Sometimes in a show, you can be presented with bad suggestions from the audience – if you are lucky enough, you will get more then one suggestion so that you can do a scene with the one that sounds better or you feel is a better option, however, sometimes that sadly isn’t the case and you have to basically take the ‘best of a bad bunch’. There are training techniques that you can you in rehearsals and practise that prepare you for bad suggestions and how to deal with them / overcome them. Sometimes, it is not always the audience that are at fault – you could be presented with a weird direction in your scene by your partner and that can also create hiccups. So, here are a few exercises you can do to overcome these or get used to them.

Accepting EVERYTHING

In this warm up game you stand in a circle and you go round the circle and endow the person next to you. You tell the person that they have a physical trait and that person then has to accept who they are and build on that endowment.

You want to give the person something very crazy so that they have to justify it and make it a valid reason to accept who they are. So for example in a lesson where I was taught this someone got endowed that they were a bear, another had cream cheese hair and eye brows, I was really good at divorces (pick em, stick em then flick em…) etc etc. It was a good exercise to get into the mindset of accepting everything that is thrown at you.

Accepting Who You Are In A Scene 

The next important thing about a suggestion is to accept what you are given in a scene. To do this game have half of your group stand on one side of the room and the other on the side opposite.  The two at the top have to walk forward and endow / make a statement for the person facing them to accept and explain why the situation was the way it was or extend on what the person was saying.

The absolute awful 

Sometimes to deal with the not so bad suggestion you have to go in it and face the complete and utter crazy and try and deal with that. Once you have been able to cope with that sort of scenario then you are ready for anything! You can do this by being forced to create a scene with the most awful suggestions. This is to make us used to what happens if you are giving a really bad location and suggestion etc. For example, in the lesson i got taught this by @c3something we did this by having suggestions such as being bananas in the North Pole in a Tescos, or Unicorns playing gambling in Japan.