Musical statues

Musical statues is a party game traditionally played at children's birthday celebrations. It is understood to have originated in the United Kingdom and is often grouped with a set of related elimination games sometimes called the Jerusalem games, sharing their basic structure of removing players round by round until one remains. The game is closely related to musical chairs in mechanic: music plays while children move or dance, and when it stops each player must freeze in place like a statue, with anyone still moving eliminated from that round. The same game circulates under different regional names, appearing as freeze dance in the United States and as statue dance in the Philippines, showing how a shared elimination format has picked up different local names despite essentially identical rules of moving, stopping, and elimination.