Game Called Zipzaps



~Elizabeth~ Very Tall Repat Expat - Native SoCal, lived in London for four years, now returned to SoCal... here you'll find my 'personal' blog, my Project 365, and my Africa blog. Constructive comments and compliments are love. Please do not feel the need to take the time to write out a diatribe of why you think I'm awful, untalented, ugly, or pathetic and insane. It will be deleted and you will hurt my feelings. Thank you. View my complete profile here are a bevy of improv warm ups i like to do:

bad improv scenes. - have everyone so the worst improv scene they can imagine being done. opens up creativity. gets folks thinking about improv philosophically a little and is good for getting rid of fear.

i like to play emotional zip zap zop where you play the game with a predominating emotion or attitude

i also like playing "electric factory" in character - give everyone a generic character catagory like a "professor - then everyone plays their specific type of professor as the group passes words to one another. you could also do without assigning a character catagory and just play in any old character.

i am also a fan - for those improvisers who do short form - of warming up for alphabet scene with electric factory by making the next word passed around the circle have to start with the next letter of the alphabet

i am also a fan of three new excercises that i am not sure people know about

i am soo - were one makes an emotional or other type of position statement and repeats it three times - "i am sooo mad, (repeat 2x)", or, "i am so light (repeat 2x)" and then you pass the person in the circle next to you an object directly or indirectly related to how you feel - "i am so mad, i am so mad, i am so mad that i am giving you this failing report card". then the other person receives that object with a position statement of their own (inspired by what they received from you of course) that they repeat three times, handing the next person an object of their own - and thus it continues around the circle.

i also like hello governor which is a character circle game where you create a character that says three lines and the person in the circle mirrors your character and repeats your lines, however this is done in dialog as if it were a conversation.
so it might sound like this:
hello governor
hello governor
mighty nice cap your wearin
mighty nice cap your wearin
fancy a drink?
fancy a drink

but the response is not a copy of inflection - it is spoken as if in response - like a dialog
then of course the receiver gets a chance to pass their character to the next person in the circle.

the third is a game called merecat

where the whole group creates spontaneous tableus or frozen pictures

one person runs to a point in the room and strike a dynamic evocative pose - the rest of the group runs to join them quickly and some sort of scene crystallizes around the initial pose

once everyone in the group has contributed to the scene by mirroring or adding detail to the scene someone breaks off into a new pose informed by the last scene or not

it is good for agreement,stage picture, initiation - all that stuff

i stole these exercises from asaf. don't know if he stole them too but they sure are great...