Here’s a fast-paced improv game that encourages creative thinking and imbues energy into the room. It’s ideal for those Monday morning meetings when everyone’s feeling sluggish, or as a warm-up exercise on a team-building retreat!
What Are You Doing revolves around miming – i.e. using gestures, body movements, and facial expressions to act something out. That’s one reason it’s so fun! It’s light-hearted, silly, and gets people moving.
How to play What are you doing?
To play, you get everyone to stand in a circle, then ask one person to imagine a certain action and start miming it. The action itself can be anything they want! Washing the dishes, taking the kids to school, throwing a baseball, brushing their hair, cleaning their teeth…the world is their oyster.
After a short while, someone else steps forward and asks, “What are you doing?”
The twist is that whoever’s miming must say a completely different action to the one they’re doing! Instead of cleaning their teeth, for example, they could say they’re putting their shoes on or amputating someone’s leg. Whoever stepped forward to ask what they were doing must then perform that action.
This process continues until everyone has had a turn miming. Try to keep the game moving and encourage people to be creative with the actions/responses.
Oh, and feel free to add another element to the game, whereby you decide who goes next. Rather than going around the circle or jumping in whenever they want, you could point at the next mime – or make eye contact with them.
Heads up, this game is best for smaller groups if you don’t have much time to spare. You want everyone to have a go miming an action, which can take a while when you have dozens of people on the team!
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