the images travel. After a rehearsal where you’ve found the first and last pictures of a scene, write them down in a sentence each, along with the line where the shift lands. When you run lines on your own, picture the image at each of those moments, and let it change how you say the line.

It helps to hear the other part spoken aloud, so you’re reacting rather than reading. Offbook reads every other character with realistic voices and waits for your line, so you can run the scene alone between rehearsals. In the video below, you can see how to set how fast your scene partner talks, add a pause before any line, and turn on auto-advance. That pause is useful here: put a beat before the line where the image changes, and practice letting the shift happen in the silence, not just in the words.

For classic scenes, our free run lines online tool reads the other parts aloud and waits for each of your lines. If you want a speech to try image work on alone, browse our monologue library, and pick a moment where the character’s situation changes. Make the before and after images in a mirror, then speak the speech between them.

Questions actors ask

What is Games for Actors and Non-Actors?

It’s Augusto Boal’s handbook of games and exercises, published in English by Routledge in 1992 in Adrian Jackson’s translation, with a second edition in 2002. It holds his games for the senses, his image work, and other techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed.

What is image theatre?

A Boal technique in which participants make frozen pictures with their bodies to show a situation. The group describes what it sees, interprets it, and then changes the image, for example from how things are to how they could be. In rehearsal, it’s a fast way to see a scene’s relationships without discussion.

Do you have to be doing political theater to use Boal?

No. Boal built the work for social change, and that purpose deserves respect, but many of the games are taught in ordinary drama classes and rehearsals. Any scene with a relationship in it has power in it, and image work shows where that power sits and where it moves.

How is Boal different from Stanislavski-style scene work?

Most text-based scene work starts with analysis and talk: objectives, given circumstances, what the character wants. Image work starts with the body and only talks afterward. They aren’t rivals. Many actors find the frozen picture gives them an answer they then put into words. Our guide to Stanislavski’s method of physical actions shows another route from the body to the text.