The Art of Dialogue

Don’t you agree – that’s another originating source of ­energy of Dialogue – the crazy hunger for wholeness. It’s ­beautiful! Who can say it better than Plato, who let ­Aristophanes tell this myth?! Dialogue – is this meeting between two separated halves… of one from the other: Romeo and Juliet, Masha and Vershinin, Estragon and Pozzo. They have been separated for hundreds of years and just now, at fate’s will, under our gaze, they are meeting and recognising each other as their half. The period of loneliness was compressed like a spring – that’s energy! and now it is beginning to work. That’s the spring of dialogue. This period of separation is over. Everything which happened to me is mine, but is also yours, ours. It is not disappearing anywhere but is poured into the shared foundations of the dialogue. In ­Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph and His Brothers, there is a description of the first meeting of Jacob and Rachel – they recognise each other immediately, at first sight, as well as their whole history, everything which was and everything which will be. They enter into a conversation, not understanding the language spoken by the person in front of them, as if they are continuing a dialogue begun by them long, long ago.

This is the EXERCISE for actors, this is the task – to begin a dialogue on stage in this way. As if without beginning, without a first line, but as if continuing a conversation which began a hundred years ago, as if you are participants of one whole which was separated infinitely long ago.

It’s that simple – one character and another character; they have so many differences, so many subjects for debate, in brief, there’s plenty of material for a living dialogue. But let’s look at them in a different way. Imagine that a hundred thousand years ago they came out of one place, breathed in one air, spoke in one language, moreover – they were one whole being and they were separated. Now, hundreds of years have passed, each one has had their own life, separate from the other, and now they meet. It seems as if there is nothing shared between them, no shared language unites them, no worldview, no faith, nothing. But they know by some scent, sound, feeling, sub-subconscious, that they are parts of one whole, that only together will they create an authentic whole being. What is that? What is the meeting with your second half? What exactly is wholeness? All wholeness of individuality, which before seemed to us to be final, suddenly appears only as part of a something new, unknown. And now you feel some obscure, but strong attraction, a premonition of a unique dialogical contact leading you to a new Unity. In that way, people remember their kinship with the cosmos. There are no facts and therefore it’s not just human memory. It is non-human memory. It is no memory at all, but a metaphysi­cal attraction. That’s energy! Metaphysical energy is always present in dialogue. How little we actors think about this but we want to play dialogue well. Rarely do we reminisce about our involvement in the Absolute.

Look at the scene when Rachel meets Jacob in Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph and His Brothers. Please excuse me for jumping from Plato to the twentieth century. But this scene is so beautiful and it will explain everything to you better than I, or even, Plato could.

Thus first he beheld her, his heart’s destiny, his soul’s bride, for whose lovely eyes he was to serve fourteen years, the mother sheep of lamb (…)

“Here am I,” said she; like a short-sighted person she contracted her eyes, but then lifted her brows in surprise and delight as she added: “Lo, a stranger!” (…)

“Whence cometh my lord?” He pointed westwards over his shoulder and said “Amurru”.

She turned towards Jerubbaal and laughing beckoned him with a motion of her chin.

“So far?” said she, in words and gestures. And then she asked in more detail, saying that the west was wide, and naming two or three of its cities.

“Beersheba,” Jacob answered.

She started and repeated the word, and her mouth, which he had already begun to love, shaped the name of Isaac.

His face twitched, his mild eyes ran over. He did not know Laban’s people and would not have been eager for contact with them. He was an outlaw, stolen to the lower world, not here of his own will, and felt not much cause for soft emotion. But his nerves gave way; under the strain of the journey they had gone soft. He was at his goal, and this maiden, with eyes so darkly sweet, uttered his far-off father’s name and was his mother’s brother’s child.

“Rachel,” said he, with a sob, and put out his arms to her, his hands trembling. “May I kiss thee?”

“How canst though claim such a right?” she asked, and retreated in smiling dismay. She gave no sign of suspecting anything, just as before she had not seemed to mark the presence of a stranger.

But with one arm stretched out towards her he pointed to his own breast. “Jacob, Jacob,” he said. “I! Yitzchak’s son, ­Rebecca’s son, Laban, thou, I, child of mother, child of brother…”

She gave a little cry. She put one hand on his breast and so held him away from her as together they reckoned up the kinship between them, laughing, but with tears in both their eyes. They cried out names, nodded their heads, making out the genealogical tree by signs to each other, putting their forefingers together, crossing them, or laying the left across the tip of the right.

“Laban - Rebecca,” cried she. “Bethuel, son of Nahor and Milka! Thy grandfather and mine!”

“Terah,” cried he. “Abram - Isaac, Nahor - Bethuel! Abram - forefather, thine and mine.”

“Laban - Adina,” cried she. “Leah and Rachel! Sisters, cousins, thine!”

They nodded to each other over and over, amid tears, while they came to the conclusion as to the blood relationship between them, through both his parents and through her father. She gave him her cheeks and he kissed her solemnly. Three dogs sprang at them baying, as the creatures do when men, for good or evil, lay hands on each other. The shepherds applauded rhythmically, singing in high head-tones: “Lu, lu, lu!” So he kissed her, first on one cheek then on the other. He forbade his senses to perceive more of her femininity than just the softness of her cheeks, he kissed her reverently; but the friendly darkness of her eyes had bewitched him already, and he felt favoured to have received her kiss at once. Many a one must look longingly, desire and serve, before there would be incredibly vouchsafed to him that which had fallen at once as it were into Jacob’s lap, because he was the cousin from afar. 6

Look what happens to the dogs and shepherds! The ­energy of the meeting overcomes them too, that is why they are happy, they jump and sing like mad people. The real dialogue always produces a mass of energy and everyone present in the field of energy (in theatre – it’s the spectators) will be affected by it. This kind of Dialogue is constructed on the energy of confluence, contact, striving towards one’s own self-­development and the revelation of the Other; on the ­energy of joy of the transformation of oneself and the other. Without the energy of creation, the energy of revelation, the energy of artistry, there won’t be a dialogue.

Dialogue is – recognising yourself in another. That is what I discovered in Plato. To unconditionally trust another, as yourself. And yourself, as another. You have seen how the things around us begin to communicate with us, open up their essence to us, show their character, not when they act contrary to our intentions and plans but at the moment that they sense our trust. That is when they begin to reveal their secrets. Then, we understand – a dialogue is being created between us and them! As if the magic words ring out – “We be of one blood, thou and I!” Remember the Jungle Book by Joseph Rudyard Kipling. I remembered those magical words my whole life. The jungle is a difficult battle where each fights for their own survival, and when these words ring out, and the connection opens up, a dialogue begins. Masters know that the violin will never call out if the wood does not trust its creator, bread will not be made if the dough does not trust the baker. The exact same thing happens between us in a dialogue – if there is a mutual trust, then the hidden possi­bilities in us open up. This trust towards each other is what Plato’s dialogues are built on.

I probably haven’t told you everything that was revealed to me in my teacher Plato’s dialogues. Go to his school. Read his words yourself, speak to him, and I am sure that he will reveal many other secrets to you. You will be persuaded that his dialogues are not only contemporary in their content but are also the best 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 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 have started its life long time before it appears in the dialogue and formulates itself. Sometimes, it takes time for it to be formulated, to 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.

How wonderful when dialogue ends with a question! It all started with a question and it will also end with a question. What does it mean? This means that dialogue isn’t finished – everything is still ahead. No full stop. Dialogue forever! Do you hear? In the very first question of the Lord God to us – “Where are you?”, the foundation is already laid for infinity. Did you hear it?! It is asked of us forever, and forever we are destined to search for its answer. I love to rehearse that sort of dialogue with actors. Well, the one where everything is clear in two or three replies, evokes only boredom in us actors, directors and the spectators. That isn’t a dialogue. At least, for me.

So, today, ten years after this Swedish seminar, I understand dialogue quite differently: Let there be a question in the beginning, but the answer …. Let the answer last for the whole dialogue, the whole role, the whole of life. Eternally. Only eternity lifts and changes a normal conversation to the level of a dialogue. Find this eternity in your dialogue. It can be hidden in each word, in each gesture, in each intonation. You can talk on different themes loftily, but still asking seriously and responding on a high level. You can think up different tricks and acting devices, include music and change the décor. But now a note of the eternal has made an appearance, with its own special sound, not resembling anything else, and you yourselves and everyone around you – ­Suddenly!!! they understand what this is not just answer-question, question-answer, it’s Dialogue.

7 Plato: Ion