Embodied Imagination: An Approach to Stroke Recovery Combining Participatory Performance and Interactive Technology

Participatory performance provides methods for exploring social identities and situations in ways that can help people to imagine new ways of being. Digital technologies provide tools that can help people envision these possibilities. We explore this combination through a performance workshop process designed to help stroke survivors imagine new physical and social possibilities by enacting fantasies of "things they always wanted to do". This process uses performance methods combined with specially designed real-time movement visualisations to progressively build fantasy narratives that are enacted with and for other workshop participants. Qualitative evaluations suggest this process successfully stimulates participant's embodied imagination and generates a diverse range of fantasies. The interactive and communal aspects of the workshop process appear to be especially important in achieving these effects. This work highlights how the combination of performance methods and interactive tools can bring a rich, prospective and political understanding of people's lived experience to design.