The Art of Dialogue

This book is dedicated to my students and friends who have helped me to create and run the European Association for Theatre Culture which will turn fifteen years old this year.

My heartfeld thanks.

Jurij Alschitz

The Art of Dialogue

Translated by Noah Birksted-Breen

Edited by Christine Schmalor

ars incognita

Berlin 2010

Good Morning

This book is, to some extent, a dialogue. A dialogue with dialogue, a dialogue with my theatre colleagues and a dialogue with myself. In any case, that’s what I felt it to be as I was writing it. It’s hard to write by yourself. But it’s better, more free, to be in a dialogue with someone else, and in that way, dialogue moves not along previously constructed traks or in one direction, but it lives easily and naturally. You can talk about one thing, then go on to another, deny that which you thought before or say the thing which only just came into your head. It’s good to have revelations together, in dialogue. If I discover something alone, then where’s the pleasure in it?! But together - it’s more joyful. I want to tell you that Dialogue itself is not alone. There are many Dialogues. They are like the branches of one large tree, very similar to one another but, in fact, they are very different. And here am I, researching dialogues of all possible theatrical directions, different schools and traditions, and I have come to the conclusion that although there are shared roots, one trunk from which the majority of dialogues have developed and are developing, nevertheless, there was not and is not a single method or set of rules, established once and for all, for the creation of dialogue. So there. Personally it makes me happy, since it gives me the freedom and the possibility of making my own division of dialogues into different types, and researching those which are the most interesting to me. Freedom in research is the most important thing.

I can’t say that in this book I will talk only about contemporary types of dialogues or about my most recent experiments. Of course, they interest me a lot but classical ­dialogues of world drama, their founding principles, rules and methods of their construction are also uniquely beautiful and interesting. They all proved their artistic quality a long time ago; you could say, they passed the test of Time. They should not be cut off like dried leaves. They are far from dead. I agree that, at times, they seem old-fashioned, wordy, but believe me it is worth paying attention to them and their magic will shine through. Think how many inexplicable feelings and emotions are evoked when you happen to hear the sound of an old grandfather clock. It’s as if time goes by the same as always but also somehow differently. And if you ever happen to wind the crank on your grandmother’s sewing machine, I assure you, you will receive genuine aesthetic pleasure. It’s the same with old-fashioned dialogues. Try to play the dialogue from the good old plays by the same rules by which they were created, and you will not only discover the playwright but also the whole era. You will feel satisfaction. Of course, it will require no small amount patience from you but you will be rewarded artistically. It’s important. I’m certain that all forms of so-called “old” classic dialogues will be developed much further, or at least, strongly influence the appearance of new forms of dialogue. I also don’t doubt that the prospect of their development in contemporary theatre is not in conflict with other dialogues but in accordance with them, you could even say – there will be a melting of forms. Only a dialogue between different Dialogues will define the development of a future theatrical Dialogue. The question is elsewhere – are contemporary actors ready to hold such a complicated, multi-layered dialogue, a dialogue which consists of so many styles? Will they easily move from Shakespeare’s dialogue to Wilde, from Shakespeare to Beckett and be able to creatively combine them together?

I think they will be able to. But on one condition. If they open the concept of Dialogue for themselves. I repeat openly now, at the start of the book: there is no point assimilating exercises and different technical devices into your acting arsenal without your own understanding of what dia­logue is. Nothing good will come of that. Memorise this at the outset – dialogue is not just a method of communi­cating on stage, it’s Theatre. My own research in the field of theatre history, let’s assume it’s not even the most profound, has shown that each theatrical direction, and each theatrical generation, differed from the previous one with its own particular understanding of stage dialogue. I’d go so far as to say almost all great actors, directors and playwrights, even within one generation, offered their own special construction of dialogue, their own understanding of its essence, aims and meaning. The secret of their success was that they could hear “their own” dialogue, the dialogue of “their own” times and the dialogue of “their own” Theatre. If you have “your own” Theatre, you will also have “your own” dialogue – that’s my main discovery. With this very discovery in mind, I want to repeat to you – my theatre colleagues, to actors and directors, who have played hundreds of dialogues on stage and to those who are only just beginning to gain experience, do not hurry to grab some ready-made recipes from this book and to get an answer to the question of how to construct a dialogue. First and foremost, you need no answers, but questions. It is better to start from a question.

First question:

How do you personally see dialogue?

This is an important and fundamental question which, beyond structural significance and the issue of meaning, touches on much broader concepts. It elicits such questions as, for example: What exactly is “your” Theatre? What constitutes your individuality as an Artist? and other such crucial themes. There’s no need to fear these questions, you can answer them for yourself; you can get it wrong and then correct yourself. That’s normal. Answer as simply as possible: how do you hear dialogue? How do you experience it? How do you see its meaning for yourself? Of course, many exercises from the chapter on training will help you. You will learn, for example, how you can tap out dialogue with your hands, or how to meaningfully draw it on paper. But to repeat, first and foremost, it’s important to have your own feeling, a personal hearing and an artistic taste, of dialogue. Don’t be embarrassed, have a go. So, for example, a bit further down, I will present ideas about my model of dialogue as a centaur. Maybe to some people this will seem strange, even questionable, but it helps me to work. When I go to rehearsals, I always have – albeit obscure, indistinctive – my own concept of dialogue in mind. I try to see it or hear it. Even in my dreams, I listen to its whispers and screams, I see human pairs sitting packed together in a corner or wandering around aimlessly. This is “my” dialogue for today, and that’s what is important to me. But I never fix its image, I am free and I can change it if I like.

So, in another chapter of this book, you will be introduced to my feelings, ideas and one extensive exercise with which I myself don’t always agree, and which I don’t yet know exactly how to realise in my work with actors. But for today, I like them, they seem useful to me, and I willingly share them with you. And so, it’s possible that they will push you towards the birth of your image of dialogue, towards a particular path of work with it. And this is good. In Theatre, you need to communicate and exchange ideas, even if they are a long way from completion. This is a living dialogue. I think you need this, not only on stage, but also in Theatre itself. It’s much better this way, both for communication, and for the knowledge of our profession. When everyone already knows everything, then there’s no dialogue, nor will there ever be… and Theatre will become a boring, simplistic know-it-all. That’s why I hope that this kind of free dialogue between us on the pages of this book will help you to formulate your own understanding of Dialogue. This is what you need, first and foremost. Just don’t relax and think that “your” understanding of dialogue, and its image, will come to you once and for all. This is just your first visit. Have your dialogue with Dialogue indefinitely. And boldly go into dialogue with each person who you think may allow you to develop your own image of Dialogue.

1. MY DIALOGUE

I imagine Dialogue as a real and, at the same time, irreal being. This is not a contradiction. Over the last years, I have been interacting with him in this way; and this interaction helps me in my work. I listen to him and see him. I feel him. I chat with him. I know what he likes and what annoys him. It’s important for him to know what I want from him, and it’s important for me to understand what he expects from me. So, over the last few years, my image of dialogue has gradually formed and unexpectedly taken on the image 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. A moment, an explosion and you are no longer here and now, but in another dimension. This is how my dialogue looks to me. Since time immemorial, Art, with its diverse methods, de­monstrates the ability of human fantasy to create unbelievable creations – not subservient to the human mind – out of parts which cannot possibly exist together by the logic of reality. Furthermore, we can note not only people’s ability but also their passionate, and at times inexplicable, wish to unite and create what does not exist and what cannot exist. I’m certain that much more of this kind of passionate striving is needed from the actors, when holding a dialogue – to unite, to re-imagine, in order to make the miraculous.

Of course, we are people. It’s difficult for us, on the basis of our micro-knowledge of psychology, to imagine the life of centaurs, satyrs, mermaids, griffins, Harpies, minotaurs, and many other beautiful creatures. It’s really difficult for us to imagine what intensive dialogue goes on inside them, between one part of the being and the other. But it goes on, and very intensively. Look carefully: inside the Centaur, there is the constant stamping and jumping of dialogue between man and animal, knowledge and intuition, culture and wildness. The Centaur can manage all types of gait, which means that all types of movement must exist in Dialogue. It has its pirouettes, cantering, gallop and so on. Can you see before your eyes, how, in such a dialogue the human is leading, but now the bird’s nature takes over, and suddenly the snake appears but now the lion is roaring? This dual, and constantly shifting, nature of such mythological beings is universal. They have a special mental structure, a special dialogical way of thinking. The creative, shared way of thinking between two – this is a special method of existence. That is what’s important! This is the very quality which should be manifest in the actor in the process of a dialogue. To arrive there, we’ll need to dedicate a whole series of exercises to this shared way of thinking and joint creativity.

Now let’s go on… Studying the private life of my favourite centaurs, I have become convinced that there is no confrontation in the phenomenon of the centaur’s life. And this made me happy. It is not a conflictual being, in spite of the severity of its disposition. In the centaur, both of his composite parts strive for harmony. It is predicated on the fact that, as in a dialogue, two different natures, not two opposing facts, are uniting. Person - horse, actor - role, reality - fantasy. These combinations do not suppose a battle of sides, in a dialogue, with the necessary or desired victory of one over the other. Because the victory or defeat of one of these natures, ends the life of the other, and that means, it ends the very meaning of the idea of a dialogical whole, it destroys dialogue. This fully coincides with the theory of the Unity of the world. Everything is mutually linked and whole. I will talk about this below. So, anyway, I realised that dialogue is in no way synonymous with a conflictual dialectic. It is, of course, similar, but in any case it’s different. The main thing is, I saw in my centaur-dialogue, that there is no battle in it, no aggression. And this became, for me, the main rule of working with dialogue.

So that’s what I can say in brief about “my” dialogue.

My dialogue is a centaur because a centaur is the image and model of conjoined life.

My dialogue is a delicate and happy combination of un-combinable lives.

My dialogue is the elegant art of thinking together and jointly revealing the new.

My dialogue is, like the centaur, strong and full of powerful energy, shaped by two opposing natures.

My dialogue is the striving for an unlimited space of the metaphysical world.

My dialogue is a constructive collaboration, an artistic creation, but never an aggressive conflict.

Now you should answer for yourself – which image does your dialogue have? Don’t rush. Your answer is there ahead of you. Discuss it with me. Write down all your thoughts and ideas. And only after doing that, move on to the second question.

1 Ariosto, L., Orlando Furioso. Translation from the Italian by William Stuart Rose (1996). Stanza L2.

Available at: www.gutenberg.net

Second question:

What type of dialogue is the playwright proposing?

For this, specific knowledge of the different types of dialogue are needed. You have found out about some of them already, and you will find out about others from this book and I hope it will help you a bit. But mainly, as I said above, try to find this out for yourself. Do not look for ready-made ­answers; ask yourself questions. How, and from what moment or word, does the playwright start the dialogue? How does the playwright develop it? What changes in the dialogue – where, when? Who holds the dialogue here, in this part, and now who, in this other part? What stages of development does the dialogue go through? What does the playwright lead the dialogue towards?

Still at first glance, even before going deeper into the play’s content, it’s clear when a great playwright is writing dialogue and when it’s a bad playwright. The bad one does it this way: question-answer, question-answer. The good playwright does it differently: question… then text about something completely different, then a reply but that’s already on another page. So, this is quality dialogue. But if the dialogue is built like steps, one after the other, then in this primitive composition, the dialogue will crawl like a snail. Then, all of the transitions, all of the answers to the questions, can be guessed beforehand. Then, there is no space, no space for playfulness, no space for ideas, no space for the theme. There will be no creativity and no revelations will take place. You will reach the end of the thought or the end of the text, comfortably, without hurrying, and that’s it – good night. Sleep well. No magic. The dialogue needs not only to walk but to run… well, and even to jump two or three steps at a time like a naughty schoolboy. It’s like in chess – you’ll never achieve anything with a combination of two or three moves, you need to sketch out a plan ten to twelve moves ahead. So if you come across a two or three-move dialogue, turn away from it, don’t waste your time working on it; it is, as a general rule, an imitation, not a dialogue.