Warm Ups and Exercises

The warm ups and exercises we played with our friends from certitude have been handpicked to suit their abilities and some were even used for our show. I present you with a list of the exercises:

Freeze, Clap, Jump.
We walk around the space and listen our for Jack's commands. When he says "jump", you jump. When he says "clap", you clap. When he says "freeze", you freeze and remain frozen until he tells you to go. When we were all getting the hang of it and more into the game, Jack would change the rules and make us clap when he says jump and jump when he says clap or freeze when he says go and go when he says freeze. The people who got confused or slacked were out. This was a good game to get everyone's awareness boosted up and we were all pretty exited when it was getting narrowed down. This is fun as a warm up but I don't think an audience would find it fun to watch.

Musical statues
This game is known worldwide but a recap of the rules: Everyone stands up and dances to the music. When the music stops, you freeze and if you move, you're out. The final two faced a dance off or we sat and waited. The dancing part was something everybody was able to do, but the freezing bit was difficult for some of the adults. Lisa couldn't stay still or quiet when the music stopped as I don't think she understood that part of it, so one of the carers danced with her and told her when to stand still, but she still carried on dancing. Our friends from certitude absolutely loved this game, it was probably their favourite. To shake things up, sometimes we would have to dance like an animal or object.

Send a movement
This game required us to stand in a circle and we had to send a movement across the circle to one person. They would do the movement back to you (retrieving your movement) and send a new movement across the circle. This was a simple game and everyone understood it.

Mirroring
For this game we were in a circle again and one person was selected to start doing a movement and everyone else would copy/mirror them. Our pianist would play some music appropriate to the movements for example, a light tune to delicate movements. You had to be slow with the movements and not move around too much because people had to follow you. Some of our friends from certitude loved this one, especially Matthew because he is very fond of dancing, he loves it, and when he was doing his movements you could see the concentration in his face. He loved this exercise and showing everyone what he could do.

Tribes
For this exercise we got into groups of about five to six and moved around the space as different clumps of tribes or different types of animals and we all had to follow the leader who would change every so often so that we could all have a turn at leading. This was fun because leading something is something that a few of our friends from certitude love to do, especially Ciaran. The only problem with this game was Ian keeping up with everyone. Ian was in my tribe and they were all enjoying it very much but they were using a lot of arm movements, moving around quite quickly and accidentally forgot that Ian was physically unable to do this. Ian has a buggy that he has to use in order to get around easily and he couldn't do much of the movements, but when he became the leader it made him very happy and he slowed down his walking pace and occasionally moved his arm around.