Mandala Theatre Company – Creative Challenge 2
Movement warm-up to free the body and the creative mind Led by Akasha Daley with Anusha Abbas. This exercise will help you to get in touch with your body and your creativity as a way to easily devise or come up with your own physical movement motif. This is a great exercise for an actor, to become aware of their body and the connection to the ground. Then we will start to involve a small ball, you need a tennis ball, or you can even use a rolled-up pair of socks. The ball is going to act like your partner.
Step 1: We will start by lifting our arms in the air, whilst bending our knees swing our arms down to the floor. Try a range of different swings, this can be dropping all the way to the floor, jumping at the end of your swing or swinging with your arms to the side.
Step 2: Now take your ball and do the same swinging exercise with the ball in your hand, then try passing the ball between your hands as they swing to the top. Now try passing the ball by throwing it between your two hands.
Step 3: If you have a partner, you can practice throwing the ball between the two of you, if you don’t have a partner, try throwing the ball very high up in the air and catching it or doing a very little throw between your hands. Remember to keep your knees bent and bouncing.
Step 4: Now you can start exploring the room with the ball, practice throwing it and catching it in different ways, whilst moving through the space.
Step 5: Explore the ball with different parts of your body eg, your feet.
Step 6: Now we are going to take the ball away, but pretend it is still there, exploring the space around us with the ball.
Step 7: If there are certain movements you like, remember them for later.
Step 8: Put a few movements together with or without the ball to create a movement motif. .
Step 9: – Ask a carer to send us a recording of your movement motif for our gallery.
Have fun!
