This is the first activity on migration and refugees produced by the Drama for Youth Work project. This activity can be used as a warming up. You can find more activities on migration and refugees here.

DURATION

10 minutes

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS

Any

MATERIALS

Large space without barriers

PREPARATION

No preparations are needed

LINK TO THE TOPIC

While this warm up activity has a rather loose link to the topic, it does in a way include a language confusion as the meanings of words are interchanged.

OBJECTIVES OF THE ACTIVITY

At the beginning of the workshop participants should get a feeling of the group, its members and the space with this activity.

DESCRIPTION

The participants moves through the space and are encouraged to neither move in circles nor following other people. After roughly a minute the facilitator presents the following commands: When they say “stop” the whole group has to stop immediately and when they say “walk” they should start walking again. Every minute or so, two new commands are presented: E.g. “jump” & “kneel” and “raise arms” & “turn around”. Later on, the facilitator tells the group that the commands from now on mean the opposite, for instance, when they say “walk” the group has to stop or when they say “kneel” the group has to jump.

REFLECTION

  • What did you recognize when walking through the space seeing all the others passing by?
  • How did you feel when words didn’t mean what you expected them to mean?