1. After general introductions, WARM UPS.

• a) stand up, making a big circle. Breathe and shake. Shake foot and ankle. Swing whole leg (let weight of leg swing it). Sway hips, not moving torso. Arm stretched out to wall with hand at right angle, then turns head and neck in opposite direction. Same with other arm. Neck circles. Big arm movements, windmill, each arm going in different direction. Face movements. Massaging jaw and temple. Make a big face and a small face. Make a big face at someone across the room and a small face at someone else. Put a sound to the face. All over jump and shake.
• b) Sound ball.
  Make a new circle. Make eye contact with someone else. Then throw them an imaginary ball, while making a sound. They catch it, make eye contact with someone else and throw the ball while making a sound.
  Throw two balls.
• c) In a new circle, say your name to the person next to you while looking them in the eye.
• d) Word association. In a new circle, say a word. Person next to you turns quickly to the person next to them and says a word associated. DON’T THINK. KEEP UP RHYTHM.
  

Elicit what is “high status” and “low status”. It may mean social status, but not necessarily. A king can be of low status and a beggar of high status. It’s to do with inner confidence, how you feel about yourself and your place in the world around you. People’s status can change according to the situation they find themselves in. Status is at the core of nearly all drama.

• a) Tell students to walk around the room with “high” status. Have them notice how they hold their head, their spine, how their clothes feel, how their feet move, how they breathe, whether they move quickly or slowly, evenly, or with jerks. Now have them walk with low status.
  Afterwards, discuss (briefly) what they noticed about high and low status.
  
• b) Have students choose either high or low status and walk around the room. When they cross someone’s path, they should acknowledge, with a gesture or a sound, or both, the other person, according to their status. Have them repeat the exercise, reversing their status.
  Note: all of the exs so far should be done fairly rapidly, i.e., no more than a few minutes of walking for each status.
  Sensing status
  
• c) I go around the group and whisper a status from 1 to 10, in each student’s ear. (It’s important that other students can’t hear the status I’m allocating.) Invite the group to sit down. Place a chair in the centre of the room. Each student in turn has to walk to the chair, sit down, and say: “I’m. . .. “ and give their name, either their real name, or an imaginary one. Afterwards, other students have to guess their status. Invite discussion after each student’s turn about details of movement, speed, voice, eye contact etc.
  Time (group of 15): about 30mins.
  Improvising a scene
  
• d) Divide students into groups of four. Give them each a status from 1 to 4, 4 being very high status (not the 4 of the previous ex., which was fairly low) and 1 low status. It is important that only each student knows his status, not the other members of his/her group, nor anyone else.
  
• e) Set the situation. Three students share a flat. They want to rent a room to a new tenant and have put an advertisement in a newspaper. The fourth student will arrive as the potential tenant.
  
• f) Explain to the students that they don’t prepare the scene. This is improvisation. Each student has to be very aware of the others, and act according to their status.
  Have students act out the scene. Afterwards, other students guess the status of each of the actors.
  Increasing receptivity to your partner
  
• g) Take a pack of playing cards with the jokers removed. Explain that ace is very low status, 1 is one up, and highest is King. Ask for two volunteers. Give them each a card, which they show to the group but do not look at themselves. They hold the card on their forehead. They act out a dialogue in which each one will respond to their partner’s status, and, through their interaction, each partner will ascertain his/her own status.
  Repeat the ex. with different pairs.
  Time for each scene: no more than 5 mns.
  Note: This ex. usually generates a lot of humour, and shows up a lot of “traps” that beginner improvisers fall into, for ex:  A (who sees that B is a N° 1): You snivelling little worm, fetch me a beer.
  B: (who sees that A is a N° 2, and anyway doesn’t want to be bossed around) says: “Don’t talk to me like that. Get it yourself.”
  B has failed to “pick up” on A’s clue that he is the lowest of the low.
  Highlight that the point of improvisation is to be absolutely alert to what your partner is doing, and respond to it.

Follow up
         Discuss with students how they felt about acting out different statuses.
Point out that nearly all drama is based on status: it may be two cowboys in a duel. Both are very high status. One may decide to sacrifice his “hero” status for some higher motive (children, his beloved). He appears to have lowered his status is the eyes of the world, but to the spectator, his status is higher because he has put love before glory (see the film High Noon).
Look at the plays of Pinter – all of them around status. Or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”(Albee) where the status shifts all the time. Or King Lear, who gains in status as he loses external power, but develops self-knowledge.

Explain the basic rule of improvisation: you never block your partner, you accept whatever is “thrown” at you. It’s called “accepting the offer”.
Never worry about being silly, or about trying to be too clever.

I ask for a volunteer, and whisper what he/she should say to me:
“Look, Granny, I’ve brought you this for your 90th birthday”.
He gives me the line out loud.
I reply: “I’m not your granny, I’m not 90, and it’s not my birthday.”
This is a very clear example of “blocking the offer”. Carry on with the scene. Your poor volunteer will invariably dry up, look at you in desperation, and say “What now?”
Now we do the dialogue again, but this time I become an old woman, and we produce a little scene, accepting whatever is given to us by our partner.

Students stand in two lines, facing each other in pairs. The first pair of students take a step towards each other. The student in line A should say something to his partner. Ex: “Oh my God, what happened to your nose?” His partner should react, accepting whatever situation his partner has thrown at him. Encourage students to invent interesting situations, not “I’d like a size 14 dress, please.” Or “Hi, how are you?” which, at this beginner stage, leads to some long and boring dialogues.
Each pair of students has their turn, then the lines are reversed, with students in line B creating the opening line of dialogue.
Draw students’ attention to when they have “built” on each others’ suggestions, and when they have blocked them. A classic example of “blocking”:
“Oh, you look so depressed.”
“Yes, it’s this awful rain that gets me down.”
“But the sun’s shining!”
The scene lacks credibility, the audience loses interest, and the actors are left with a feeling of non-cooperation.
Explain that “accepting the offer” is the basis for all improvisation. Note: This does not mean that, if Student A says: “Come with me to tranvestite disco tonight” Student B has to agree. He can reject the idea violently. In his rejection, he has accepted the situation set up by his partner.

Follow-up writting example:
Take any of the above mini-dialogues and have students, either individually or in pairs, extend the dialogue on the page, not forgetting the status of each of their characters.

Students in a semi-circle. Ask for two volunteers. One student starts up the situation, as in the previous ex. Encourage dramatic offers or, in "shy" classes (do these exist in Romania???) give them a strong opening line.

Students improvise until the teacher says "freeze", (choose an interesting moment, expressed either facially or physically). The pair has to hold the position. Replace the student who did not initaite the dialogue with another student and, on "Unfreeze", the newcomer comes up with an opening line relating to an entirely different situation.

Note: This is obviously very good for developing receptivity. Students cannot prepare anything in advance, and have to "accept the offer".

Have students sit close together, on the floor, in a circle. One student begins “once upon a time”, and each student adds a word. Keep up a tempo.
Do the exercise again, but this time, if a student misses a beat, he is out of the game. This leaves two students making up a story, under pressure!
(Variant: same idea but with longer sentences, adding “and because of that”, “and because of that”, “and because of that”, “and finally. . .”)

Note:
I had actually planned a three-day workshop, with Days 2 and 3 mirroring Day 1, using Creative Writing exercises as the inspiration for theatre and film dialogue, prose and poetry. As it turned out, I was asked to do only Theatre Improvisation, and to repeat the same course over three days. As teachers haven’t done the other two days’ exs, I feel a description of them would be long, require over-explanation, and be meaningless. The spin offs between the written word and theatre are obviously endless!