The Art of Dialogue. Jurij Alschitz
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of a living metaphysical being. I have named him a centaur. The name is not new, but precise.
The centaur is half-man, half-horse. It is a dialogical relationship. I think you will agree that our very profession of acting is also extremely dialogical. However you look at it, the actor constantly finds himself in a dialogical relationship with someone or something: with a text, with a director, a partner, a spectator, with himself and so on. The most famous relationship of our profession was defined by Stanislavsky, namely the one of Actor-Role. This relationship is least understood but the most interesting, because what is present in this relationship is, what one could call, the combination of two un-combinable natures: dialogue of the world of fantasy, and invention, and the world of real life, everyday life. A centaur. An inauthentic truth. But this untruth is an artistic truth, that is what’s important! Actors, as a general rule, strive towards it although by no means everyone all the time is able to answer the question “why”? What are you striving for? But those who can, know that they are striving for the zone of the inexplicable and the unknowable. So, in Aristophane’s tale, people cut in half by Zeus are inexplicably striving towards each other. They know and don’t know where it will lead them, but anyway they rush towards the union, hoping to reveal something which they mysteriously longed for. Later I will speak more concretely about this tale in Plato’s Symposium. So there is this very similar and inexplicable, yet very clear and powerful inner striving in the partners to enter into a dialogue.
“Can you strive, through the whole course of a dialogue, towards something unknown and inexplicable?”, you may ask.
“Not only can you, but you need to. Because art is much more of a path into the region of the inexplicable than into the region of the explicable. In a dialogue, both participants of the dialogue are equally drawn in that direction, understanding that they need to break into the zone of the unexplored together. Take the dialogue ‘I - Hamlet’ by way of example of the relationship ‘actor-role’. So, an authentic dialogue between them, an artistic breakthrough and a revelation of the unknown as a result of this break-through, can only occur in the situation where ‘I’ needs ‘Hamlet’ as much as ‘Hamlet’ needs ‘I’. This is the law of dialogue always. The Horse needs the Man exactly as the Man needs the Horse.”
“But these are two realities. ‘I’ is always I, the ‘Role’ is the role and the ‘Character’ is always the character. The Person belongs to the real world, but the Role is from the invented world,” you object. “They cannot be united.”
“They can,” I answer you. “But not the way this happens in real life. Theatre is Theatre. Here, it is not so much the laws of everyday truth which hold sway, as much as the laws of the metaphysical world, the world of art. In Theatre, these two realities join together legally. Then, the miracle arises, the new reality arrives, as does the unknown dual-being and the dialogical relationship: actor-role.
“Of course, any life, which comes from two united lives, is – in and of itself – a miracle. A child is formed of two lives, two lives have joined into one and what emerges is one body, one own soul, one own set of habits, et cetera.”
“That’s two in one. But a centaur isn’t quite like that. It has two lives joined together but it still has two lives. Two systems, two worlds, which are joined and not joined. They live together but also separately. Being in agreement with each other, but also opposing each other, they have a constant dialogue. Dialogue – is the principle of their co-existence. That’s what intrigued me about the centaur-dialogue as a way of living.”
Not only in Theatre, but also in life, everything can be joined, fused and turned into a miracle-unity. Certain conditions are needed: a vacuum, a low or high temperature, a high speed, weightlessness and so on, but everything can be joined by modern technology. But in everyday life these miracle-unities exist as well; still, we do not wish to add them to the system of our habitual knowledge. People immediately call them: delirium, madness, the wild, the absurd, and so on. So, one has united with another, but they shouldn’t have united, according to our logic… so that means it’s useless, rubbish! It’s as if we swear at them but, at the same time, we love them. These absurdities are accepted by us, they live beside us, you could say that they are our neighbours, and we frequently, albeit cautiously, enter into contact with them. They always attract our attention and they turn out by a strange logic to be more interesting and valuable than all of that which is around us and exists coherently and explicably. Why? Well, because there is an inexplicable life in these strange, alogical conjoined beings, these miraculous beings. There is something new and mysterious in them, for us. So, mystery is always present in dialogue. A dialogue should be thought of, by actors, as the magic of unity. Their task is to join and merge together words, phrases, images, themes in dialogue, in order to reveal something unbelievable. This is not a simple addition, but rather a sort of multiplication of dissimilar, heterogenous elements. Broken pieces of a mirror and the sound of a saxophone. Telephone and lobster. Is it not possible to combine them? Of course it is, and they go together very well. But it happens not on the basis of – what would be for us – comprehensible and customary arithmetic but according to the laws of magical chemistry. No revelation comes from “two times two equal four”. No energy is created. No artistic explosion will happen. There needs to be a collision like “Man + Horse”. So then we get the fantastical creature, the subversion of the natural order, the miracle – the centaur.
These newly formed miraculous beings are a lot more interesting to us than a horse grazing in a meadow or a person eating a sandwich. A person’s just a person, a horse is just a horse. There needs to be something literally fantastic. Only this can provoke an explosion of our ideas and feelings. Such is dialogue, it always strives to jump from reality to the realm of fantasy. It, like the centaur, tries to break out of the captivity of everyday truth. There, everything is clear, stuffy, and it can’t gallop as freely as it would like. It’s with us, only in physical terms; but it’s not with us. By its nature, it is simultaneously physical and metaphysical. It is a real creation but it is also irreal. It is these combinations which make it artistic. I believe that each centaur-dialogue should be like that, – artistic and metaphysical. It always feels trapped when it’s in the written framework of the author or an allotted timeframe of the play.
I can find confirmation of my image of the centaur-dialogue in any form of art. In ancient mythology from all around the world, there are images of similarly strange creatures, which manifest two different beings within themselves - sphinxes, mermaids, chimeras, angels, devils, and finally centaurs. All of these are the results of dialogical unions of different worlds which cannot, at first glance, be unified – animals, birds, people, fish and even plants. If you open Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings you will see how many possible variations of these incredible monstrous-beautiful, attractive-repulsive miraculous dialogue-beings exist in the world of fantasy. We’ve always been afraid but also fascinated by them, the way that people have always trembled in front of – and celebrated – unexplained or divine appearances. This is just one of the examples which Borges gives, using an octave from one of the longest Europe epics of the sixteen century Orlando Furioso by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto.
And sees the host and all his family,
Where, one to door, and one to window slips,
With eyes upturned and gazing at the sky,
As if to witness comet or eclipse.
And there the lady views, with wondering eye,
What she had scarce believed from other’s lips,
A feathered courser, sailing through the rack,
Who bore an armed knight upon his back. 1
We find images of creatures with combined origins not only in ancient literature but also in modern art: lion-men, cupboard-people, bird-women, elephants walking on mosquito legs. All of these – my favourite examples of miracle-beings by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali – are my models and examples of dialogue. Look at their striking work: a multitude of many irreal combined dialogue-creatures! This is how, taking their lead, I combine elements of dialogue so that what appears is an exit into irreality.