Activities whose main function is to get people to loosen up, to communicate with each other freely, to relax, to get excited or enthusiastic. Most often they are games, but they can also have thematic content.

Bad dancer

Sat, 03/01/2014 - 02:16 by matt noyes

Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band made a music video of her song "Bad Dancer" in which Ono and other celebrities dance badly and joyfully. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3mvEfON2CI) The idea of the song is that we should free ourselves of the burden of "being good" and embrace being bad at things, so as to do them freely.

This idea can be applied to any activity in which fear of poor performance prevents us from acting with freedom. For example, "Bad Presenter," "Bad Singer," "Bad Listener," "Bad Writer," "Bad Artist," "Bad Translator," "Bad Innovator," "Bad Activist," etc.

Personals

Wed, 10/02/2013 - 04:33 by matt noyes

Sometimes the most important part of a meeting or event is making contacts, networking. This activity uses the format of a personals ad to have people introduce themselves and quickly identify people they wish to get to know.

The format is simple. On an index card, people write:

  • Name:
  • Attributes:*
  • Turn-ons: **
  • Turn-offs: **
  • Seeking:***

    *This means relevant information about you for the purposes of this event, e.g., in a meeting of labor activists, your union affiliation or other organization, etc. People should feel free to play with this, though.

Instant Playback

Tue, 05/07/2013 - 04:25 by matt noyes

Idea for an activity:

Like the mirror game, where you mimic the other person's movements in real time, in this game one person speaks, one sentence at a time, and the listener repeats verbatim what the speaker said, as close to simultaneously as possible.

Maybe start with the mirror game, as a warm-up, then introduce speech. (One might also show the great mirror sequence in Duck Soup.)

The idea is to make the speaker, listener, and referee more attentive to the exact way they are expressing themselves.

I heard you fired your boss...

Tue, 04/16/2013 - 04:43 by matt noyes

This game is a variation on the "Yes, and yay" improvisation game I learned at Kani Club. The purpose is to be playful and free with language, using a standard form of interaction creatively. Like most games, it can be thematic or simply fanciful. (In any case, it needs to be fanciful.) Finding the creativity and play in each other is an important gain for people working together in groups. Just as we need to re-invent the wheel periodically when it comes to our strategy, we also need to re-discover each other from time to time.

The flow:

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