This week was another round of auditions but we won’t go into that instead we are going to focus on the games that we played and scenarios in them. We started as always with our classic warm ups and tried two new ones that are for focus and concentration. The first one is called Where is My Son where someone is in the middle of the circle and go up to someone and say or shout in any way that you feel the sentence – Where is My Son? If they laugh or anyone else does then you have to run around the circle. It was a fun game to play as it is all about making someone laugh and some of them were absolutely great! We also played the Samurai warm up game but it is something we have all done before but don’t do a lot.

This week we played a lot of the same games as last week however this week the suggestions I got were a lot more exciting so that was really good fun – although Mike ended up having to do a tax related one like I did last year so that was pretty funny.

This week I came up with the scenarios again for two line vocab and this time I decided to make one of them very topical and relevant to make it more realistic as to what we may get in a show but more about that later in the case study section.

We also played another game this week that we had not played before and I do not know what the real name is but I am going to call it Gibberish Party Quirks. Basically it is the same game but instead of being able to talk you can only speak in gibberish the whole time. It is quite satisfying to watch as an audience member and it can be fun and frustrating to play. When James had to guess he could not get what the characters or quirks were so we had to all pretend to be lots of characters for him to guess. I wanted to be the role of guessing because usually i find it very hard to work out who people are but I found it a lot easier combining the two formats – who knew!

Case Study – Love Island

It’s not every day that I would be writing about a reality television show as a case study – especially something like Love Island as it is a show I really am not  fan of, however it is funny how these things happen.

As part of our rehearsal this week we played the two line vocab game where you are limited to what you are allowed to say and only can talk with the sentences you are given. We always prepare things such as suggestions before we come to rehearsal and I came up with this weeks scenarios for this game.

When we do shows, the audience can sometimes ask for requests that are relevant to what is happening in the news or the media so I wanted to put this theory to the test in one of our games to see how we would react to it. I wrote up a scenario that is very similar to what happens in the show and also slang that they use on a regular basis.

It was very fun to see the scenario play out – firstly because it was all the guys pretending to be model like girls that appear in the show and secondly because it worked really well which was a nice surprise.

Doing exercises like that is really helpful as audiences usually want to see things are relevant at the time and testing out to see if something that is the most talked about show can work in an improv environment is really good to see and understand what works and what would need to develop if we did do that in the future.