Activities

DE-MECHANISATION

Number of participants

5 to 25 participants

Objectives

● To foster attention and go beyond automatic movements and ways of thinking, increasing spontaneity and improvisation
● To celebrate mistakes: value each person as a resource and mistakes as learning opportunities

Where does the activity take place within the process (beginning, middle, end)

Beginning

Duration

15 minutes

Material needed

Preparation

Prepare the room/space so that it is as spacious as it can be, without obstacles.

Step by step description

1. Ask participants to walk through the space, trying different speeds, occupying all the corners of the space.

2. Instruct participants that whenever you say STOP participants should stop walking and when you say WALK participants should resume walking. Do this for 30 seconds.

3. Now instruct participants that you will switch the instruction so that STOP will mean walk and WALK will mean stop and don’t move. Try doing this for a minute, playing with the speed, the sound and intention of your voice to confuse participants.

4. Then introduce two other concepts: UP means to put the arms up to the sky and DOWN to put them towards the floor; Practice for 1 minute and remind participants that the previous instructions (WALK and STOP) are still valid.

5. Then reverse the concepts: UP now means to put the hands towards the floor or even bend and DOWN means to put the arms towards the sky; Practise it for several minutes together with WALK and STOP which remain reversed

6. Introduce the final ones: NAME (which means for everyone to say their name out loud) and APPLAUSE (which means for everyone to clap once). Practice for a minute with the rest of the reversed concepts.

7. Finally, reverse the last ones: when you say NAME it will mean for participants to clap once and when you say APPLAUSE it means for participants to say their names out loud.

8. Practise all instructions for a while until participants get them almost right each time.

Closing up

You can close the activity with the following questions to reflect:

● How was it?
● Was it easy or difficult?
● Why do you think we do this exercise?

Resources

The de-mechanisation is a technique from the Theatre of the Oppressed and its goal is to start de-mechanising from the automatically learnt and reproduced habits (such as walking, moving, etc, but also thinking or reproducing in an automatic way some ideas or speeches). This is a starting point to critically reflect on some subjects and freely explore one’s creativity.
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Comments / hints for facilitators

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