Gibberish

How to Explain It

"From this moment, you may not speak English. Everything you need to communicate, communicate in gibberish. The words are nonsense. The meaning is real. Make yourself understood."

Gibberish is one of the most effective exercises for breaking performers' dependence on dialogue. Students who rely on verbal wit or clever writing discover that their strongest communication happens through their bodies and voices. The exercise rebalances the performer's toolkit.

Begin with paired exercises before moving to full scenes. Have two performers hold a gibberish conversation about a specific topic (directions to the store, an argument about housework) and ask the observing group to identify the topic. The accuracy of the group's guesses demonstrates how much nonverbal communication conveys.

The most common failure is performers abandoning emotional commitment when speaking gibberish. Without real words to anchor them, some performers become silly or disengaged. Coach for the same emotional investment they would bring to a scene in English. The gibberish is the language; the emotion is real.

Gibberish connects to Spolin's foundational principle that communication is a full-body activity. The exercise appears throughout her curriculum as a tool for developing what she calls "the intuitive," the performer's ability to communicate beyond the rational, verbal mind.

The gibberish must sound like a real language. Performers who repeat the same syllables or speak in a flat monotone undermine the exercise. Effective gibberish has the cadence, inflection, and emotional variation of genuine speech. The performer should believe they are communicating, and the commitment to that belief makes the nonsense readable.

Physical expression must carry the scene's content. Performers discover that their bodies communicate more clearly than they realized: pointing, shrugging, recoiling, embracing, and turning away all transmit story information. The exercise reveals physicality as the primary communication channel.

In Gibberish Translation, the comedy emerges from the gap between the gibberish speaker's apparent meaning and the translator's interpretation. The best translations listen to the emotional tone of the gibberish and then provide content that matches the emotion but surprises in its specifics.

Gibberish scenes work best when performers forget they are speaking nonsense. Scenes that play as comedy about gibberish (performers mugging at the audience about their inability to communicate) miss the exercise's point. The scene should play as a real scene in which the language happens to be unintelligible.