The field of theatre studies has traditionally been characterized by its strong focus on the concept of performance, whether looking at the dramatic theatre, performance art or popular forms of entertainment. This was especially true during the incipient phase of the field, as theatre scholars began to stress the features unique to performance, a process that eventually led to theatre studies’ emancipation from the philological disciplines. It also held true for the semiotic approaches in the 1960s and 1970s, whereby performances were described as specific ensembles of signs. The paradigm of performance has gained even more attention during the last twenty years with the performative turn, through which researchers in theatre studies discovered new subjects of study ranging from rituals to festivals to media events, that could all be examined under the category of cultural performance, and thus seemed in some way comparable and connected with each other. ‘Performance’ thus became established as a sovereign category to integrate manifold areas of inquiry.

Even if the concept of performance seems like an extremely broad category, it has its limits and there are forms of theatre that do not fit within these boundaries. A primary limitation has to do with time, as the hegemonic concept of time implicit in the performative turn is the present: performances are carried out here and now, requiring the simultaneous presence of actors and spectators. Using these features as a jumping-off point, the fields of theatre studies and performance studies define theatrical events as phenomena unfolding within a given time period that contain a beginning, an end and a processuality that is largely emergent. Performances are created and then are gone; they can neither be preserved nor reproduced, and therefore they can only be experienced in the present.

What does this definition imply for those forms of theatre that decidedly take the future as their main point of reference and are thus not created in the absolute present tense? In certain forms of theatre, the focus is on designing a future, motivating people to perform certain actions in the future, or testing out new patterns of communication and behaviour for future use. Are these forms of theatre compatible with the performance concept? Can a theatre event that is resolutely devoted to the future even be called a performance?

It is therefore not surprising that drama therapy, with its accompanying promise of new perspectives in the future, is difficult to investigate using the performance concept. There are indeed substantial problems with the performance model when applied to drama therapy. At least three features unique to common notions of performance tend to cause a conflict with therapeutic work:

1. 1 Performances entail risks for all participants because they cannot really be controlled by anyone.Footnote ¹ The therapeutic process – which itself poses substantial dangers – often cannot afford to take these risks.

2. 2 Exhibiting oneself in front of others is a central feature of performance. The courage needed for self-exhibition requires a strong ego, which many clients in their given situation lack. The self-presentation typically found in performance can be detrimental to the therapeutic process, if it is perceived as a threat.

3. 3 The therapeutic effort is aimed at either the past or the future, but is rarely restricted to the here-and-now of a performance. For this reason, at least a phenomenological performance concept strongly oriented towards the present cannot contend with fundamental dimensions of therapeutic work. It does not illuminate the process of working through the past (traumatic experiences, memories, fixations). Neither does it specifically stress how the future is to be designed.Footnote ²

One possible result of these (necessary) limitations of influential performance concepts is that a striking number of forms of therapy, including types of drama therapy, tend to fall back on the ‘image concept’ when they are employed in working through the past or in envisioning the future. In this case, the term ‘image’ is not meant in the more complex sense of ‘imagination’ or ‘the imaginary’, but basically points to the traditional idea of tableau or tableau vivant. If drama-therapeutic work is to be investigated in theoretical terms it is necessary to complement the performance concept with this sort of (more or less traditional) image concept. To demonstrate this point, I would like to recall the working method of Augusto Boal, author of some of the classic texts of drama therapy, who has received attention in Europe primarily for his drama therapy workshops (while continuing his sociopolitical engagement in South America).Footnote ³ Boal posits both political theatre and drama therapy as work towards a better future. While his political projects operate on the level of society, his therapeutic offerings are concerned with interactions between individuals. In both cases, it is his conviction that bipolar structures of oppression should be replaced with egalitarian forms of relationship.

In Augusto Boal's therapeutic theatre everything centres on ‘images’. One characteristic technique that he uses in his workshops is called ‘image and counter-image’.Footnote ⁴ This technique is suitable for longer-term, curative and revelatory therapeutic work with groups of clients composed heterogeneously. It can be divided into four phases.

In the first phase, the therapist asks group members whether they might feel ready to recount an experience with oppression and would like to work through this experience with the group. Ideally, about half of the group should volunteer at this point because group members will need to pair up for the following exercise, where every volunteer storyteller (‘protagonist’) will be paired with a listener, known as the so-called ‘co-pilot’, who will now become both witness to and co-creator of the story of oppression. The two partners will first work together on their own for fifteen minutes, sitting together with their eyes closed while the storyteller relates his story to the co-pilot. The co-pilot is to listen attentively, asking for details to imagine as precisely as possible the other's experience of oppression.Footnote ⁵

Boal's image concept first comes into play in the second phase. After all of the participants have returned to the group, the therapist will request that one of the pairs depict the experience of oppression as an ‘image’ for the other group participants. To do this, the pair is to sit back to back so that the partners cannot see each other. Then, using the other group members as extras, each partner is to direct and arrange the others as they see fit to construct a single ‘image’ from the story of oppression. The protagonist develops one image for the story that he or she has recounted. At the same time, the co-pilot conceives an image for the story as he or she has heard it. With this technique, the same story is depicted by two different images. At this preliminary stage for designing the image, both the storyteller and the protagonist must place themselves in their respective images in order to assume the role of the protagonist. Finally, two complete images of the same story will be on display side by side.Footnote ⁶

In the third phase, the participants discuss and compare the two images. They may discuss, for example, the relation of the protagonist to the other figures, the distance between the various positions, the constellation as a whole, or the absence of other, presumably important, figures. For Boal, it is important that the participants take care to distinguish between objective descriptions of visible components, and subjective interpretations of the relations between these objects. Participants are not allowed to speculate about the ‘true’ story manifested in both images. From this point on, the group will base their work upon the figurative reality portrayed in the images, which should not be confused with the reality of the original story.Footnote ⁷

The fourth phase adds a notion of the future to the images. The protagonist and co-pilot are to step out from their respective images and are then given the opportunity to realize three specific desires. They may make three changes to their images, intended to propose a possible solution to the depicted conflict. After both images are returned to their original positions, both partners will be asked once again to enter their images. The three wishes will then be repeated in slow motion, but this time both creators of the images will interact as performers with the extras. The extras may develop their own ideas for the plot at this point, which they will execute in cooperation with the protagonist. In the final step, the storyteller and co-pilot will trade places: the storyteller will become part of the image conceived by the co-pilot, while the co-pilot tries out the image designed by the storyteller. Both can now better grasp the changes that the other has made to the image with a view towards a better future. All of these dynamizations will be accompanied by conversation, reflection and group discussions.Footnote ⁸

For Boal, this kind of technical description of a method never suffices, and he always provides case studies with comprehensive explanations to offer vivid proof of a technique's efficacy. In his commentary to the technique outlined above, Boal mentions a woman named Berta, who stood out for her intense and emotional acting during the image-design phase of a workshop held in Kassel, Germany. Berta and her co-pilot, Martha, created images referring to abandonment, unfulfilled desire, and wounded narcissism. Martha arranged a group with three men, who appeared to be engrossed in conversation. Next, she erected a wall made up of wooden tables between herself and the men. Berta chose an image that was even simpler: in an expression of her discontent, she planted herself in front of the other group members, who then stared at her. As the dynamization phase came to a close, Berta locked her co-pilot Martha in a frenzied duet. In a tumultuous dance, the women pushed the three men out of the first image, forcing their way into the space occupied by the onlookers, where they fell down with a thud right in the middle of the audience. Earlier, Martha had rearranged her image to make it more innocuous: she had dismantled the wall of wooden tables to join the men, greeting each of them with a kiss.Footnote ⁹

With this case study Boal demonstrates that by redesigning their own images, clients can at the same time envision the path to a better future. Martha's revised arrangement gave her the chance to approach the others and to bridge a distance that she herself had created, thereby daring to take the first step out of isolation. Similarly, Berta's projection of the future stands in contrast to her presentation strategy that already grants her a kind of immediate cathartic gratification within the group: through dance, she achieved close physical contact with Martha, and it is this bond that allowed her to nudge the other group members into giving her their full attention and direct touch. The future has in a way already begun in this activity-filled variation. Both solutions are oriented towards the future, underlining the performativity inherent in Boal's technique: the process does not come to a close through the mere illustration, intensification or repetition of reality. Rather, in its dramatic re-creation, reality is actively altered and cast into another shape: it is per-formed.

Why might it however be appropriate to designate this kind of event an ‘image’ rather than a ‘performance’? Since no presentation is planned for an audience outside the group, the performance concepts do not seem quite appropriate. Everything that takes places within the context of therapy – Berta's helplessness at the beginning, the cathartic breakthrough of her desire, and its resulting physical expenditure in the dance with Martha – is rightfully withheld from a public beyond the group. Of course, Boal could have replaced the term ‘performance’ with another word from the semantic field of the theatre, such as ‘scene’, ‘act’ or simply ‘portrayal’. Of all possible terms, why is the image concept the most suitable for the theatre model that Boal uses as a foundation for his work oriented towards the future? What can the image concept reveal about the special theatrical techniques that Boal deems effective?

From a media-ontological perspective, one could argue that images are two-dimensional, that they are more static, have less depth and are at the same time easier to frame than performances. This kind of stasis seems exactly what is needed for the purpose of therapy: the client, who should not just analyse, but also try to change the situation, needs an intensified and at the same time manageable format that can be controlled and reworked. It makes sense that a statically framed image would be more suitable than a dynamic, fleeting performance, which is in a constant state of change. However, the images created in Boal's workshops are neither static nor two-dimensional – the wild dance between Berta and Martha comes to mind – and are in no way easy to control. All of the other examples in Boal's textbook, The Rainbow of Desire (1995), help demonstrate the extent to which his technique strives for interactive depths, emotional excess and psychic transgressions. To interpret Boal's image concept as framing, stasis, and controllability would be to misunderstand the concept as Boal uses it. The full potential of Boal's image concept – taken to be the underlying concept of drama therapy – must therefore lie elsewhere.

First of all, Boal seems to hope for a kind of instant understanding. Classifying dramatic situations as ‘images’, he underlines how confident he is that these situations can lead to insight. In Boal's world view, the structure of oppression is deemed the crux of all psychic problems and should be immediately recognizable with the technique of ‘image and counter-image’. Thus Boal's therapeutic scenes expose a clear dialectic relationship between ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’, which directly and unambiguously becomes evident to the viewer. Behind his image concept lurks the doubtful notion that images can be processed more quickly than dramatic scenes or complex acting sequences because they can be perceived simultaneously.

The image concept also points to the high degree of projection immanent in the scenes created with this method. The lead performer (‘protagonist’) projects aggressions, hurtful episodes, hopes and desires onto the other participants, whom he or she integrates into the scene, putting them on display in the ‘image–counter-image’ exercise, in which the protagonist's image is confronted with the projections of another participant, the co-pilot. This leads to an externalization of two individual views (or images) on the situation or conflict that are in equal measure subjective, and yet authorized by different parties. These views can support each other, provide contrast or put each other in perspective. One can easily connect the image concept with the relevant psychoanalytic concepts of projection or the imaginary: the ‘inner images’ of the imagination see the light of day in the form of Boal's ‘images’.Footnote ¹⁰

We tend to believe that images are easy to manipulate. While performances are considered emergent, perilous and difficult to control, images appear to be more susceptible to subjective manipulations, such as overpainting, deletions or additions. This is because we tend to consider an image the product of a single creator, which is not (at least not to the same extent) the case with a performance. As a result, it also seems possible that an individual – the protagonist, in Boal's conception – can effect lasting change on an image. The question of authorship is more difficult to answer in the case of performances, as they are produced collectively. Correspondingly, it is difficult to believe that an individual can transform complex performances solely by force of his or her own imaginings.

The use of the image concept can even offer a certain kind of relief in the therapeutic process: by asking clients to represent an experience of oppression as an image, Boal spares them the need to find the appropriate language for their experience. They can concentrate on the visual construction, without having to invent verbal dialogues, narratives or descriptions. In this way, the image concept denotes a liberation from the trials and constrictions of logocentric forms of expression.

As Nic Leonhardt has shown, there is a long tradition in European theatre discourses of adapting the image concept to scenes and performances.Footnote ¹¹ When referring to a performance, the term ‘image’ often reveals a particular visual opulence and exuberant clarity – or it may hint at a ‘fourth wall’ as a way of creating distance. None of these meanings is relevant, however, when the image concept, as illustrated in The Rainbow of Desire, is evoked for the purpose of drama therapy. In this specific context, Boal seems to be referring more to the scenic materials’ potential ability to be formed – and therefore to their performativity. Here the image concept stresses that it is possible

1. 1 to understand a perceived situation at first glance,

2. 2 to project interior notions outside yourself and onto others,

3. 3 to rework a given scene relying on one's own authority and

4. 4 to undertake this reworking freed from the limitations of language.

All of these four possibilities open the door to a significant prospect for transformation. This model of theatrical practice cannot assume just any form when it is harnessed to design a future characterized by relationships without oppression, communication without violence and interactions free from unequal power relations. Rather, the model must take on a form that the individual agents can perceive as assessable, understandable and easy to transform. It should invite performers to take a creative stance towards the present, and to develop the courage to change. This invitation is denoted by the image concept.