THE WITCHES- Task One: Warm-ups

 The very best way to begin a class is by warming up. We can do this by starting off the lesson with some games to get our brains working and our bodies moving. One game, which is an easy, fun, light way to start things off, is splat. The rules are to get into a circle with a person in the centre and that person will call out splat, in which the chosen person will duck and the two people beside must call out splat to one another. The slowest person is out and this continues until there are only two people remaining. The final round, the two start back to back and take a step forward with every word spoken until the chosen word is mentioned and the fastest to splat the other wins. The purpose of this game is to wake everybody up, make them alert and speed up reaction times. It also warms up voices and allows everyone to loosen up. 

We have also played some really fun improvisation games, with the purpose of improving everyone's ability to think on the spot and to just go with comes to mind at that time, helping us be present in the moment and be spontaneous with our choices, a few of the most useful skills in acting. This can also be used when reading from a script to add character and depth. Theres the "What are you doing?" game, where we each take turns going into the centre of the circle and ask, "What are you doing?" and the person tells us an action that doesn't actually fit with what they're doing so we all act out different actions within each turn. From this exercise, Ive learned to think outside of the box with my actions and to not go for the obvious choice. 

Another improvisation game is the bus game and it is one of my favourites. Everyone enters the bus at different times portraying a behaviour, in which everyone on the bus has to mirror that behaviour. With each new character that gets on, the bus is filled with lots of different emotions constantly changing as the game carries on. This game broadens my ability to play lots of different characters that are all different in their own way.

In addition, I love the improvisation game where there are three people that remain in the scene, all have to be on different levels. For example, one person will be sat on the floor, one on a chair and the other stood. A scene will then be improvised and they can swap levels as long as everyone is on different levels at all times. New people can swap in whenever and change the scenario of the scene. This game gives freedom to all actors involved and allows them to just have fun with it and see where it goes. 

A warm - up that I feel would be useful to use with the group would be the "expert" game. In this game, somebody is chosen to leave the room and when they re-enter, they are told that they are the expert of... (whatever the group decides- the weirder the better). They are then asked multiple questions by the group on that topic and they have to answer in the best way they can, obviously they don't really know about that specific topic but they make it up as they go along, in order to sound professional -as if they really know what they are talking about.  This game is a fun way to be creative with your answers and questions and the "expert" can change every round allowing multiple people to have a go. I personally think this game can be quite funny depending on the topic and the babbling the "expert" does.