Where are we?

This is a Game. It is in the following categories:

• Performance

• Warm-up

Audience Warm-ups

How it Works

Often an improvised show starts with an audience warm-up. Here are some suggestions:

• Do a Mexican wave (audience making fluent waves with their hands above their head).
• Have he pianist/keyboard man make all kinds of sounds and have the audience imitate them
• Ask the audience to stand up and do some physical warm-up. Have them shake their arms and legs.
• Have the audience introduce themselves to strangers, tell a secret their spouse/partner doesn't know about to a stranger, have them hug a stranger
• Do an interview with the audience, where the MC is one character (say, a headmaster) and all of the audience another (say a naughty child). The audience needs to reply to the interview in one voice (all saying the same at the same time - see One Mouth ). Not an easy one, and if the audience does not feel like doing this it really sucks. When it works it's a real thrill.
• divide the audience in 3 or 4 groups, and give each group a sound. Rehearse the sound with each group. Then tell a silly story, and use these sounds as sound effects. (We saw a pretty gruesome one in which one group was a car (roar), another a dog (bark) and the third group got a kind of splashing sound. The poor dog got run over by the car... not exactly nice but the audience had fun with it)
• Do a cheering competition between the men and the women.
• Rehearse different kinds of applause (from the 'polite' applause when a scene sucks, over an 'ooh' applause for a touching scene, to a wild roar for a hilarious scene). Have them rehearse voting for a team by cheering the team name (if that's your format). Rehearse a 'Die' ( see Die ) if i you're going to be playing scenes in which the audience can decide to throw a player out of the game.
• Give the men and the women a different sound and play with that. Tell them they are members of a wild tribe, the women go 'Ugh' when you raise your left hand and the man go 'Hagawaga' when you raise your right hand.

If you're looking for berries in the forest, and you're stupid enough to discover a supermarket with berries on sale, it should at least be staffed with witches --- Keith Johnstone