SilentShowSetups

Setups:

Some ideas:

• Change: A lifetime in two minutes.
• Dubbing (in gibberish.)
• Twin pillars?
• Gamey: Emotional zones: Emotional noises, hokey mimage (or emotion), interpretive dance.
• Gamey: Statue garden (No, I don't know exactly what I mean by this. What does it say to you? Maybe like Freeze Tag but silent.)
• Change: A journey to seek enlightenment
• Tormented by gremlins (frustrated at reaching a goal, other players sneak in as gremlins and mess with the protagonist. Let protagonist set up environment and goal and have gremlins enter and cause mischief.)
• Energy: Dance diamond
• Gibberish talk show with audience member that speaks intelligibly.
• Split screen
• Love on the trading floor (romance between stock traders in the pit with all their freaky hand signals)
• Humming argument.
• Happy feet! Angry hands! (express emotion with specific body parts)
• Draw your environment (sheets of white paper taped to the back wall; players have crayons or markers). Used extensively in Ernie Kovacs' Eugene

• Soundscape background

  • Three or four people do a steady soundscape on one of the mikes. The scene on-stage has to use that music to establish mood.

Some old things we can dust off:

• Try to do a common household activity; fail over and over
• Chain murder
• Plain ol' vanilla scene work
• Funny/scary/sexy in gibberish

Okay, now I agree that we should not over-rely on these, since ideally we're starting from what we like best about the show and coming up with new material from there -- instead of doing "the Rookie show with a gimmick" (c. f. my complaints about ImProp). But they are all solid standbys that we should use judiciously.

Warmups

• Pass the clap

• Pass the mimed object

  1. Get in a circle
  2. Person #1 mimes an object
  3. ... and passes to person #2
  4. person #2 interacts with object...
  5. and transforms it into something else....
  6. goto 3
• Walk around the room; eye contact without laughing

• Everyone establish an environment

  • It might be fun to use some stuff like this to open the show...

• A body language thing

  1. Everybody stands around
  2. Each person silently picks one person in the room
  3. "Go!"
  4. Everybody walks around the room
  5. As you walk, constantly try to imitate the walk of the person you picked.