Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, it’s Les McGehee, back with you on Expert Village with my book, Plays Well With Others.
I have a guest with me today and we’re going to teach another game to you. This game is
going to be a basic application of a gibberish translation game; we’ll call it Interpreter.
This is Andy Crouch from the Hideout in Austin, Texas. The Hideout is the home of one of the
best improv scenes in the nation and if you’re in Austin you need to check it out. Go look
at their website, you can search for it, it’s the Hideout, in Austin and you’ll find all
kinds of stuff about it. Now Andy’s the manager and he’s also one of the best teachers
and I’m lucky enough to get him to do some shows with me too, but right now we’re going
to teach you this game called Interpreter. “Gibberish, babble, babble, more gibberish”,
what he’s talking about is, it’s this game Interpreter, is a game where you’re
going to be speaking in a foreign language. Now hopefully, you’ve watched the clip that
we did on gibberish speaking because this is going to involve gibberish speaking. Now
gibberish is kind of an unfair thing to call it, because we’re not just making noises.
When Andy just made that choice to speak that sort of fake language, that he just made up,
he didn’t tell me ahead of time what that was going to be. But we know that as improvisers
that if I listen carefully to him and if he makes some clear choices, I’ll hear the
choices that he makes and I’ll use so of those choices back to him. I’ll honor all
the information brought into that discussion so that it makes it sound like we’re speaking
the same language because I’m going to use pieces of what he used. Now in addition to
that, it will actually form its own language in some ways because some of those words will
end up taking on meetings, meanings as we work and so the improviser will have opportunities
to come up while they’re talking built on this whole process, building as it goes.