Theater Games

These are participation games!

We also have other fun activities for you at the bottom of our Terms page!

Your job as an actor is to entertain the audience. To do this it takes practice. There are many different ways to practice. Such as repeating your lines over and over again, writing your lines down, and theater games, which in our opinion is much more fun. Theater games help an actor get into to character and just get their creative juices flowing. Let's try some!

Now you are the actor and here are just some of the theater games for you to try.

Pantomime or mime is acting without using your voice. This is a very good way to learn to exaggerate your body movements. Here are some tips to how you can make your pantomiming the best it can be.

 1. Keep it simple- In Pantomime the storyline must be simple for the audience to understand it. A complicated plot is also hard to act.

2. Tell a story- In making up a storyline, actors must think in terms of an initial situation (beginning), difficulties arise from that situation (middle), and a solution to those problems are found (ending).

3. Be Great!- In pantomime, difficulties and solutions can be less realistic, more creative, and more fantastic than those in a realistic improvisation with dialogue(spoken words). It is easy and entertaining to present through mime.

 

Here are some examples for you to practice your new miming skills (remember it takes patience to get pantomiming just right).

- Playing a baseball position

- Cooking something

- Searching for water in the desert

- Changing a flat tire

- Skiing

- Learning to swim

- Walking through water, snow, mud, glue, or any other element

- Being trapped in a box

- Putting groceries away

- Folding laundry

- taking a shower

 

A great pantomiming game is charades. To play this game you must have two teams with two or more people on each team. Each team needs to write the names of a book, famous person, song, and/or movie on slips of paper. You then take one of the other teams' paper and act out what is written on it without speaking or making sound. You have three minutes to try and get your team to say what is written on the piece of paper. You write down the time that your team guessed correctly. In the end add all your teams times together. The team with the lowest time wins.

 

 

Mirroring is a great way to "try on" different actions. First stand directly across from another person. Next, decide whether you or your partner will be the mirror. If you are, then your partner will do the actions and you will copy them and vise- versa. Now comes the tricky part, you have to do exactly what your partner does at the same time he or she does it. To do this you must be able to sense your partner's next move.

 

Here are some mirroring actions to try (large movements are easy to mirror):

- move your hands in large circles

- move from side to side and up and down.

- knocking on a door

- combing your hair

- climbing a ladder

- dancing

- walking a tightrope

- brushing your teeth

It is also fun to try expressions! Using only your face show:

- happiness

- sadness

- worry

- fear

- anger

- surprise

- hurt

- anxiousness

- mischievousness

- weariness

 

 

 

Here is a fun improvisational game:

 

This is a great game to play in a large group. Be as creative as you can! First of all, have everyone write down a person, either a famous person or the occupation of a person (Examples: super model or John Elway). Make sure everyone will know who the person is. Second, write down a place, either a famous place or a general place. (Examples: Golden Gate Bridge or a football game) Third, write an action (Example: selling life insurance). Then separate the slips of paper into three separate containers or piles. Next, have a group of about three people draw a slip of paper from each containers or pile. Whatever slips of paper you draw, you must act out what is on the slips of paper for the other group of people to guess what you are doing . Most likely you will get three words that have nothing to do with each other, but this will stretch your creativity, and the ones who are guessing.

Younger children could use simpler words that they are sure to understand.

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