Synonyms
Clap Focus. Pass Clap.
Introduction
This warm up is to get players listening, responding and reacting without thinking. Everyone gets into a large circle.
Description
One player in the circle chooses a random player across from them in the circle. They signal the selected player by making eye contact, lunging into the circle and clapping “at them.” It should be really obvious who is has been given the clap. The selected player accepts the offer of the clap and repeats the process with a different player in the circle. This process continues until there are claps flying back and forth across the circle.
Ideally there will be a constant clapping noise. Eventually the players will be so attentive and so quick to respond it sounds like one person clapping rapidly. This warm-up usually ends when people’s hand are denuded of flesh.
One could insert literally any gesture in place of clapping. I have seen nods, toe flicks, middle fingers, hellos, salutes, etc. The two most common versions of this warm up are clap focus and snap focus.
This warm up helps players develop taking focus, and the immediate rewards of making eye contact to connect with other players. On a rudimentary level this is a listening exercise as well.
- Distractions – those players that are not clapping are snapping their fingers.
- No Clap – the players do not clap but merely point across the circle to the other player. To make the the warm up a bit more challenging remove any physical cues and move back and forth across the circles with only eye contact.
- Telepathy – Eyes are closed and players signal each other using their inherent psionic power.
Variations
Clap Focus – Same warm up but snapping fingers instead of clapping.
Credits
Camp camp summer cramp.