Description

4 players play a scene, in which one of the players gets excluded.

Notes

This is a group exercise, in the sense that players should be sensing where the majority of the group is going (see Alien Tiger Cow ).

Tell players not to be afraid of `being nasty` - be extreme in your exclusion (that makes it easier, also for the player that is excluded - see Mr. Nice Guy ). Whoever gets excluded should gladly accept this and react accordingly.

Excluded players can go to extremes to be re-included - hilariously funny if even this is thoroughly ignored by the others.

Variations

Let the exclusion evolve; allow a player that got excluded to get 2 others to join him and exclude the fourth one. This only works if the excluded player first allows herself to be excluded (a little Chivalry here).

Also known as Alliances. . This game was originally created as a pattern game for long form shows at the Theatresports London Impro Lab in the late 1980`s. The whole point of the game is NOT to actively try and exclude anyone. The exclusion of one player should happen as a result of the other players making alliances with one another. If you don`t do this the scene doesn`t form very good patterns and the players get too competitive. You also miss the slow, sliding status drops and the desperate attempts to hook into an existing alliance, that happen when a player is starting to nrealize that they are being excluded.

A good way to start this game would be:

• Start in a black-out seated round a table
• While the lights are still down the entire ensemble starts to laugh (as if someone has just told the punchline to a hilarious joke)
• The lights slowly fade up as the cast`s laughter winds down and the alliances begin to form
• By the end of the scene, which climaxes in a final, dramatic exclusion, we usually end up with four to six threads and a clear protagonist

Big thanks to Alan Marriott of Crunchy Frog Collective and Grand Theft Impro (London, England) for the additional info on Alliances.