English teaching/learning

Another surrealist game from Alastair Brotchie. This one involves the random creation of definitions.

What is...?

Each player writes a question on this pattern: "What is ----?" (e.g., "What is solidarity?")

The players each fold down their papers so the questions are concealed and pass their papers to the next player who writes a definition on this pattern: "It is ----" (e.g., "It is a scream in the night." or "It is the final resting place of our dreams.")

The first technique is from Alastair Brotchie's collection of surrealist games. The second is a variation on the first. Like all such games, it is important to play them freely, without concern about "making a good one" or being clever. If the players feel free, the results can sometimes be remarkable. We are used to trying to work together rationally, these games ask us to work together irrationally, creatively.

If/Would

In pairs or a group: each person writes the first clause of a sentence, beginning with "If", on this pattern:

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.

The chief advantage of Augusto Boal's term "joker" is that it separates a role -- instigator, initiator, actor, etc. -- from a position: teacher, leader, facilitator. Roles can be rotated and re-distributed across participants. Positions, however, are part of an institution or structure and don't change as fluidly as roles.

These comments and reflections are too long to place at the end of an activity and often apply to more than one technique.

This game is a variation on the "Yes, and yay" improvisation game I learned at Kani Club. The purpose is to be playful and free with language, using a standard form of interaction creatively. Like most games, it can be thematic or simply fanciful. (In any case, it needs to be fanciful.) Finding the creativity and play in each other is an important gain for people working together in groups. Just as we need to re-invent the wheel periodically when it comes to our strategy, we also need to re-discover each other from time to time.

The flow: