Friday, November 23, 2007

Acting Games You Can Teach Your Students

Learning the art of acting can be both difficult and enjoyable. If you are an acting instructor, you need to teach people how to find something within themselves that can drive every single emotion and motivation available. You need to teach people how to discipline themselves so that they express the right emotions for a particular scene, nothing more, and nothing less. You need to teach people how to act, not overact or under-act.

All the same, acting can be enjoyable. As an actor, you can meet new friends in acting workshops, learn a lot of new things every time you learn new scenes, and discover things about yourself that you didn’t know you could do. Acting can be even more fun to learn if you are engaged in acting games; so if you are planning to hold an acting workshop, take a look at these possible games for your students to learn how to act.

- Charades can be a great way to allow your students to know how difficult acting is. The best acting is done without words, so if you can discipline your body and make precise, recognizable movements, then you are on your first step to acting well. Play charades with your students using different themes: you can do statesmen or famous celebrities, so that your students can learn about characters and their habits; or you can do actions or jobs so that students know about details of movement.

- Play guess the emotions and use only your eyes. Because many great actors can act up a storm using only their eyes, you can train your students to not only use their eyes in acting, but to recognize emotions by examining peoples eyes. Pair up your students, and give one of the pair a card containing an emotion, such as anger, amusement, indifference, and the like.

The first to guess the other persons emotions wins the game. A variation on this is played using only your lips, which can be even more difficult. Try it on your students, and you all might end up laughing!

- Have you ever tried gazing into another persons eyes for a long time, without laughing? Teach your students how to control their emotions and gain focus by pairing up your students, and letting them look into each others eyes or stare at each other. The pair that can look at each other for the longest time without making any reaction wins the game.

- Have your students sing a happy song without breaking into a smile. The one who controls his or her emotions the longest also wins the game.

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