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

Authors: Emma Coats, Stephen Lloyd Smith

Addresses: Creative Arts Facilitator, Alchemy Consulting, 110C Wood Vale, London SE23 3EB, UK. ' Brunel Business School, Brunel University, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: emotion; emotional labour; embodied creativity; mind changes; decision theory; facilitators; performance workers; image theatre; ontology; problem solving.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWOE.2005.008833

International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 2005 Vol.1 No.2, pp.169 - 179

Published online: 27 Jan 2006 *

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