Day 16

24th July 2019

Activities:

1. Today’s session was dedicated to studying dialogue and thinking deeply about what dialogue does, and what good dialogue looks like. We began the day by discussing dialogue’s role in theatre, and noted that dialogue facilitates the progression of story, the revelation of information, sets the context and the rhythm of the play, and helps build relationships between characters.
2. Then, we were asked to write an exchange between a couple that has been married fifteen years, with the premise that they meet at the door to their home, and one is coming home unexpectedly and the other is leaving home under suspicious circumstances. After sharing our scenes with the group, we discussed what information the dialogue gave us about the characters, their relationships, and their secrets. We noted that, for most of our scenes, it was hard to tell how long the couple has been together, despite being told that they have been married fifteen years.
3. Then, we read excerpts from Mohan Rakesh’s “Ashadh ka Ek Din” and Simon Stephens’ “One Minute” and discussed the concepts of high and low context dialogue. Low context dialogue is the speech that takes place between characters that have no shared history and thus, the dialogue is rich with information and contains large amounts of exposition. High context dialogue, on the other hand, takes place between characters who have a shared history and thus a vocabulary of their own—they reference events that the audience may not know and may, in fact, find confusing until later on in the play.
4. After that, we took some time to craft two scenes: one with low context dialogue and the other with high context dialogue. We discussed our scenes and whether we were able to produce dialogues in different contexts and what that did to the scene.

Questions considered:

1. What role does dialogue have in plays? What are the different ways in which dialogue can reveal information? What makes dialogue believable?
2. How do you start a scene as close to the beginning of conflict and as early as possible, before easy resolution?
3. What is low context dialogue? What is high context dialogue? What does the way in which people speak tell us about them? How can we remain mindful of the subtext of dialogue? What is the shared past that connects these characters, if there is any at all?