Emotional Chairs
Resources you will need:
Chairs
Blank Emotion Cards
Aim
This is a drama-based exercise designed to unravel the difficulties involved with understanding and interpreting emotions.
Overview
Everyone’s sense of feeling and emotion is different and relative, and people’s perceptions vary also. This activity will give young people the opportunity to explore these differences without needing an advanced level of English to do so.
Instructions
Discuss the idea of different emotions. Place cards on the floor describing different emotions. Begin with ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ and then stretch out to more difficult emotions (e.g. angry, upset, offended, content). This is an opportunity to improve English and literacy skills while discussing different interpretations of what these emotions mean, and how people show them.
Choose one of the cards and share the it with the group. Ask the whole group to form a circle and ask them all to close their eyes. Explain to the group that one person will be asked to show an emotion using their body language. Touch one member on the shoulder and show them one of the emotion cards. So for example, they are HAPPY. Now ask the group to discuss who they think has been shown the ‘happy’ card. Try this with more difficult cards. Discuss how people perceive those emotions differently. Some examples may be more subtle then others.
Next, have three chairs labelled with three emotions. For example, happy, sad and angry. Now sit in each chair and show how physicality changes. Now say one line ‘I’m happy for you!’ Say it happy when in the happy chair, sad in the sad chair and finally angry.
Allow each young person to do this one by one. Each person moves from chair to chair taking on the physicality and tone of the labelled chair. They repeat the same line with different emotions driving the words.
Discuss how different people may have different physicality for each chair. For example, your group might notice that sometimes anger can be hard to spot, or can be mistaken for another feeling. Change the cards on each chair.
Run scenes. Set a location and some characters and a situation in the three chairs and see how people respond for example 3 people on a busy bus, or at a party. They can move chairs throughout swapping to a different emotion at any point. The result will be both hilarious and educational but make sure you discuss with the wider group the different physicalisations used.
The workshop gets tied up with a discussion on how we can be aware of others emotional wellbeing and also how we can communicate our feelings through our bodies and voices.
Click images below to download Blank Emotion Cards:
