When I taught high school theatre we played a lot of improv games (I would jump in myself a lot). Some of my students favorites were:
1) Freeze Game
2) Character Add-In/Out Game: I would give three actors a scenario and they would start acting. We would try to get as many different characters from the class to add-in to the scene as possible without the scene losing focus. The extras could come and go at will, the only constant being the three originals.
3) Park Bench Game
4) Party Quirks
5) Dating Game: the three bachelors/ettes all have quirks/identities that the contestant has to figure out by asking dating game-esque questions. I also had a student play Chuck Woolery and had some of the other students jump in and improv some ads during a "commercial break".
6) Wacky Dialogue (for lack of a better name): I would select three students, 2 of which had scripts from totally different plays. They would then act out a scene based on a scenario, I gave them. The catch was that the 2 students could only speak in lines from the scripts they had in hand. The other student was free to say whatever.
Those were the days! We had a lot of fun!
"You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering." --Harold Hill from The Music Man
Updated On: 2/17/06 at 02:24 PM