Audience Warm-ups
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Description
This is a Game. It is in the following categories:
How it Works
Often an improvised show starts with an audience warm-up. Here are some suggestions:
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Do a Mexican wave (audience making fluent waves with their hands above their head).
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Have he pianist/keyboard man make all kinds of sounds and have the audience imitate them
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Ask the audience to stand up and do some physical warm-up. Have them shake their arms and legs.
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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
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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.
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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)
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Do a cheering competition between the men and the women.
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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.
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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.