In our Tuesday rehearsal we talked in ‚Gibberish’, a non-sense language. So we were making noises and pretending having normal conversations. Obviously nobody understood each other, but we still had this feeling of knowing what the other person is saying (although sometimes it wasn’t what the person was saying at all).
When we were talking in Gibberish we used, like in normal English speaking, a lot of gestures and mime and we realised that gestures have very distinctive meanings to them, varying from culture to culture. The use of gestures together with intonation, loudness and quality of speech gave us this partly misleading feeling of understanding each other. The words we are actually saying in a conversation are only a small part of it, it almost matters more how we say them.
I had many teachers comparing language to dance which I think makes sense as we mostly want to communicate with dance. It matters not which step you do, but it matters how you do the step.
Laura Stierli
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