An exercise with a lot of variations. The core is as follows. The players stand in a circle. One player starts with passing the clap to one of their neighbours: they turn to their neighbour, look at them, and clap their hands. The neighbour then turns to the next person in the circle and passes the clap. This way the clap travels through the circle. Try to keep a steady rhythm. Instead of clapping, the player can also say “whoosh” to their neighbour. The whoosh is like a ball of energy.
The exercise gets more difficult when you allow the players to pass the clap forward or back. This way the clap can change directions. It gets even more difficult if the clap is allowed to cross the circle. Here it is very important that the passer focusses clearly on the receiver (eye contact).
- Passing the clap forwards stays the same but changing direction happens by blocking it: the receiver makes a blocking gesture and says “boing”. The clap can cross the circle by pointing a ‘gun’ (hand gesture) at someone on the opposite side of the circle and shouting “bang”. This can perhaps devolve into happy almost-death-scenes and increasingly heavy ammunition.
- The receiver points themself at someone at the opposite side of the circle and says “en garde!”. Thereafter follows a sword duel accompanied by the loud clashing of swords, in which both players pass each other and take each other’s place. The clap then continues from the receiver.
- Now the receiver has to clap their hands at the same time as the passer. Each player now claps twice: once when receiving and once when passing. In this variation good aim is essential.
- Together with the clapping the receiver should say a word. The relation between the words can be associative (see associating), or the words must form a story, or you let everyone say their own name, etc.
- The receiver puts their hands up like they are about to ring a big bell. Everyone immediately follows this example and the whole circle together rings the bell once with a loud ‘boing’ or ‘bong bong’. Then the clap is passed normally.
- The receiver shouts “high five!”, at which point everyone walks to the middle of the circle and tries to touch as many hands as possible.
- The receiver shouts “freak out!” in a weird voice, after which everyone skips hysterically through each other after which everyone ends up in a different place in the circle. The counterpart of this is the ‘freak in!’ in which everyone panically to themselves shuffles to another spot in the circle.
- The clap is passed in the same direction every time and the rhythm keeps getting faster or slower. Try to get the tempo change to be as smooth as possible.
The receiver shouts “subway!” and the next five players jump to let the subway pass. After the fifth player the clap or whoosh continues. The same thing can be done with an airplane. An imaginary paper airplane is thrown by the receiver and gazed upon by the next five players. A variation to this is the airplane hijacking: one of the five players gazing at the airplane grabs the air and calls the name of a terrorist group. After catching they pass the clap or whoosh to the next player.