On Monday night we started delivering drama and movement workshops with the young people at Valley Theatre. Each Monday for six weeks we’ll be working together to develop a secret finale performance – here’s the first weeks warm up…

We began with a few games to get to know each other. After a few raucous rounds of Grandma’s Footsteps and a ruthless game of Mafia (when some seriously cold-blooded tactics were used!) we started on some improvisation.
We played the game Party Quirks. The group divided into two teams. The first team nominated a host for the party while the rest of the team members were allocated a specific trait or quirk that they needed to develop during the course of the ‘party’. The first group had a riotous party that included a boy who believed he was a pirate, a girl who was slowly turning into a cat and a boy who thought he was being followed by MI5! As the improvisations escalated over the duration of the party, hilarity ensued with the cat-girl chasing mice and the MI5 person hiding behind everyone and everything! The second group had guests who included a boy who thought he was a bumble bee, the Queen and Pokemon!

It’s up to the host, sometimes with the help of the team who are watching, to guess what each person’s quirk is. Some are more obvious than others; it was quite easy to guess the cat, it was trickier to work out why someone kept asking if the building was secure and if there were CCTV cameras around (the MI5 person)! The group has excellent improvising skills and were really able develop interesting and funny characters from a very simple premise. We’ll be building on these skills over the coming weeks as we start to develop ‘pop up’ performances and installations for the event. We’re looking forward to it!