Statues

How to Explain It

"Strike a physical shape and freeze in it. Do not plan the shape: let your body go somewhere and stop. Now: who is this person? Where are they? What do they want? The shape already knows. Your job is to discover it."

Objectives

Statues reverses the usual improv direction of scene work: instead of the mind generating action that the body executes, the body's position generates the scene that the mind articulates. This reversal is pedagogically valuable because it bypasses the habitual patterns of verbal planning that many players carry into scene work. When the body is already committed to a position, the player must respond to what is already physically true rather than deciding what to do.

In Boal's application, Statues has an additional political dimension: the exercise creates images that can be read, debated, and transformed by a community, making complex social experiences available for collective examination without requiring the vocabulary of theatre.

Scaffolding

For groups new to physical work, begin with self-generated frozen positions (each player finds their own body position from a given word or theme) before introducing partner sculpting. This gives players experience with physical commitment before adding the vulnerability of being arranged by another person.

For the Art Gallery variant, the sculptor role requires coaching to be specific: a player who vaguely adjusts a partner's arm provides less material to work with than one who places each body part with genuine intention.

Common Coaching Notes

• "You are already in a position. What does that position know that you don't know yet?"
• "Commit to the weight. Where is the center of gravity in this body?"
• "Sculptor: place each part intentionally. The body you create tells a story."
• "Animate from the inside. The body was there first. Follow it."

In Short-Form Contexts

The paired-sculpting variant works effectively as a public demonstration because audiences can see the sculptor's choices, anticipate the pose's implications, and then watch the scene player's justification unfold. The interpretive gap between the intended and the actual, between what the sculptor put into the body and what the scene player does with it, generates its own form of comedy and surprise.

The game scales well: a facilitator can sculpt an audience member in front of the group and then open the stage to other scene players to enter and respond to the established physical reality.

The use of frozen body positions as a theatrical and pedagogical device predates the improvisation tradition. Tableau vivant, the frozen living picture, has a long history in European theatrical performance as a way to communicate narrative and emotion through image rather than action.

Viola Spolin includes Statues in Improvisation for the Theater (1963) in her section on physicalizing attitudes, connecting frozen positions to the broader principle that physical expression is as valid and rich as verbal expression in scene work.

Augusto Boal transformed the statues exercise into a central method of Image Theatre, developed in Brazil from the 1960s and documented in Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) and Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992). Boal's Image Theatre uses sculpted group statues as a democratic method for communities to express and examine their social realities without requiring verbal fluency or theatrical training.

Linda Belt and Rebecca Stockley include a children's game variant in Acting Through Improv, documenting its use as a warm-up exercise in early improv sessions, and Keith Abbott documents the Art Gallery Statues variant in The Improvisation Book.

The children's game "Statues" predates the improvisational tradition, making this one of the exercises where improv pedagogy drew directly from children's play.