1. WARM UP EXERCISES
PRESENTATIONS
WALK IN THE SPACE
Description: The participants walk around the space. They first identify each other. Wink an eye. Clap. Say hello. Then they keep on walking and they end up walking in pairs. Finding a common rhythm,. Finding together different ways of walking. Different speed. Exploring the space together.
Objectives:
– develop abilities of listening, empathy and adaptation
– Challenge preconceptions
– build collaboration
LOOKING AT EACH OTHER- POETICAL ETHNOGRAPHY
PUSH AND PULL
Description: Movement exercise in pairs. One person closes their eyes and allows the other person to push and pull different parts of his/her body. The person who is pushed and pulled has to let her/himself react to the impulses given by the other person, who also has to be extremely attentive to the limits and needs of the mover.
Objectives:
· Develop empathy and listening
· Develop flexibility: finding your freedom within someone else’s restrictions
ASKING QUESTIONS WITH NO ANSWER
Description: Participants find each other and stand in pairs. One person will ask questions to the person standing in front of her/him, but she/he will not reply. The person asks what she wants to know, and by guessing what is in her/his body and look responds with next question, so that even if there are no active responses, there Is a real dialogue.
Objectives:
– Raise perception in human needs, considering not only verbal language but also emotional perception and environmental awareness
– Develops abilities to work from a human centered approach
– Ability to read emotional feedback
2. GAMES
CLOCK GAME
Building complicity with the audience.
Looking whilst you are doing something, before you do something, after you do something
PRESENTING AN INVENTED TALENT
FINDING A PEN WITH EYES CLOSED
Description: Individual exercise. The teacher covers the eyes of the participant, then puts a pen on the floor of the room. The participant has to find it as quickly as possible.
Objectives:
· Identifying different talents and different relationships to the research process of the individuals in the group
· Build up resilience to failure. Embracing failure
· Finding balance between rationality and intuition
· Challenging assumptions (observing other’s people’s “techniques” to finding the pen opens up new possibilities
- problem solving: what you do when you donn’t know what to do. You need to be doing something to find it.
LET’S
Description: The game is an investigation of what the group wants. Inspired in aboriginal groups in which decisions are made by total agreement.The group has to respond “Yes” to the suggestions of any member of the group. The suggestions should come from everyone – there are to be no leaders. The teacher tells the participants: “If you can’t respond with genuine enthusiasm, please leave the group and sit on the side”. We time how long the group can sustain itself.
Objectives:
– develop abductive reasoning
– exploration of alternatives in experimentation
– finding solutions in action – develop imaginative play
– developing empathy
– enhance collaboration as well as individual perception of one’s role in a group.
ASKING FOR A FAVOUR 30 min
Short description: In a circle. Two participants walk to the center. One of them asks for a favour from the other one. The other one has to say yes. The person needs to find a way to say yes, even if what is asked seems impossible. Where does saying yes lead to? The “giver” will have to take his/her proposal as far as possible without missing the original need expressed in the request.
Objectives:
– reading what the other person might need
– read the non verbal requests behind the verbal request
– adapt a proposal to the need of the person
– develop empathy
– work in trial and error until the result is satisfactory.
– promote collaborative work (the group can also contribute to the accomplishment of the request)
– challenge comfort zone.
— ALTERNATIVE – GIVING PRESENTS
Description: Participants have to mime “giving presents to each other” in pairs. At first it’s the giver who defines what the present is, but in a second round of the game it would be the person who receives the present who will define what it is. It should be something that he/she really wants. The “giver” will simply help the person to define what the present is.
Objectives:
—- ALTERNATIVE – THE KING’S GAME
Short description: one participant plays the king and the others become a minichorus trained to react at every need of the king. The objective of the “helpers” is to support and guide the king
Objective:
– learning to understand what someone else wants without needing to ask
– reading non verbal communication
– work collaboratively
THE AND …AND GAME
Description: in twos, one person makes a simple action. The other person says “and” which is a command to develop their action. They go on saying “and” and the person has to keep on proposing actions in association to the one he/she just did.
Objectives:
– Finding freedom in restrictions
– React to someone else’s request
– adapt quickly to the partner’s rhythm and provocations.
– Develop intuition
– Develop non linear problem solving abilities.
– Avoid preconceptions of what the game should be or might be,
FINDING THE GAME
Description: a small group stand in a circle and they are asked to “find the game”. They will have to be attentive to small movements from someone in the group and let them transform and grow. Once the game has been identified, everyone else copies it.
The group will allow the game to grow and play with it, but then will have to identify when the game is over and find a new game.
Objective:
– develop abilities for problem definition – find the problem in experimentation, the same way you find the game in action.
– identifying the problem whilst in action
– Replace the need to be inventive for allowing to identify what comes up naturally out of the group. Find solutions in experimentation.
– Because the game appears within a group it avoids linear thinking or linear association as many imaginations are pulling the action in different directions.
3. IMPROVISATIONS
HANDS UP GAME
Description: Individually participants go on stage and try to keep the interest of the audience. The audience has to be completely honest. If they are bored they put their hands up. That’s the game. Understanding the flop. Reacting to others.
Objective:
– Listening
– Quick adaptation
– Embracing Failure
– Reading a room
– Feeling the room
CLAPPING GAME
One of the participants leaves the room. The rest of the group decide what task they want the person to achieve. The object of the game is for the person onstage to complete the action that the group has planned. They can only clap their approval
Objectives:
– work out a solution through experimentation
– find a balance between intuition and rationality
– process of problem definition
– testing multiple potential solutions (trial and error)
THE CASTING
Description: 3 clowns are invited to an audition but they don’t know what for. The facilitator starts asking them “I’ve heard you know how to….” And proposes to do a very difficult task. For example: imitating the sound of an animal, or an object, speaking in a foreign language, performing a choreography…
IMPOSSIBLE IMPROV
Description: In pairs, two participants have to cross the stage without being seen. They need to find strategies from the clown perspective to cross.
Objectives :
– Iteration and experimentation
– Challenge deductive thinking
– Ignoring the obvious
– Integrate failure as an inherent part of the work
THE INVENTION
Description: two clowns. One presents to the audience an object as a new extraordinary invention that he made. The other clown is his helper and shows the uses of the object by manipulating it (demonstration)
Facilitators offer objects
Objectives:
- mutual adaptability
- finding solutions on the spot
- co-construction: the meaning emerges because from the relationship you have working with it
- teamwork
COLLECTIVE STORYTELLING
Description: One person starts narrating a story. The narrator re-enacts what she/he is telling. Others in the group can contribute to the story, playing characters or helping generating an atmosphere for example. They serve the story but the story can be mutated/transformed by the inputs of the collaborators.
Objective:
- develop the ability to visualize in action
- understand how active thinking transforms rational ideas and opens up new alternatives
- develops an adaptable imagination in the narrator (who has to integrate the inputs coherently into his initially linear story)