The Art of Dialogue. Jurij Alschitz

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СКАЧАТЬ possible school for us actors. Therefore, when you are beginning to work on any form of dialogue, and their exist many and they are very different, remember the great philosopher who first revealed the beauty of Dialogue; remember his main principles of the construction of dialogue which he discovered, and you will be convinced that they can help you to resolve your most difficult tasks.

      And one further piece of advice – don’t forget that Dialogue arose in the heart of the young Greek democracy. Which means that Dialogue significantly helped to build free, democratic relations. It could be built on thorny competitiveness, hard battle, but anyway, it’s foundations were agreement between people. We be of one blood, thou and I! Never forget this. And try to start work on each dialogue from that perspective.

2 Plato (1994), Complete Works [Sobranie socinenija], Anonymous Prolegomena, vol. 4, p. 367. Moscow.

3 R. Müller: Stuttgart zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Stuttgart, 1988. pp. 37

4 Plato, Protagor. 1994, Complete Works [Sobranie socinenija], vol. 1. p. 418. Moscow.

5 Plato, Pir., 1993 Complete Works [Sobranie socinenija], vol. 2. p. 98. Moscow.

6 from Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann, 1933, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, published by Secker & Warburg, pp. 148-150. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

      3. LABYRINTH OF QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

      Around ten or more years ago, at one of my seminars in Sweden, which was not on the theme of dialogue, I said to an actor, during a discussion about one of the pieces of work presented, that his scene was not a dialogue but a simple exchange of questions and answers. I did not mean to offend him. But as a person with a university education who appeared to have very seriously studied ancient Greek culture, he was shocked and upset – “dialogue in ancient culture has always been understood as the special art of holding a conversation, asking questions and answering them. That’s how the dialectical method came about,” he said. “One person asks a question and the second person answers him.” I both did and didn’t agree with him. But I didn’t object to what he said because it wasn’t the theme of the lesson, I didn’t want to make a digression, well, and generally it was already late in the day to start a serious conversation. But, coming back to the hotel after the session, I thought that it was essential to continue the discussion which we had begun about the ancient Greek understanding of dialogue as the art of questions and answers. When I got into bed, by chance, I turned my attention to the Bible lying in the draw of the small table next to the bed. I began to leaf through it. And there I found the first line of the very first dialogue in the world. And I was very pleased, because that dialogue took place a very long time ago, even before the dawn of ancient Greek culture with its dialectics, before ancient Greece even existed. In brief, I had found a reply. I took the Bible to the next session and read the actors this line:

      God. “Where are you?”

      There it is – the beginning. I like this a lot. In my view, it’s a very sharp, painfully wounding and beautiful opening line. As elegant and piercing as my favourite weapon – the rapier, which I learnt as a child. But in this particular situation, the essence of this line was not the important thing, nor its penetrating depth nor even my childhood memories, but rather the fact that this first line of dialogue was a question. “Yes, the dialogue begins with a question,” I agreed with my opponent from yesterday, the following morning. “But dialogue does not begin from every question. It must be a special question. What sort of question?” I invited the actors to think about this theme. The discussion became very noisy, literally right away, and I didn’t have time to write everything down. There were so many different and so many interesting points of view. Someone compared the question with a razor which “slices with its sharp blade – and undoes everything hidden and firmly sewed into the adversary’s subconscious”. Someone said that a question is light. “Like a bright sunbeam on your eyes, it should interrupt a sweet dream and say – Get up!” They confirmed that a question should be an instantaneous, shocking blow. Others considered that “it should go unnoticed and enter inside the adversary bit by bit, like a slow-acting and paralysing poison”. I was interested in listening to everything they were suggesting. Then we went over to an analysis of the question which I had found in the Bible, “Where are you?” and we decided that the one who asked it, knew that an endless series of other questions stood behind it – “Who are you?” “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” “What are you looking for?” and so on. “So, the question can be an ­exploding bullet,” someone blurted out, “Its fragments live for a long time inside the person who was affected by them, and won’t give him a minute’s peace.” It was an interesting group and, in a Scandinavian way, was very poetically inclined towards Theatre. When the actors became a little clearer about what sort of special “questions” we were talking about, I closed our discussion and declared that it was time for a cigarette break. After the break, we began rehearsing scenes from Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, but that theme of the discussion had captivated the actors to such an extent that they continued with it during the rehearsal and finally decided to start the analysis of the famous questions in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue once more from the beginning. At the end of the seminar, to calm them down, I promised them that we would continue this theme again, at some point. But I never saw one of these actors again. That is just how it worked out.

      And now, more than ten years later, as I am researching dialogue, I remembered that discussion. I found the notes from it and thought for a long time by myself about the Question and its role in Dialogue. Today, I no longer think that the question is always a “bomb”, a “bullet”, a “mine”, “poison” or a “razor”. Before, these definitions pleased me with their attack, their sharpness, but not any more; I don’t like them now. I agree that, when beginning an analysis of dialogue, the actor and director must find the question which breaks the calm, but not only with the aim of breaking and destroying. We need the powerful energy of a question, first and foremost, so that something will grow out of it in the future. The question is the seed – and something should grow out of it. That’s what we need.

      Each dialogue incubates a powerful Question like a germ cell. We need to find it. It relates to each character, each actor and each person. This question is directed at you as actor, it is addressed to you as an individual, and that in turn provokes the character who you are playing. In a dialogue the question must be “distributed to all addresses”.

      But first the actor must find the question and define it. This is not easy at all, because the question can come under different names and in different masks. You might not even understand that it is this Question which will transform you or your Dialogue. It depends on your alertness, your experience, and your skill-level of analysis. You need training. For this, take dialogues by different authors and try to find the main question in each of those dialogues. You will find that the question can come too early in your dialogue when it is not yet your turn, according to your role. Or the role has already started but you are not prepared to articulate the question out loud. In this case, the question is present in the dialogue, just waiting for its entrance. It can also happen that the question appears later, meaning the answer was already played before the question was even articulated. Such a reversal between question and answer is always very interesting. Arrivals of the question “early” or “late” in the composition of a dialogue always create a playful and meaningful tension in the scene. Such a device protects the dialogue from the catechism of the question-and-answer pattern. The questions come and go, they can appear again and be repeated in other scenes, they can be split in two or three parts and so on, until they have been fully articulated. But note this, too: it is far from being the case that СКАЧАТЬ