Acting

Two variations by Lo Manho, with a few adjustments by MN.

“Beat the fears”

1. Joker separates the class into two groups: Demons and People.
2. The Demons have to make a list of twenty five things that the people in this particular learning group (e.g. university students, Sanitation workers) strongly fear, writing each fear on a separate index card. Ideally it should be something specific to that group, but people should feel free to name basic human fears, like death, too.
   

Variation by Hirabayashi Shunichi, with a few adjustments by MN.

Make a list of fears in advance, to save time. From the list, players vote for the top 10 fears that they have. Of course, they can add another words not on the list, but the number of fears should be the same as the number of demons.

Divide the participants into two groups. One group is the people, the other is the Demons. Each Demon will choose one fear to represent, keeping this secret from “the people.” The Demons will draw masks that somehow express – without words or symbols – the fear that they represent.

In this game, three people have a conversation with one person playing the role of interpreter. In fact all three are speaking the same language, but two pretend they do not understand each other, so they need the interpreter.

The interpreter's role in this game is to misinterpret everything the speakers say, producing the maximum of confusion and misunderstanding.

Example:

Person 1: I am very pleased to meet you.

Interpreter: He says, "what took you so long?"

Person 2: I am not late; I think our meeting was for 4pm and it is 4pm now?

I got this from Kani Club.

Three players and an audience (optional).

The scene is an alien visitor being interviewed by someone who does not speak her/his/its? language. So there is an interpreter.

Choose the setting: a TV program, an immigration interview, a job interview, a political meeting, the UN...

Role play an interview with the alien speaking gibberish which the interpreter translates into English. When the interviewer speaks, the interpreter translates into gibberish.

Variation:

Idea for an activity:

Like the mirror game, where you mimic the other person's movements in real time, in this game one person speaks, one sentence at a time, and the listener repeats verbatim what the speaker said, as close to simultaneously as possible.

Maybe start with the mirror game, as a warm-up, then introduce speech. (One might also show the great mirror sequence in Duck Soup.)

The idea is to make the speaker, listener, and referee more attentive to the exact way they are expressing themselves.

Another way to evaluate a course (or any other activity, perhaps), that breaks from the standard evaluation form format. This one takes the form of a debate over this proposition: "This course is (has been) a complete and total waste of time and money."

Form two teams, choose sides by flip of a coin, one team is given the task of arguing for the proposition, the other against.