The Art of Dialogue. Jurij Alschitz
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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 you and your character always give birth to the questions. That’s an illusion. Questions are born of themselves.
The Question which comes at an unplanned time, not in the situation or place where people are prepared for it, gives rise to genuine shock. Suddenly!!! It appears unexpectedly and nobody can find anywhere to hide from it. Actors need to search for such questions, more than anything. These are the so-called event-Questions, questions which turn everything on its head. They live their own special life – they are born, they live and they die. I’m saying this so that the actor shouldn’t be too satisfied by the fact of the arrival of an important question, during an analysis; he is going to have to follow the whole journey of its life. Questions have their own complicated lives: some short, some long. The process of forming, and giving birth to, the question must become an important, composite part of the actor’s and director’s analysis of the whole dialogue. I personally like these explosion-like questions. Nobody is waiting something – and suddenly – an explosion. This is preceded by a long energetic tension, which creates the conditions for this bolt out of the blue. Such a question wakes up everyone and everything. It turns the dialogue on its head. We are speaking about a nice theme, eating an apple, talking to animals, nothing presages change and then – suddenly!!! An explosion-question – and everything changes. Like this ignition, from the outside – “Where are you?” – the Lord explodes the inner cosmos of Adam, destroying his original wholeness. An explosion is always effective but, at the same time, it’s important not to forget that the aim of such an explosion-question is not to destroy! We don’t need such a question in dialogue for that – it’s not in order to kill, overturn, conquer, confirm, subordinate, and so on. The destruction of the prepared, the about-turn, the explosion of the whole: these should be realised as a launch of energy for creation and rebirth. This is what is intended with the question; that’s what we need.
In a play, the dialogue begins from the question. That’s the way it is. But that does not mean you will always see it immediately in your role, in the text. Even there’s no question mark in the first line, or second or third, the actor still needs to hear it, and play it. There is always a question in the beginning, even if nobody has formulated it on paper. Notice that a question can stand in front of the door for a long time. The question might