At Work with Gibberish

Stanislavski used to have his actors paraphrase the scene, to put it in their own words. It helped them personalise what the author had written. The trouble is that it’s not the character’s words that bring us to life because what they say isn’t really that important to actors. It IS really important to the audience, but to the actors. The words are gibberish, they’re lies and you don’t intend them and every attempt TO make them sound like you sincerely mean them results in insincerity of varying degrees.

So how to bring the page into being if not through the words of the character?

None of us speak but for a reason. We are intention, action and reaction, a very simple process. Something in us, some desire, some need sparks an intention, a desire to achieve something, to get something done. This intention bursts into life as actions we take, some of which come out as verbal communication. But the intention burns through every word.

To bring the words to life is your goal but to do that means leaving them alone, the words and lines have meaning of their own, forged by someone far better at that job than you.

That’s where Gibberish comes in, rather than personalising the words, we get behind the intention. In a Gibberish exercise, two actors have a single line of dialogue each, something useless because it refuses to mean anything like ‘one dot red dash’.

Now they attempt to achieve their Task, but not by trying to communicate something or transmit some emotion, not by trying to make this stupid rubbish phrase mean something to the actor but that they must DO something to the other actor.

As they work, the actors become aware that since the other actor’s words are meaningless, they only have their behaviour and tone to work from. Now their sensitivity to what the other actor is actually doing in each moment heightens, they are aware, and react not to what has just been said, but to what has been done to them.

The actors learn to pay less and less attention to the content meaning of the other actor’s utterances but to how they are bending those utterances to their purpose. Now a non-verbal ping ping occurs with both actors acting and react to the truth of each moment and the scripted words are enslaved to that purpose and not spoken earnestly to answer ‘correctly’ the previous line.

All cues are physical signs.

Sometimes the lines come out strangely, not how you would intend to say them, but entirely authentic nonetheless, appropriate to this moment because it was caused by the behaviour exhibited.

Once you see this exercise truly working, once you see it in action and the actors then moving into the scene and still doing the same thing, then, you witness the power of action and you will never be able to listen to another actor sincerely trying to mean their lines again.