The Vertical of the Role. Jurij Alschitz

from this spiritual foundation – let alone trying to fix it separately. As Anatoly Vasiliev, my teacher, repeatedly told us, one should concentrate rather on investigating the spiritual life of the role, while the body together with the voice should remain in a perpetual state of improvisation. That is the only way one can hope to bring together the structured thinking and unstructured playing. With any other approach one would have to be satisfied with the usual clichés and a more or less clever imitation of the living process.

      Let us consider the life of a person as a kind of movement along the line of its major events: a person is born, then we can look at his school years, take a glimpse of his first love, learn something about his education, his family, his job, his children, and so on. Whatever the specific events and whatever the order they come in, they all lead to an end with which all of us mortals are well familiar. If we regard and investigate human life according to these events from beginning to end, we can only hope to understand its visible part. However, the invisible life also exists. The life of the human spirit follows different rules and is filled with different events. This kind of life is less known and we do not often draw much attention to it. Its events are less noticeable and the road itself is devoid of any end; here our journey is directed towards infinity.