Improv games are a wonderful way to break the ice with your new cast, review and develop skills, and help your actors find themselves in the characters they’re playing and the script you’re working on with them. Through exercises and improvisation games, the actors learn to respond quickly to changes in their environment and to create on the spot a new way of looking at, responding to or expressing feelings about a situation that has also been created spontaneously.

As a director of young performers, I have developed a repertoire that I would like to share here, of games that I feel work well with children and adolescents. These are not all original products, in fact most of them have been around for a long time, but I am including them here not as my own inventions, but as games that I have found particularly useful and popular with my young actors. .

park bench – This is usually the first game I teach. It is simple and happily played by people of all ages. Believe it or not, I have met the team of kids ages 5-8 who go on with this game for an hour or more! I start by asking for a volunteer to be the first innocent sitting on a bench. I tell the pew sitter who is sitting minding his own business when a new person comes in and sits next to him, and here I encourage the next kid to come and join the first. The second person’s job is to say or do something to make the first person go away. The work of the first person – and this is an important point to highlight – is allow the second person’s statement or action to make him want to leave. As the first person gets up and leaves, the second person moves into her place and becomes the next innocent sitting on the bench and welcomes the next kid in line who will now make him leave. The innocent original bench caretaker goes to the end of the line of the rest of the future park bench antagonists to wait his own turn.

Freeze – Another old standby, Freeze has been around forever and is enjoyed by actors of any age. It begins with two volunteers taking the stage. The director asks the audience to give the two volunteers a setting to start a scene: a place, an activity, and who the two actors are playing. Leaving no time for the two actors to think much, the director instructs the volunteers to start the scene. The scene progresses for a few minutes and then, when the actors are in an interesting physical formation, the director yells “Stop!” and the two actors must freeze their bodies at that moment.

A new volunteer is chosen and that person comes up on stage and gently touches the shoulder of whichever actor is in a position that inspires them. The intervened actor leaves the stage. The new actor assumes his position and uses that pose as a cue to start a whole new scene.

Martha’s game And no, no one knows why it’s called “Martha’s Game.”

An actor is chosen to play Martha. Martha has the pleasure of choosing where she is, what she is doing and what she is and she announces it to the group and freezes in an action pose. The rest of the students, one by one, say what they want to be in the scene (any character or environmental aspect of Martha’s setting is fair game, including inanimate objects) and add themselves, frozen, to the picture. When all the actors have chosen to join the Martha stage, the director will clap three times and the image will come to life, moving and speaking, even inanimate objects must speak as if what they are portraying could speak. This results in a wonderfully wildly chaotic wacky scene. This game is not for the faint of heart.

Tell me again? – This game originated with me and starts with a set of pre-written sentences on slips of paper that can be used to start a scene. Some examples:

I don’t believe this. I’m tired. Do not tell me that. What do you mean? wow. What do you know? It’s great to see you.

Two students choose a piece of paper with a sentence printed on it, enter the play space, and start a scene with their sentences. The problem here is that the only thing students are allowed to say is that sentence in their hand. They must use their bodies, faces, actions, and inflections to vary the scene and portray different intentions. The fun really begins when the director adds more actors, each with their own one-sentence script to play out. The game is great for teaching about the many ways a line can be pronounced, as well as a nice way to show that it’s not so much what we say but how we say it.

The Game Show Game – An original variation on the old standard The Dating Game. Three children are chosen to create characters, whose identities they do not reveal. The characters can be anything from SpongeBob SquarePants to a rabbit and mac and cheese. The three characters sit in a row of three chairs, with enough space between them to allow them to physically move while taking their portraits. A contestant is chosen who then sits on the far right of the stage in the row of characters and the announcer, the director, begins the game.

Announce: Welcome ladies and gentlemen to our show The Game Show Game, where our contestant will have five rounds of questions to determine who these three characters could be. Here is our contestant for today: Tom. Character number one, say hello to Tom!

The characters go down the line, each saying a characteristic “hello” to the contestant. When this is accomplished, the announcer says, “Tom, please ask your first question.”

The characters answer a series of five questions posed by the contestant, who collects information from the answers that hopefully leads him to the answer as to who the characters really are. This game works well as it involves many children at once and even the children representing the audience are participants, as if the contestant cannot guess the identity of a character, the announcer says, “We address the audience members. from the audience. …do you have a guess for this character?” At the end of the round, when all characters have been revealed, the contestant returns to the audience, all characters move the stage one chair to the right, character number one becomes the contestant, and a new character number three is chosen. of the audience, and the announcer. he launches into introducing him once more…

These games are just a sample of what is available for principals to play with their students. Some useful improv game links are:

http://www.createdrama.com/theater

http://www.improv4kids.com/ImprovGames

Improv games provide the director with a myriad of ways to extend her novice actors’ rehearsal and acting skills into uncharted territory, while also providing opportunities to develop social skills and build camaraderie among students. The director will enjoy watching the student actors grow as they play, laugh with their co-stars, and become more spontaneous and creative.