A conversation game

Transcript of this video:

I ran a session earlier this week with some

of the students here on the subject

of bringing an improv insight to ordinary

and sometimes difficult conversations.

And we did another activity, which I really enjoyed.

I haven’t done it for a while.

We got two people to perform as little scene

and the scene consists of two lines each,

a very mundane dialogue.

It’s a scene set in a greengrocer’s

and it goes: “Good morning.

Good morning. Have you got any oranges? No, we’ve run out.”

So I got the two people to play the scene just as was,

and then I’ve got ’em to do it again

many different times, but each time I gave one

of them a little card with a side coach on it, asking ’em

to do something slightly different.

Some of the coaches were just physical:

tip your head slightly to one side, lean back a bit,

raise a single eyebrow.

Some were more kind

of felt: like there’s a stone in your shoe

or you urgently need to go to the loo.

And some were a bit more relational:

You really like the other person,

or the other person looks like someone from a wanted poster.

you saw this morning. Each time they played the scene,

that little tilt changed the whole scene.

The whole feeling of the scene, not just

for the player who’d got the coach,

but for the person responding to them.

And then the game was to ask the audience

what they thought the coaching tip was.

And although sometimes they kind of narrowed in on it,

often they came up with very different interpretations.

So, you know, in the scene where we asked someone

to lean back, it was, oh, well he’s really less engaged.

Oh, he’s quite aloof. Oh, he doesn’t like the other person.

And so it was a great exercise in seeing

how the tiniest shift in, if you like.

The starting conditions of the scene produces

very different kinds of drama

and crucially, I think different dramas

for different people in the audience.

And I love this exercise.

It was, first of all, it was very, very entertaining

and fun that never does any harm,

but also I think illustrates a quite profound point

that there’s so much more going on in our conversations than

the words we are saying in the, in the information,

if you like, that we are exchanging.

Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash