Rice
Like lentils and seeds, rice has a wonderful, almost liquid quality which participants enjoy exploring with all their senses. In large quantities it can be accessed by a whole group at the same time. Being white it glows brightly in the light and stands out against a black cloth background, which makes it easier to gather when finished. It also looks amazing when lit with different colours. If you don’t have coloured lights, it is easy to dye the grains with brightly coloured ready-mix paint in zippy bags.
Watch the fluid nature of rice as it streams and pours from one container to another, or onto the floor.
Rice
Feel it run through fingers and toes or bury
hands and feet, watching the rice move as fingers and toes wriggle and appear.
Rice
Pour into different sounding
containers and onto instruments, adding aural effects for those with sight
impairment. Sprinkle into tambours - rolling it around it
sounds like rain, shake and shuffle it, create rhythms, tap underneath and see
it jump and fly into the air.
Rice
Use within a theme, for example, combine with fish lures,
noodles and chopsticks to create a multisensory Japanese restaurant, blue for a starry night, or reinforce colours of a theme i.e. French
flag - red, white and blue.
Revealing rice
through a swinging tube has proved a great way of focusing attention and
creating patterns. A good sized rice swinger can be made from a heavy duty
cardboard tube about 60cm long and 12cm in diameter. Tape a disc of cardboard
over one end and bore a hole in the centre about 1cm in diameter. Block the
hole with a cut down cork or dowel.
Hang the other end of the swinger from as high a point as you can with nylon cord or cotton washing line. Fill with rice, pull back, remove the cork and let go! Hung over a black cloth it produces a continuous series of loops and you can easily gather the rice afterwards. Placed over tambours, chimes or singing bowls the rice creates both sound and motion. The swinger also works well with lentils and seeds.
