The Speech of Reality and the Speech of
the Stage:
Life,
Science and Art
Slobodan Elezović,Ph.D.
Word is the most frequent way of
communication in the human experience. As a mean of communication it influences
the sentence formulation, which ought to be the autochthonous expression of
thoughts. The experience teaches us that it is necessary to be a sovereign
master of our own thoughts and of sentiments of others. This is one of the
fundamental postulates of the communication in the word category. To speak
correctly means to think correctly and that, on the other hand, means in the
grammatical, lexical and stylistic aspect to be able to create a sentence as a
way of getting across the thoughts, ideas and contents of the spirit. The
community mentality, the person’s characteristics (the temper, the type and the
intensity), the education level, the range of the knowledge and the volume of
their potentially creative synthesis determine the lexical richness and the
amplitude of the use and the application of the language with the aim of
establishing a high quality communication with words as a basic mean of that
process. Within this context a word has its impressive and expressive
dimensions. Its impressive dimension is created by the common reliance on the
frequency of the use of some lexical possibilities and their variations. It is
an individual characteristic of the spoken and the written output of every
person and it also determines the singularities of a person’s style, to that
extent that it helps to detect the author of a text with a high percentage of
accuracy even in the cases where the author is unknown. The expressive value of
a word denotes the author’s level of thinking depending on the situation in
which he uses the words to express his thoughts. In this sense the word is
chosen with a different approach for the communication on a friendly or intimate
level from an approach used in a communication on the official level or in a
relation between the individual and the public. All this affirms the word as a
mean that is individually chosen and used for the expression of the speaker’s
ideas, attitudes and points of view in the communication process, which reveals
the characteristics and the speaker’s level in all the named aspects of the
word value assessment. In the case of »evaluation« of the word through the
experience of the on-stage speech, that is, the words in the experience of the
theatre art, the approach to the value assessment is contrary to the assessment
carried out in an everyday, real experience. In the artistic language the words
are already given, the sentences are formulated and all this is determined by
the author’s will and the act of creation. The actor is the interpreter of the
author, his ideas along with the characters of the protagonists and the spirit
of the action and, therefore, he must gradually master the word to the extent where
it seems spontaneous from the point of view of the impressive and expressive
categories. It also has to sound similar to the natural speech and its
suggestive influence. With this counter-natural direction of the treatment of
the given word it is important to reach the level of spontaneity of the
expression to an almost documentary form in the overall verbal-scenic-mimic
articulation. In this process the life and the art mesh and the art illustrates
and defends the life.