Warm-up exercises

However experienced the students are, it is always advisable to use some warm-up games and exercises to enable them to adjust to the demands of practical session spent thinking on their feet. If students are not used to a practical approach then warming up is vital.

There are many warm up games and exercises detailed elsewhere in Stagework , for example see those in the Beasts and Beauties: Stories to stage workshop .

Here is a warm-up game we used for this workshop.

Bless you sister

The Bless you sister warm-up is a fun (and useful) exercise because it helps create focus and concentration and involves the whole group. Begin by having everyone standing in a circle facing inwards. At a signal from you one person starts the game by walking solemnly across the circle to face another person whom s/he greets by bowing and saying the words “I bless you sister (or brother)” and then giving that person a funny name – any name – e.g. “I bless you Sister Longlegs” or “I bless you Brother bountiful". The object of the game is to play it without laughing; any player who does laugh is ‘out’ and has to sit down. Continue until just two players remain.

Community is a warm word (like toast) and usually conjures up positive images of cooperation and a sense of belonging. Strong communities have clear ways of identifying themselves whether by codes of behaviour or by dress and sometimes, as was the case in rural Massachusetts in the late seventeenth century, by both. Communities can be defined by race, sexual orientation, faith, geography, or a mix of all or none of these. Individuals may belong to more than one community and sometimes to none. The paradox is that the warmth and pleasure we associate with belonging to a community is that the membership of some people invariably involves the exclusion of others. Those who fail or decline for whatever reason to subscribe to the community’s way of understanding the world and the codes it devises to live together in it, are excluded as outsiders. In The Crucible Tituba is an outsider because of her race, John Proctor is also an outsider because of his unwillingness to subscribe to the fundamentalist principles that bind this closed community together.