The Art of Dialogue. Jurij Alschitz
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dress itself correctly before it can decide to come in and introduce itself. It is the job of the actor to listen for it when it’s still outside the door, to see it before it comes in, not only if it’s standing right in front of you. That’s too late. Then, only an elementary reaction will occur, a hasty judgement, but not the process of a genuine meeting. For me dialogues, which are full of such quick-fire judgements and reactions, are on the lowest rung of acting. “Suddenly!” and “Explosion!” do not mean you need to scream or duck under the table.
On Stage, the dialogue begins from the question. That’s the way it is. But, hang on, your partner asks the fundamental question and you don’t even hear it or feel it. Does that mean it’s not a question? Well, sometimes the question is nothing but words from your partner, just lines of text, and so you don’t recognise it. The actor asking the question must, first of all, hear the question which he’s asking deeply inside himself, and understand its depth and perspective. Why should he ask if it’s not important to him? If the person asking does not highly value what he is asking, if the question is only for the other but not for himself, then this Question will never be uncovered.
I value questions – those wise, old beings which were born even before the plays. These are the timeless questions. They were alive before the dialogue and the play, and they have a long life ahead of them, even after the dialogue. The actor must learn, while still in the analysis, to hear them and differentiate them from ephemeral questions. A long-borne question, which has aged like a fine wine, has a different, particular weight, a different energy. This kind of question decides for itself when to appear, before you can decide whether to ask it now or later. It’s the same way a child – not the doctor or midwife – decides when to be born onto god’s earth.
So look how beautiful it sounds when scenes, plays or dialogues begin with such a powerful question as, for example, in Plato:
“Welcome, Ion. From where do you wander in this moment? I assume, from your house of Ephesus?” 7
or in Shakespeare:
“When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” 8
In Pushkin:
“What do you think? Could I be recognised?” 9
Or in Chekhov
“Why are you always in black?” 10
The fact that it’s not a common question but a question which sets in motion the machine of dialogue means you will always hear it and feel it like an impulsive, germinating burst of energy. It is always experienced vividly, almost painfully. Disturbingly and joyfully, it includes you in the dialogue. Everything is in it – in the first question, just as the first step of a marathon contains the energy for the whole forty two kilometers and one hundred and ninety five meters.
In dialogue, there can be arsonist-questions which, like sparks, ignite first one question then another, until the whole theme is alight, the whole Person. The questions themselves aren’t powerful, not dangerous individually, as it were; they are just matches. Perhaps one does not even notice them. But together, – they give birth to flames. It is exactly this creative flame, which begins the process of the birth of the Individual, Adam. Notice how – with his quasi-innocent question “Where are you?” – God changes his conception of the living being-Person, created out of the dust of the earth, into a Person-individual, created out of questions and answers. Questions and answers – that is the main material from which the Person-individual is created: they torture us, fill us with hopelessness, reassure us, please and kill us; other questions are born – in brief, they make us living personalities. We were not simply thrown out of Heaven. No, we were condemned to a constant search for answers and the birth of new questions which are looking for their answers. An endless inner dialogue was started in us, with a constant insane search for answers in the labyrinth of questions. What is it? Why is this? What is it good for? To make you search. To search for your times, your place and your world. And most importantly to search for yourself, your Personality, your Wholeness. In life, it is this unending search for wholeness which makes a person into an individual. In theatre, it is this search which makes a character into a personnage. And one must understand the main movement of a dialogue as a search.
There is rarely only one question in dialogue. Normally there are many questions, and they often crash down on you one after the other, from different sides, like a hail storm from on high. So many questions but you don’t have time to answer? Well, you don’t need to. It’s not possible to predict their direction or to hide from them? Then, don’t do that. It’s frightening and at the same time, for some reason, also joyful? It’s an honest state of being. It is a crisis. It is a chaos from which everything wants to be born. If I see more and more questions turning up in a dialogue, then I know that the moment of crisis and revelation is getting closer. It’s for that reason you need the hail attack. Don’t be afraid. Only once you start to accept your defencelessness against these questions, as an essential condition for the moment of revelation, only then can you understand which direction you need to go in and why. And only then, somewhere deep down and very far away, an answer is born inside or outside of you.
For me, a reply is not yet the end of the question. Even with the reply – it’s not yet time to let the curtain down. It only seems as if – with a reply – one dialogue ends and you need search for the beginning of another. I don’t think that’s it. Perhaps there is basically only one dialogue? … which lives in us for the whole play, the whole role, our whole lives? That’s why I like long answers, long-lasting dialogues, even if they are interrupted for some time, but which don’t come to an end. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko once spent sixteen hours in dialogue about the working principles of an Artistic theatre. The result? This marathon-dialogue gave birth to the great phenomenon of theatre culture, the Moscow Arts Theatre, the MChAT. That is dialogue. It’s the same in Dostoevsky’s novels: long questions and long replies. Remarkable.
In plays, the dialogues are usually short, what a pity. Everything is unbelievably squeezed together. I feel this, and then I try to lengthen them out. One needs to give them time to live and be sorted through, and to compare the options, and time to search, to make mistakes and to doubt. Or I combine a few dialogues into one. I will speak about this more in the later chapter on “spherical dialogues” and introduce an exercise for this subject. Never mind that it’s in pieces, strewn throughout the play in chunks but, nevertheless, it’s one dialogue. This can happen: a dialogue began then suddenly got up and left, came back in the second act when nobody was expecting it, continued and unnoticed went off into town, returned after three years, in the winter, and again – the same dialogue. One dialogue, only one, a whole. I think that you can only reveal something genuinely unusual for yourself – the main and most important thing – in the unending development of the meaning in one and the same dialogue. Not in fits and starts, not in pieces, but whole.
There is a constant dialogue both in life and on stage. It goes over from one role to the other, from one performance to another of your performances. Look at the play, at your role, at all of your performed and produced plays, as at one journey. Not fractured but constant. Everything changes – different themes arise, all the possible situations; all the stops flash by, partners not resembling one another, sections of plays resonate, languages mix together; familiar and unfamiliar faces appear and disappear but in fact, it’s just one journey, one and the same, one and the same endless dialogue.
Of course, there are also short dialogues. And they can also be beautiful. Very beautiful. Small, but brilliant and quick dialogues. But nevertheless, I love long ones. It’s strange. When I was young, there was a lot of time but I loved short meetings then. And now time presses but I prefer longer ones. And I ask myself: “why?”
It happens, that a dialogue moves, and moves, floating along … how nice that you don’t want to think about how it will end.
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