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Maybe all learning is creative?
The Association for Experiential Education (AEE) places the creativity of learners at the heart of the 'EE' process:
"Experiential Education is a process through which a learner constructs knowledge, skill, and value from direct experiences." Creativity may also be at the heart of the transfer of learning - see my review of Robert Haskell's book. The DRAMA & IMPRO section below provides inspiration for even more active learning. What opportunities for creativity (and learning) do you provide for others? If you can't afford to buy a book on creativity, inspire yourself for free by exploring some of the links opposite. (Roger Greenaway) |
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Book Description:
Over 100 activities that can be used across all curriculum areas to motivate your pupils and to engage and sustain their interest. The activities will enhance pupils’ ability to ask questions, think creatively and express their considered judgements with confidence. Full of photocopiable resources.
Synopsis: Imagine That... explores the nature of creative thinking and how this can be effectively driven through an ethos of positive encouragement, mutual support and celebration of success and achievement. Links content and process within the learning environment. Addresses the emotional components of the educational experience, and how these can be optimised to enhance self-esteem and confidence in the learner. Provides nearly 100 practical and immediately useable classroom activities and games that can be used in isolation, or in combination, to help meet the requirements and standards of the National Curriculum. In short, Imagine That... empowers children to learn how to learn. (Amazon.co.uk) 
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The extensively illustrated pocketbook is aimed at teachers working in primary and secondary education in England but is also relevant to teachers working in other parts of the UK and overseas. It starts with 'challenging your comfort zones' and the importance of teamwork with students and colleagues. Ideas for creative starters, middles and plenaries include active approaches to lessons and using technology creatively. Questioning techniques are discussed and a section devoted to revision includes strategies to help visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners. (Amazon.co.uk)
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Synopsis:
Traditional thinking habits of businesses need to be greatly improved. Analysis and judgement are no longer
enough to make important corporate decisions; you can analyse the past but you have to design the future.
Corporate decisions depend on values. Disputes and conflicts often arise because of a clash of those values;
each party in the dispute wants to pursue its own values, often at the expense of the other party. It is
therefore essential that companies, managers and employees have a full understanding of the values of everyone
involved to design a way forward that benefits all parties. From the bestselling author of How to Have a
Beautiful Mind and Six Thinking Hats, this groundbreaking book provides a basis for value assessment, an
essential tool in decision-making for 21st century corporations. De Bono demonstrates that values come into all
areas of thinking, behaviour and decision-making and outlines a framework to focus employees' attention on a
variety of values including human values, organisational values, cultural values and perceptual values. By
introducing a scoring system to rate different values as strong, sound, weak or remote de Bono helps readers to
prioritise and make executive decisions that count. (Amazon.co.uk)
From the Publisher: A fresh and inventive framework for making creative but sound decisions in business
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Synopsis:
Offers writers, artists, and performers advice on overcoming the fear of the blank page and empty canvas, and tells how to use this emotion to artistic advantage.
From the Intuition Magazine review of Fearless Creating: "In Fearless Creating, Maisel offers a clear, systematic approach to creativity that fully acknowledges the role of anxiety in the pursuit of artistic excellence. The author doesn't just name and solve some creative problems, he calls on us to create, and to create deeply. Fearless Creating mobilizes you to think, feel, and act completely; it engages and changes you, like the act of creation itself."
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Review:
Sticky Wisdom should be required reading for anyone who's ever wondered how to have more fun at work and profit by it. The basic message is that creativity is like gold dust but it needs to be practised and worked at in organisations. It needs to become part of the organisational furniture. Dave Allan and his co-authors run ?What If!, a creative consultancy (and the title of the first edition) aimed at helping businesses move outside the proverbial tramlines and here, minus the fee, they show how, with activities, games, insights and general lunacy.
The basic premise is that there are six main ways of being more creative--from thinking about things afresh through greenhousing (letting good ideas grow) to bravery (making them happen). Each chapter presents a range of case studies that help ground the activities in a sense of reality--for example one client managed a breakthrough in their advertising for toothpaste when they started seeing their product as liquid teeth. Where many management books are drier than a diver's underpants this has a freshness and zing about it. It keeps you reading and it keeps you smiling too. Sticky Wisdom sends a rocket into the comfortable world of conventional thinking. (Steve Morris, Amazon.co.uk) You can download chapter one for free at http://www.whatif.co.uk (which is worth a visit anyway)
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Creative Art in Groupwork
Jean Campbell
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Back Cover: This practical and highly accessible manual contains 142 art activities developed specifically for use with groups of people of all ages and abilities. The activities include drawing, painting, collages and sculpture and cover diverse themes, such as relationships, emotions, culture, spirituality and celebrations... A brief history and rationale of art in groupwork is included together with suggested ways of working in groups... |
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Synopsis
Describes seven elements of creative thinking and offers exercises for developing more effective thought processes.
(Amazon.co.uk)
A book that deserves a special place in our journey in discovering and living our potential. Great on facts, extremely well presented...it leaves the readers with a feeling that creativity is a birthright...and that being so is a matter of us living life in a certain way...which the book details. The exercises at the end, esp for a beginner learning to draw, are also unique. (extract from a review at Amazon.co.uk) |
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Synopsis:
This work provides a 12-week course that guides the reader through the process of recovering their creative self. It aims to dispel the "I'm not talented enough" conditioning that tends to hamper the creativity of many people.
(Amazon.co.uk) Some very detailed and positive reviews (at amazon.co.uk) show how this programme has helped unblock a writer, help someone recover from depression and even help stockbrokers become better stockbrokers! (Roger Greenaway) Also see The Artist's Way at Work which aims to teach readers how to perform more creatively and effectively at work. |
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Synopsis:
Encourages a detailed perception of the world that improves awareness as well as drawing skills, and includes Zen stories, quotations, proverbs, and anecdotes. (Amazon.co.uk)
Delightful book about SEEING as opposed to "looking at". This book is one of the few that has had a profound impact on my life, and one of the very, very few which will always have a place on my bookshelf. I go back to this delightful book again and again when I need to be inspired and refreshed. "Zen Seeing / Zen Drawing" is neither a primer nor a thorough discourse on either zen or drawing technique, and thank goodness - the last thing we need is more "talking" about zen or "how to's" about art. This book, plain and simple, is about the experience of SEEING, truly seeing, not just with ones eyes, but with all of ones senses, ones heart and ones spirit. If you have always wanted to draw but somehow never have, then this book may be just what you need to get started, especially if you have any inclination towards things "zen" or spiritual. (a reader's review at Amazon.co.uk)
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Synopsis:
An artist and follower of Zen presents a celebration of nature, people, and the need for self-awareness and intimacy with the visible world. (Amazon.co.uk)
A lovely book touching the kernel of Art. I love this book for its sincerity and deep mental approach to the art of drawing. While the book is full of his beautiful creations, Franck stays humble and being true to the Zen tradition he wants to be just a ‘True-Man-With-No-Label’ drawing the ‘Ten Thousand Things’. This book is published handwritten, because, as he says, it is a love letter. (part of a reader's review at Amazon.co.uk)
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Review: This latest book of Jeanne Carbonetti's is an absolute Jewel.
After reading her two other fine books on the technique of watercolor and zen, I didn't think she could come up with another as good as they were,I was so pleasently surprised: "Yoga of Drawing" has surpassed both! Her lovely drawing and simple techniques are easy to understand and most pleasing to the sense of balance and spirit in the presentation of the printed word to the reader. The flow of the spirit and mind are merged together as one to carry one happily through all the pages one by one in the process of understanding. My warmest recommendations. (review at Amazon.co.uk)
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Review:
A popular creativity tool from the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head. It's a systematic way of being creative. (Why not?) What you get is a pack of of 56 cards slightly larger than playing cards and a 60 page booklet the same size. If you want a lot for you money you might be disappointed, but you (or the person/team you are buying it for) are more likely to make use of an attractive set of cards than a book or a handout with the same information. Cards also help you to focus on one thing at a time - Roger V.O. recommends 2 minutes for each card. I find I am bubbling with ideas after only one or two cards, so I like to use them randomly. But you can also work through the cards in order of the acronym SCAMMPERR if you like to be systematic: Substitute something; Combine it with something else; Adapt something to it; Magnify or add to it; Modify it; Put it to some other uses; Eliminate something; Rearrange it; Reverse it. It's fun to use but if you work through every card and still don't come up with a decent idea, try using it with a group - which may add to the fun and help to bring out your creative potential! (Roger Greenaway)
Description: Use the cards alone or with others to seek innovative solutions to issues. Created by best-selling author von Oech, the cards have been used by many organizations, including NASA, in strategy development and problem solving. Complete with detailed instructions. (amazon.co.uk) Reviews at amazon.co.uk Reviews at amazon.com
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Synopsis:
"You can't step in the same river twice". "Dogs bark at what they don't understand". "The doctor inflicts pain to cure suffering". The ancient Greek philospher Heraclitus was famous for such brilliant and provocative sayings, and today, more than 2500 years after they were written, his ideas about life, nature and the cosmos are as relevant as ever. In this guide, von Oech uses 30 of Heraclitus' epigrams as springboards to creativity. Treating each saying as a source of inspiration, he supplies amusing anecdotes, mind-bending riddles, hidden jokes and intriguing questions designed to topple old habits of thought and fire the imagination. The author shows how to reverse expectations, turn change to advantage and find novel solutions to the most intractable problems. (amazon.co.uk)
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Book Description: Visual note-taking relies on paring down thoughts to key words and pictures. This introduction to this technique illustrates how relationships among various concepts are highlighted and more information can be recorded on a page. This helpful tool can be used for personal self-expression, curriculum planning, group processes, and as a teaching strategy in daily lessons. Beginners are introduced to stroke-by-stroke exercises in drawing simple iconic figures that can be incorporated into one's mindscapes. |
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Book Description:
The only way to succeed nowadays is to throw away the rule book. Change is the name of the game, but innovation doesn't come easily. This is bad news when creativity is a survival skill. This book acts as a catalyst to free up your natural creativity - creativity that can be bottled up by habit, training or lack of energy. Instant Creativity provides an easy-to-use action kit bursting with exercises that will help everyone to make the most of his or her creativity. Full of simple, proven techniques that will help you find fresh ideas and solutions, the book offers over 70 approaches to creative thinking. Instant Creativity is an instant resource for individuals and teams to crack a problem or generate ideas. Innovation in an instant! (Amazon.co.uk) Readers' reviews emphasise its value as a handbook. |
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Synopsis:
A manual and resource for developing philosophical dialogue with children aged 4 and above.
Book Description: Storywise is a fascinating resource that harnesses the power of familiar stories to open up a space for children's thinking. This publication, the Storywise Starter Pack, comes in two parts. The first is a Teachers' Guidance Book of ideas and methods for leading children into high-quality thinking and dialogue about all kinds of stories. The second is an expandable starter-pack of ideas and learning materials for three classic picture books along with a Web of Intriguing Ideas that teachers can use with many other stories, poems and pictures for all ages. More Storywise material will be available in the future. Storywise is a radically updated and re-written version of Dr. Karin Murris' ground-breaking project: Teaching Philosophy Through Picture Books. The benefits for children of that project will remain (introduction to philosophical dialogue, improvements in thinking skills and literacy).
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Synopsis: No one can establish a learning atmosphere without gaining audience attention, this book offers over 50 activities that trainers can use to start their sessions memorably. When participants enter a training room, their brains are "full". They are distracted, and they may perceive training as an interruption to other important tasks. The first job of any trainer is to break participant preoccupations These activities can be used to build teams, encourage social mixing and even enliven an atmosphere that has fallen prey to indecision and apathy. (Amazon.co.uk) |
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Review (extract): Bob Pike has been able to do what no other trainer of trainers has done - deliver easy to digest and apply techniques based upon popular adult learning theories of the day. More... |
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Synopsis:
Not just another book on the theory of strategic planning, here are dozens of recipes for creative group activities to facilitate strategic planning in any organization. Designed for use by consultants, facilitators, and management team leaders, step-by-step instructions guide you through exercises
From the Author: Practical & collaborative activities that produce results The key to effective planning is to meaningfully involve your organization's stakeholders in creating a shared picture of the future.This book shows you how to solve problems, build commitment and community. The activities described have been used successfuly in hundreds of organizations. We provide a balanced approach to planning that taps the resources in an organization and most importantly, creates the commitment to produce results. enthusiastic reviews despite the price tag. |
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Synopsis A key goal for many of us is to increase our ability to learn, remember and record or store information. The reader is shown how to accomplish this using a range of techniques developed by the author. |
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Synopsis: Creativity is becoming increasingly important for all businesses as competition intensifies because to act creatively is the best and cheapest way to get added value out of existing resources and assets. In this book, the author brings up-to-date the core concept of his book "Lateral Thinking". |
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Synopsis: The internationally bestselling guide to better thinking used by tens of thousands of people - fully revised and updated. There is nothing more sad and wasteful than a roomful of intelligent and highly paid people waiting for a chance to attack something the speaker has said. With the Six Hats methods the fullest use is made of everyone's intelligence, experience and information. The Six Hats also removes all "ego" from the discussion process... continuation and reviews at Amazon.co.uk |
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Creativity is crucial to business success. But too often, even the most innovative organisation quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity ... In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full colour, Gordon McKenzie shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius. Originally self-published and already a business "cult classic", this personally empowering and entertaining look at the crossroads between human creativity and the bottom line is now widely available. It will be a must-read for any manager looking for new ways to invigorate employees and any professional who wants to achieve his or her best, most self-expressive, most creative and fulfilling work. (Amazon.com) 25+ glowing reviews |
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Synopsis
The second volume in Koestler's trilogy on the human mind is an study of the processes of creativity and imagination in which Koestler explains that humans are most creative when rational thought is abandoned during dreams and trances. (Amazon.co.uk) Readers' reviews have nothing but praise for this 'masterpiece' from 1964. e.g. ''Koestler's writing is eminently readable and still highly topical three decades later.'' |
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Review:
This is a smashing little book for anyone who's ever wondered how to have more fun at work and profit by it. The authors run a creative consultancy aimed at helping businesses to move outside the proverbial tramlines. The book shows just how, with activities, games, insights and general lunacy. The basic message is that creativity is like gold dust but it needs to be practised and worked at in organisations. It needs to become part of the organisational furniture. How to Start a Creative Revolution may not deliver exactly what it says in the title (publishers hype perhaps) but it will allow you to do some useful thinking. The basic premise is that there are six main ways of being more creative--from thinking about things afresh, to greenhousing (letting good ideas grow), to bravery (making them happen). In each chapter the authors give a range of case studies that help to ground the activities in a sense of reality (apparently one client managed a breakthrough in their advertising for toothpaste when they started seeing their product as liquid teeth!). As impressive as the ideas and the activities is the style the book is written in (you'll probably find you do many of the things they suggest already). Where many management books are drier than a diver's underpants this has freshness and zing about it. It keeps you reading and it keeps you smiling too. (Steve Morris, Amazon.co.uk) More reviews and information about six ?What If? strategies for creativity: * Freshness * Greenhousing * Realness * Momentum * Signalling * Bravery. |
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Synopsis
Outlines a four-step program to help stimulate creative thinking and to promote the application of creative ideas. (Amazon.co.uk) Reviews |
Art-Based Games
Don Pavey
Methuen, 1979.
Unfortunately out of print, but you may be able to track down a second hand copy on this page at amazon.co.uk
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Synopsis:
While adhering to the conventions of cartography, this atlas invites travellers to follow routes through familiar-looking topography to realms of imagination, ideas, feelings and experience. It encompasses the Ocean of Possibilites, the Swamps of Boredom, the City of Boom and the Airport of Escape.
Review: Two Dutch cartographers get carried away with the idea that life is a journey and can be represented on maps. The text between the maps is suitably thought-provoking and inspirational, but it feels like two books in one. I would have enjoyed even closer integration between the text and the maps, but it's worth buying for the maps alone. There is plenty of scope for the creative trainer to turn this coffee table novelty into a powerful tool for reflection. Some might say that Tony Buzan has done the job already with Mind Mapping. But this is different and more magical. It is like Treasure Island or The Phantom Tolbooth - for grown ups. (reviewed by Roger Greenaway) Reviews at Amazon.co.uk - from 1 star to 5 star Go to the publisher's website and make your own map - at a price |
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Product Description:
Gain access to a personal collection of 101 highly effective drama games and activities suitable for children or adults. Chapters include improvisation, mime, ice-breakers, group dynamics, rehearsal, story-telling, voice and warm-ups. This unique book has been developed over a thirty year career in education and theatre, through workshops with actors, teachers and children around the world. (This book has lots of 5 star reviews at Amazon.co.uk)
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Synopsis
Includes 900 situations for improvisation which use character conflict, contrasts, obstacles in solo improvisation, physical positions for one or two actors, props, the environment, and lines of dialogue.
(Amazon.co.uk)
Review at amazon.com: The author, himself an acting teacher and play director, believes that the key to great acting lies in the successful mastery of the art of improvisation, which brings the intensity and spontaneity that marks a truly memorable performance. He encourages actors to work without scripts during some rehearsals and offers 900 improvisational situations designed to stimulate development of character conflicts and the use of obstacles, the environment, and simple props. This title complements but does not duplicate the material covered in Andy Goldberg's Improv Comedy ( LJ 3/15/92). It should serve as an excellent teaching tool in drama classes. Recommended. - Howard E. Miller, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Missouri Lib., St. Louis Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Readers' reviews at amazon.com are very mixed (from one star to five star)
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Book Description:
In today’s fast paced, “right-sized,” competitive environment businesses increasingly need staff who are creative, think on their feet, take the unexpected in their stride, and work effectively in fluid teams. How can they instill and develop these critical skills?
The answer may be to improvise! Improvisational actors make up scenes, dialog and entire plays on the spot. They work collaboratively in front of paying customers who expect to be entertained and amazed. Improv actors use no script, cannot predict what will happen next, and have no chance to go back or rewrite. They rely on their knowledge, practiced skills and their colleagues. This book is the first to apply the improv methodologies of the theater to developing the business skills that are in high demand. Kat Koppett—a professional trainer, management consultant and professional actor—demonstrates to trainers and managers how they can effectively transfer improv training techniques to their day to day business environment. (read more at amazon.com)
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Synopsis:
Section 1 includes games for relaxing and focusing. Section 2 helps students discover new ways of seeing themselves, others and the world around them. Section 3 demonstrates with improvisations how to use space to build scenes and create characters from imagination. Section 4 features acting games to analyse and play characters from existing plays. (Amazon.co.uk)
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Book Description:
This authoritative volume, written by one of the world's leading pioneers in the field, provides an integrative framework for the practice of drama therapy. It is the first book to offer a comprehensive and systematized description of drama therapy techniques as well as an in-depth analysis, supported by clinical examples and case histories, of the progression of brief and long-term drama therapy.
After exploring the primary conceptual sources at the roots of drama therapy, the author delineates five distinct development phases in the therapeutic process that will help the therapist to pace treatment, assess progress, and choose effective techniques and interventions. The volumes describes over 125 distinct drama therapy techniques, many of which were created by the author. These techniques are categorized according to phases of the session and treatment series and subcategorized by therapeutic objective. Also included are an examination of performance-oriented drama therapy and "self-revelatory" theatre as well as the poignant story about a group of seven former psychiatric patients and the play they created about their lives. The techniques described in Acting for Real will be particularly useful for clients who have difficulty with verbal communication, social interaction, or emotional expression/containment. They can be easily integrated into the contexts of individual, family, and group therapy; day treatment centers; inpatient psychiatric hospital units; as well as clinical and recreational work with all populations and age groups. Drama therapy offers an intensification of the psychotherapeutic process that will contribute to the growing need, in our current economic climate, for more cost-effective types of psychiatric treatment. But above all, drama therapy, as so clearly and knowledgeably set forth in Acting for Real, can offer individuals a particularly potent and multidimensional means of accessing their most profound and vital selves. (Amazon.co.uk)
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Synopsis:
This is a handbook for working in the creative arts, with an emphasis upon imagination and receptivity: to our bodies, to our surroundings, our materials, and to what we create. It will be of value to anyone interested to explore their lives through an active engagement in the arts. It puts particular emphasis upon the sensing, feeling, moving body as a basis for any imaginative activity. The book describes sources and strategies for working within and between various forms of expression, including: moving, making things with materials and writing. It stresses the importance of intuitive, instinctive ways of knowing, perceiving, and creating. The book will be a useful resource for people studying or teaching in the arts, or for anyone whose professional life involves them in working creatively with others: therapeutically, educationally, or in a community context. The book is written to inspire rather than to instruct, to be used in small amounts to stimulate a working process, rather than to be read through from cover to cover. The authors' previous book, Body Space Image (now available again), was about improvised movement, experimental performance, and creating performance settings. This book turns to the question of imagination in our lives and how this is awakened and nourished through attention to the present, feeling world of the body and to whatever appears as we make. In this way we enter into the poetics of our experience. (Amazon.co.uk)
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"Games for Actors and Non-Actors" is a handbook of methods, techniques, games, and exercises designed to help anyone - whether actor or non-actor - rehearse for real life: make the fictional real.
This classic and best selling book by the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal, sets out the principles and practice of Boal's revolutionary Method, showing how theatre can be used to transform and liberate everyone - actors and non-actors alike! This thoroughly updated and substantially revised second edition includes: * Two new essays by Boal on major recent projects in Brazil * Boal's description of his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company * A revised introduction and translator's preface * A collection of photographs taken during Boal's workshops, commissioned for this edition * New reflections on Forum Theatre (see favourable reviews at Amazon.co.uk)
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A reader writes: Your book is the best I have come across so far in articulating the goals of community drama work, the centrality of play and in giving good coverage to areas often skipped over to do with research, preparation and planning, safety, troubleshooting and so on. It is well set out, accessible but still challenging and thought-provoking, well-referenced and also has many fresh ideas for games and how to facilitate them. I also liked the fact you cited Keith Johnston along with Boal, Heathcote et al as a model and influence for a particular way of working. See more reviews of 'House of Games' at Amazon.co.uk |
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Synopsis: This volume is a handbook of exercises with a difference. It is about the therapeutic ability of theatre to liberate individuals and change lives. Now translated into English and fully updated from the French, the book sets out the techniques which help us "see" for the first time the oppressions we have internalized. Boal, a Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician, has been confronting oppression in various forms for over 30 years. His belief that theatre is a means to create the future rather than passively wait for it has inspired hundreds of groups all over the world to use his techniques in a multitude of settings. This, his latest work, includes such exercises as: the cops in the head and their anti-bodies; the screen image; the image of the future we are afraid of; and image and counter-image. This book should serve as reading for those already familiar with Boal's previous work and should also be accessible to those new to "Theatre of the Oppressed" techniques. (Amazon.co.uk) |
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Q. What's popular? A. See The Top 20 Q. What's best? A. See Best Books Q. Where are the bargains? A. They are all on one page at Books Under a Fiver Q. What's new? A. See New Books or browse the right margins in any category. Q. Where am I? A. Roger's Bookshop is part of The Active Reviewing Guide. |
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