TECHNIQUES

Body Stories

What happens inside your head? And what about inside your heart? What do you do with your hands? Get to know each other through the stories held in your body.

Written by

Quime Williams

Edited by

Gioel Gioacchino

Developed by

Stages:Community Building

One of the wonderful advisors who accompanied us for many years, Natalie Abdou, used to work with the Coady Institute. She does a lot of social theatre and creative facilitation work, this is just one of in her toolkit.

What do I need?

Chalk if you’re going to do it outside or markers and large paper if you’re going to do it indoors

How long does it take?

40 minutes.

Ask participants to pair up and give them chalk or pen to sketch the outline of each other’s bodies.

Once the bodies are outlined, instruct every person to fill their shape with symbols or words. They will share their story/describe who they are based on the following prompts:

Head: What’s in your head? What thoughts go through your mind on a regular basis?
Heart – what is in your heart? what passions do you have?
Gut - what does your intuition tell you?*
Hands - What do you do with your hands?
Feet - Where do your feet take you? Where are you going?

* intuition is sometimes hard to pin down. We've often understood it as your instincts. Something your body knows before your mind does.

In their pairs, have them share their body story to one another. They should take time to explain each part.

It allows participants to think about the different pieces that define who they are. It’s also a great way to have people get to know one another in more depth.

If you want to do this exercise with chalk on the ground, you should see first if this is something the group would be ok with. You could also tell people to show up with clothes they are ok getting dirty in – that way they’ll feel more comfortable and prepared.

It’s hard to answer deep questions with just a few words or symbols. If you want to capture more depth in the answers then it would be best to do it on paper. Chalk becomes hard to work with if the surface is too rough.

How to adapt the technique

We adapted ‘Body Stories’ for The Bathroom Research project we ran in collaboration with student groups at the University of Toronto. There, the technique was adapted to capture how people relate to their gender and sexuality in bathrooms.

Tips and Traps

Allow people to make different shapes with their bodies if they’d like when they are having their silhouette drawn out. It’s interesting to understand why they made those shapes and how that relates to what they put in their body story.