I don't put warm-ups into categories in my head. I tag them like blog posts. Most-used tags: verbal, pattern, physical, reactive, silly, energy, group, individual.
I don't like rhyming warm-ups. But I remember when 1985 started doing Beastie Boys before shows, the shows got better, so I stopped worrying about it.
Monkeydick did Superheroes for a long time, and that always made me laugh. So did Categories. The best in when you are laughing during your warm-up! It doesn't always happen. Then years later Erik Tanouye told me Categories was stupid and I felt dumb.
Crazy 8s seems lame, but in classes it does seem to get people into a "ready to go" state.
Warm-ups are different with different groups. Stepfathers doesn't warm up all the time, but the most fun time warming-up with them was when we did "bippity-bippity-bop" which is so stupid it makes the Fred Schneider warmup look like an Escher drawing. The Fucking Kennedys doing Shay Shay Coola would probably look sad and painful. But Creep doing it? That could get a 14-week run at the Orpheum.
I first saw Shay Shay Coola with Bombardo and then 12K and thought it seemed super fun. Fun is good.
Were I on a team with 7 other Will Hineses, we would do a bunch of "me say word now you say word" type of warmups and then sit down and try to say which of us is most analogous to which character in Watchmen. Since we would all be clones, we would fight over who got to be Night Owl (II).
Lately I've come to think that the best warm-ups are ones that very quickly let the people say/do something to each other one at a time -- that that's the best way to practice the actual interaction of building a scene together on stage: ba-da-da, 3 line scenes, let's-point-and-make-lists, pass a character, pass a face.
My groups have always done whatever warmup the pushiest person wanted and just dealt with it. Sometimes I am that person.
