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A new Spanish improv comedy group debuts on Saturday evening in San Antonio.
When Ignacio Valdez, Frankie Benavides and Angela Mora realized there was a strong need for Spanish-speaking performers to have their own space to perform in their native language, they created an improv group.
They named it S.O.C.K.S., which when saying the individual letters sounds close to a Spanish phrase ‘Eso sí que es.’
Valdez was also inspired after attending many improv shows around the state. He noticed the Spanish speaking artists would do something interesting when they stepped onto the stage.
“I noticed that they would almost freeze up when it came time to English, but in Spanish they were so funny. Like, the jokes came easier to them,” Valdez said. “So it was just at first it's, 'hey, let's just get together and why don't we just try to play and then we'll just add people as they become available?' ”
Valdez, 54, started in improv in 2018. “I did not think improv was something that was accessible to me, " he admitted. A trip to Austin changed that.
“There's a group in Austin at the Hideout that do improv with students that have special needs or are neuroatypical,” Valdez said. “I'm a special education teacher, and we went to Austin to learn how to do some of these games. As the students would do these games, they would then work on things like eye contact, turn, taking communication, being supportive. Dropping something when it doesn't go your way and pivoting to somebody else's way to support them. So that's kind of how it started.”
It was encouragement from his boss that got him to take some acting classes. “And then when I took classes and I finished, she was like, 'you have to audition for a show.' I was like, 'I don't want to perform.' And I totally fell in love with it.”
When he was on stage, Valdez noticed how his brain transitioned from Spanish to English.
“I noticed that my brain works a little differently. Like I feel sometimes in English, I try to be witty or clever, and one of the tenets of improv is to not preload your thoughts. Really just be in the moment and see whatever comes naturally within reason,” Valdez said. “In Spanish, what I noticed was that my brain just seemed to make those connections a lot quicker.”
He felt his Spanish improv class has succeeded so far.
“It's been nice to find a community that feels supported. One of the things that I see when we go into other spaces and we get to do jams, especially for our players who are non-English speakers, you know, they're learning English, they struggle a little bit with references or slang, They don't pick up the joke as easily, but you get them to do Spanish improv and then that stuff just comes so easily to them,” Valdez explained.
The name S.O.C.K.S. seemed appropriate to him. “Directly translated it could be ‘that is it’ or maybe something like ‘it is what it is,’ " Valdez explained.
“The phrase, for me, comes from a 'joke that I remember my uncle told me a long time ago,” he added. “I was improving in English, and he asked me ‘how do you say calcetines en japonés?’ I gave up, and he then said, 'Eso sí que es,' My brain hears the phrase, and I didn't get it, so then he said it in an English accent and while writing out the letters s-o-c-k-s, and it clicked for me.”
Valdez hopes for audience participation during the shows. “We did do a Spanish improv show at Comedy Sports a few months back, and it was so interesting to see the audience, who had never really been to an improv show, were so well behaved and just kind of sat there and weren't really sure what to make of it. Whereas if you go to comedy sports any other night, people are yelling out suggestions and they're really, really part of the show. They're very much invested."
He had high hopes for the future. “My hope is that maybe, you know, we get to go into some of the areas where, you know, improv is not necessarily something that people have thought of or accessible to them,” Valdez explained. “I would hope that we are doing this and that some kid out there or some communities see it and say, 'hey, that's something that I want to do.'”
S.O.C.K.S. debuts at the Overtime Theater at 8:00 p.m. on Saturday.
