One game I learned from the Kani Club improv workshop in Tokyo is Master and Servants. The idea of the game is simple: three players, one is the Master who is constantly demanding things of the servants. When the servants try to meet the Master's needs, the Master is never satisfied and yells at them. For example:
A series of activities for looking at wealth inequality in the US and globally.
A volunteer describes an incident they experienced -- something embarrassing, funny, puzzling, etc. -- to the whole group. The joker asks questions to clarify details and verify understanding. Then, the joker asks for volunteers to enact the scene. They are free to improvise in any way they like.
I got this from Kani Club, the improvisation school in Tokyo. It is a great "Yes, and..." game.
Pairs or trios (daunting to do in larger groups, but could be done with practiced players).
The idea is for the players to speak a sentence simultaneously without knowing what the sentence will be ahead of time, relating the sentence to some physical action or pantomime.
Idea for an activity:
Take a text, in another language, that you love (poem, song, whatever).
Use Google translate to translate it to English.
If the result is sufficiently strange, copy it, reduce it, and perform it like a poem at a poetry slam.
If the result is too normal, try translating the translated version into a different language, then from that language into English, or into another language -- repeat until you have freed the words from the original text.
From the great Open Culture website. http://www.openculture.com/2014/04/10-rules-for-students-and-teachers-po...
These rules can be used in many ways:
They are great to use for thinking about innovation, creativity, education, any kind of self-directed work.
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RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
The game Loud & Proud is designed to played as a rapid-fire competitive matching game. http://store.toolboxfored.org/loud-proud/
It can also be played:
In pairs, one person is the Engineer the other is the Robot. The engineer gives the robot instructions. The robot does exactly what z is instructed to do, if possible in the spirit of "yes, and...". It is okay for the robot to fail to perform an action -- that requires the engineer to adapt the instruction. This will be most interesting if the instructions are creative: write a poem, pretend to eat ice cream, explain the meaning of life...
Variations:
Idea for an activity: in trios, one player is the couch potato, the other two are actors in a TV show. The actors improvise a dialogue. At any time, the couch potato can say, "mute!" as if hitting the mute button on a remote control. When s/he does that, the players continue their dialogue without any sound.
The players have to pay attention so that when the couch potato turns off the mute, they have something to say.
I'm sure this has been done before, but it occurred to me as well. (It's like the Kani Club activity "Words from the Heart" where the players add side commentary, sharing their true feelings out loud as if only the audience could hear them.)
Four people improvisation game.
Two people are the players, the other two are their shadows.
The two people meet each other for the first time. (The audience can choose a place beforehand.) They improvise a conversation, starting with a greeting.
