Zoltán Balázs, the leader of the Maladype Theatre spoke about his silence in the past few months, about the past and future of the company and about the situation of independent theatre makers.

Zoltán Balázs, actor, director was awarded with the Sándor Hevesi prize for enriching the international reputation of Hungarian theatre at the Hungarian centre of the International Theatre Institution on the World Theatre Day. The artistic leader of Maladype Theatre is a permanent guest at diverse festivals and theatres around the world not only with his own company but also as a director. He directed in the US, France, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia and he is a returning artist in the very strong Romanian theatre scene.

On 31st of May 2018 the Odeon Theatre from Bucharest presented the contemporary polish writer Elżbieta Chowaniec’s Gardenia directed by Zoltán Balázs. As an actor he appeared in the title role of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Theatre World International Theatre Festival in Brno, Czechia. The one man show based on Viktor Kravcsenko’s memoir I Chose Freedom after Washington has a debut in Subcarpathia, Southland, Highland and Transylvania; a documentary recorded the journey entitled Freedom Tour. Besides all these he represents the independent theatre makers as a member of POSZT Advisory Board.

He shared his thoughts about national and international invitations, the tale of the way to happiness, the vocational questions about the independents and why did not give an interview in the last months.

- You directed in several Romanian theatres, but in the capital city for the first time. How came the co-production with the Odeon Theatre of Bucharest into being?

- I got in touch with the Odeon Theatre through the france based Romanian author, Matei Visniec’s visional absurd, the Dada Cabaret. The theater’s last leader the well-known actress and theater principal Dorina Lazar wanted to show the Dada - which had huge professional and public success - adjusted to the Romanian actors.

Finally her purpose didn’t fulfil due to programming difficulties, but thanks to the meanwhile evolved personal and professional relationship I got an invitation as a director for the first part of the season 2017/2018. Few days before the contracting Dorina Lazar was unexpectedly changed to Cristian Sofron, who contacted me after his registry, by my surprise. The invitation went for the performance within FabulaMundi Playwriting Europe international project, and as an upshot in the end of May the Odeon Theatre presented the Gardenia by Elzbieta Chowaniecz in my direction.

- You are regular guests with your company, the Maladype Theatre of remarkable international festivals. For example the Great Sound in the Rush performance will be presented in Armenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia. Why are the Maladype performances so wanted?

- Principally maybe due to our individual theatre language and non-conformist trait. On the other hand the years of professional presence on national and international theatre festivals and forums, where in the course of the last years from Iran to America many people remarked those specific processes which are typifying the Maladype’s incessantly renewed theatre view and works. For us the concentrated work, the intense coexistence of the actors and the constant communication with the audience is very important. The strenght of our actors is the linguistic conformity, the resilience and impovisation which reacts in real time to the events in the common space with the audience.

We have both classic and contemporary, multidisciplinary and non-verbal productions on our repertoire and out of this the festivals with diverse topics can find a Maladype-production interesting for them. There is also an advantage that our company has its own creative method developed by me, which can be presented in the frame of acting workshops during the festivals or guest performances.

- Recently you appeared in the title role of the Richard III by Shakespeare on the Theatre World International Theatre Festival in Brno, Czech. What is special in the direction of Sándor Zsótér compared with the other running Richard III performances and how was it received by the bohemian audience?

- Unfortuantely I didn’t have yet the chance to see neither the one in the National Theatre or in the Radnóti Theatre so i can’t compare them, but I am sure that the are three very different concepts and acting in the three theatres. In the concept of Sándor Zsótér the most liberating for me was the throw away of the medical aids and the capacity to recognize the relative truth of the sober game leader. In our show the execution of Richard’s programme is possible by the economical and vivid acting where I can go through the sensitive experience of thinking with players - who had grown up on Sándor Zsótér’s theatre and - who represent the focus, style and proportion on a high level.

As an actor the chalenge is the direct infiltration under the skin of the inabriated royal court. We played the show for almost 40 times, but the duets of Lady Anne and Gloster, Elisabeth and Richard or Richard and Buckingham were never the same as these scenes need diffenret intellectual modulation every time.

I believe that our unconventional Richard III perforamance arrouses the interests of international festivals due to its intimacy, the energy of the minimalistic acting, the diverse and dynamic music and the concept which creates new accents in Shakespeare’s classic. After our guest perfomance in Brno in May it will be presented at the Shakespeare Festival in Bitola, Macedonia and at the Shakespeare Festival in Neuss, Germany.

- You renounced many interviews recently among others about yout Csongor and Tünde direction. What was the reason of your silence?

- I simply considered ridiculous in the middle of the me too campaign to meditate on the alternatives of finding happiness in Vörösmarty’s Csongor and Tünde and to explain why was it important for me the two title roles to be played by one actor - Ágota Szilágyi - for the first time in history of the play.

The majority of directors may have considered relevant the molastation issues with the topic of finding happiness, but for me this topic is much more sensitive and complex to bring it down to the mud-slinging. Nobody or only a few would care why mixes my direction László Sáry’s contemporary music with János Jammal Fekete’s beatbox effects and why did I choose László Kéringer tenor to play the androgynous role of Mirígy. Shortly as Vörösmarty’s hero I looked into the fountain and remained speechless for a while...

- What was your goal when you cast Ágota Szilágyi both for the male and felmale main role?

- I was interested in the Male and Female personality-model melting into each-other, the surface where the double conciousness creates a reality with its own system. Ágota Szilágyi is a creative personality and through her wonderings in diverse roles she became able for this self-unveiling. Her strong verbal and vocal knowledge guarentee the succesful execution of this unconventional adventure.

It was special to observe how she finds Tünde and looses Csongor and other way around during the rehearsals, and the spiral of the double role finally appeared in her acting and it was a relevative experiece for those present. The performance had good reception by the audience and profession both in Gyula and Budapest, Ágota Szilágyi was even awarded with the Lajos Őze-prize for her acting.

- How do you see: in the current, highly themed theatrical public life, what legitimacy and validity can the story of Csongor and Tünde get?

- Like Csongor or Tünde, finding and preserving one’s own path definitely requires strong human and creative resistance. The issue of inner belonging, the abandonment of bad instincts, and the constant rethinking of acquired values are serious responsibilities and challenges for all artists. Arriving at Triple Way, without exception, we all need to ask ourselves: Where to go next and why? Are we trying to position ourselves along trends or are we sticking to the validity of our own ideas? Are we following canonized solutions or looking for new ones?

“Classic” questions that sooner or later all generations of theater makers need to ask themselves. Like the heroes of Vörösmarty, we sometimes have to ask relentlessly about the delicate topics and current contexts of alignment, independence, security, and risk. As an independent theatrical creator and director, it is a particularly important and unavoidable task.

- In your previous statements the performance doesn’t offer solutions but a creative accounting. From where did you started and what is your aim in your career?

- I seek the lowest common denominator in my works which connects the seemingly alien contents, thoughts and motivations. In the Csongor and Tünde I tried to find those imaginary spaces where the causes and effects got a new meaning and the routine can loose its stability. As Odyssey or Faust or Peer Gynt or even Csongor I also pursue the experience of the journey and with every of my new works I’d like to delay my arrival.

- A special poetry and a uniqe vision describes your directions, your scenery doesn’t fit the diverse actual theatre trends but your works are still in the centre of professional and public interest, with the gastro language they get epicureanism. What is the reason of your desire to depart from the canon?

- I never was concerned with the theatre trends and expectations, from the beginnings I walk my own path and with my reprobate partners who came with me on this special expedition I seek the answers for those questions which are the most relevant to us. My directions did not fit the canon neither when I put the unusual pieces of Ghelderone, Weöres, Genet, Maeterlinck, Hörlerlin or Wyspianski and I did not thought about the trends when we created the Büchner’s classic Leone and Lena’s 25 scenes in four variations or the Ubu King with four players between newspaper bales.

I did them this way because I considered valid. I am a lucky person since besides my own company I have the chance to work in other theatres as well, and during my works abroad I get familiar with diverse cultures of theatre-making and thanks to these I could stay away form closed theatre mediums. During the years I had the chance to try myself in several genres from the prose through the opera till the puppets and slowly I managed to by-pass to be put into boxes. Currently we have Shakespeare, Vörösmarty, Genet, Lagarce, Weöres and László Sáry on our repertoire. Being avantgarde among the classics and classical among the alternatives mean some kinf of exclusivity. And to create for epicureans is a great honour and responsability in the same time.

- Your manifesto based on Victor Kravchenko’s I chose freedom had a tour which was documented by a film crew. What is the concept of the documentary movie airing soon?

- The Kravchenko project started four years ago and had several fazes and it definately was born under a lucky star. The obtaining of the rights, the translation, the publication under our own power, the succesful scenery, the Kravchenko-case passed to pupils with disadvantages, the American and transborder tours including my birthtown, Máramarossziget all prove that it was a worthy work by the sponsors, professionals and the Maladype crew who helped my commintment with Victor Kravchenko from the firs moment.

The concept of the documentary investigates the complex case of pure recollection, personal freedom and responsability in an enviroment where the basic human rights and democratic values are in danger. It is a true acting challenge to transmit the story of Victor Kravchenko at these venues. The one hour movie’s main idea: you can’t build a reality on lies.

- You are a member of the POSZT Advisory Board as representing the alternative scene. How do you consider the board’s work?

- In the Advisory Board I represent the independence (as La Fontaine’s Un independant) where among with the other members of the board we debate the actual and future tasks of the POSZT festival. Certainly we often discuss the situation of independents. The long term solution of these won’t be solved by this Advisory Board, but every suggestion is truly considered which aims the representation of experienced or fresh independent groups at the POSZT contest and/or off-programme. By my experience these debates lack the warefare between the tribes, these are led by professional aspects and we all seek the opportunity for every opinion that find its space for the diverse creative claims.

- The evaluation of the annual operation projects are public. During the past years many questions concieved of the project system and several important theatre groups articulated their displeasure about the curators decision. You quit the Independent Performing Arts Assotiation with your company. What was your complain about the IPAA and the curators?

- Most of all about the fact that I did not felt represented by the association in any way. And behind the curators decision I couldn’t observe any real result, professional history, operational strategy, plan or suggestion regarding the future. In my opinion the operational budget is awarded wastefully with a year by year changing hectic attitude which is not compatible with the companies with domestic and international results (which are recognized every year by the curators themselves) which are only a few: Forte, Káva, Kerekasztal, Maladype, Pintér Béla és Társulata, Proton and Studio K.

The publication of the curators this year draws attention to the independent theatre’s anomalies, which consist as an accentuated part the proposition (since many years) to create “a category for the companies with big history and a stable and calculable operation who are not able to be accentuated due to their independence from the local government, but in their numbers they are often equal.” They also ask to “make it possible for these organizations to apply for three-year budget with an annual account for the proper computability and progress.”

I totally agree with the suggestions and I consider them topical and reasonable, but as the leader of one of the concerned companies I dont understand that with the considerable difference in the awarded budget why those divide the significant actors of the independent scene who accentuate this operational strategy based on the Polish model and urge the accentuated category for the companies above-mentioned. What is the cause that since years we are granted 12-15 million less by those decision-makers who perfectly know what added difficulty is for example in the life of the Maladype to sustain our own venue or the lack of technical crew and infrastructure.

Every aware professional knows that compared with other companies behind the Maladype there isn’t an institution or organization which would finance the basic terms or everyday expenses and it is totally inexplicable why are they keeping us on a peep and why aren’t the professional aspects deciding the destiny of the viable companies. The imponderability of this situation evolved since many years proves that the majority of the companies doesn’t see the annoucements neighter as a possibility of reaction.

- It seems that you constantly return to a starting-point, as you redefine yourself, your creative visions, your theatre. A few years ago your succesful repertoire was reset and rebuilt. Today the repertoire is again full of internationally recognized pieces. How do you evaluate the 2017/2018 season and in which direction would you like to navigate the Maladype Theatre in the next years?

- Since many years the main approach of the Maldype is the standby. Thanks to this status we always were a company which is able to recreate itself. Into our researcher attitude fits The Balcony by Jean Genet as well as the Louis by Jean-Luc Lagarce which were the premieres in the season. By the words of Tadeusz Kantor, one of the most complex theatre-maker “there is another entrance, a poor side door which is not too elegant moreover it can be ridiculous but through that the art could sneak in...” I think that I should take it serious and hunt up this entrance, open it and leave it open for those who seek the constant development with me.

It’s time to find those responsibly thinking people in the theatre profession and in the state apparate as well who are able to think in terms of perspectives and contexts. With their support I would like to realize some of our old artistic and structural ideas which could broaden the current borders of common thoughts about the theatre embedded into the “traditionalism” and could examine the actual intentions of the theatre on professional base.

Last but not least I would like to guarantee for the Maladype - which turns 18 in the season 2019/2020 - to treat it as an adult, in such way as condigned with the undertook and finished aims, national and international successes and results in theatre and theatre-education. I don’t want the wrongly informed “well-informed” (MGP) narrow “elite” to determine the coordinates of the structural background of our art progress and to continously feed our contiguous defencelessness. I would like a standard and long-term solution with cooperation and common countenance of those who are principally concerned in the problem and are capable of productive cooperation in the favor of professional continuity and calculable functioning.

Zsolt Oláh, szinhaz.hu, 2018

Translation by Brigitta Erőss

Maladype Theatre has been around for almost two decades, and audiences have long been able to enjoy their performances not only at home but also overseas. True to its name, their community is a real meeting place where viewers can get to know different cultures and innovative theatrical methods within the framework of plays with special themes.

What does the name of the company mean?

Maladype means “encounter” in the Lovari Gypsy language. When the theatre was founded seventeen years ago, there were some Gypsy actors performing in our productions. The joy of performing with non-Roma actors and the exotic experience of "encounter" that affected everyone inspired us to find a Lovari word that accurately expressed our feelings at the time as the permanent name for the newly formed company. That is how we became Maladype. Our name is pronounced in many different ways at home and abroad, but the essence of our performances, born in the spirit of artistic and human encounters, is uniformly decoded everywhere.

I first encountered the name Maladype Theatre about six years ago, when Budapest was plastered with posters and advertisements of the company. How come I hadn't heard of you before?

Perhaps because you didn't frequent Szkéné Theatre or Bárka Theatre, where we performed our first shows. During the 2015 poster campaign, thanks to our theatre's dedicated supporters, we were able to advertise ourselves more visibly and promote Maladype as a brand, as well as our performances and other content. As an independent theatre, we couldn't have afforded this campaign, because we sustain ourselves through grants, subsidies, and tours abroad. The success of the "I watch Maladype too" campaign was largely due to the fact that we were in the right place at the right time. The campaign was backed by professionals and supporters who had been following the development of our theatre for a long time and held the "Maladype phenomenon" in high esteem; thus, while traveling on the subway, tens of thousands of people became familiar with the name of our theatre overnight. Thanks to widely recognized figures (György Csepeli, Kata Huszárik, András Kepes, Tibi Kiss, Dávid Klein, Anna Pásztor, Mari Törőcsik) who were happy to recommend our theatre, people passers-by took notice of the name Maladype. They sought us out on every possible forum and came to see our performances.

In this column, I talk not only to the directors of large institutional theatres, but also to the leaders of small companies, such as independent theatres, most of which do not even have their own venue. How is Maladype different, and how does it lure audiences away from its competitors?

Unfortunately, only a few of the more significant representatives of the independent theatre scene are still active (Forte, Stúdió K, Béla Pintér Company, Maladype), and our future is also very uncertain. It is true that at the time of submitting the annual operating grant application, a few people get together and try to apply as a company with some temporary name and plan, but later on they cannot ensure any real process or transparent structural and artistic development for their ensemble and audience. Maladype is a constantly changing theatre workshop with a seventeen-year history, which has had periods of "co-tenancy," as we have performed at Szkéné, Bárka, and Thália theatres, but seven years ago we settled on the first floor of the building at Mikszáth Kálmán Square 2, where our permanent venue, Maladype Base, operates. We perform our larger productions in classical theatre spaces and our smaller ones in this more intimate, minimalist apartment theatre environment. We distribute our permanent repertoire both at home and abroad, so our actors can easily adapt to unexpected situations that present new challenges. It often happens that we perform a show that we play for an audience of sixty to sixty-five at the Base in front of an audience of up to a thousand abroad. Our performances, which deal with unique themes, are inspired by the works of unconventional authors and bear the mark of directors who are known for their extraordinary vision and innovations in content and form. We have only one problem: we have outgrown this beautiful, bourgeois home and need a larger and technically better-equipped venue where we can perform in front of a larger audience almost every night. I am determined to see this plan through by the end of 2018.

As far as I know, they currently have nine pieces in their repertoire, which they take on tour both at home and abroad. The latter is excellent publicity, bringing the company international recognition!

These invitations are thanks to domestic and international theatre professionals, critics, and festival directors who, after seeing our performances, recognized that Maladype has a unique theatrical language and value system that, in its exclusivity, can easily be converted to any part of the world. From America to Iran, Italy to Poland, we have performed in many countries, with our actors performing with subtitles, simultaneous interpretation, or in English, which they speak excellently. We always incorporate a few sentences into our guest performances that the actors convey in the language of the given country. It was a huge deal, for example, when we performed King Ubu in Iran—the opportunity to perform in a dictatorial system was fantastic in itself! The actor playing Father Ubu delivered the final line, “If there were no Poland, there would be no Poles,” in Persian as “If there were no Iran, there would be no Persians,” and the audience in Tehran gave a standing ovation.

This is the best way to show where an artist stands as a creator and thinker, and where a company stands as a collective.

Maladype Theatre is a small company, but it has a lot of energy! Together with me, the company consists of five actors: Zsigmond Bödők, Kata Huszárik, Ágota Szilágyi, and Erika Tankó. Of course, we also have guest artists, depending on the requirements of the play and its director in terms of the cast, but basically, the mental and physical condition, complex attention, and preparedness of the permanent Maladype actors are the foundation of our creative processes. We are fortunate because over the past seventeen years we have been able to work with such great actors as Ilona Béres, Erzsébet Kútvölgyi, Andrea Ladányi, László Sinkó, and Mari Törőcsik.

Do you have a summer break, as is customary for institutional theatres?

In theory, yes, but in practice, not really. Last summer, for example, we presented Csongor and Tünde in Gyula in co-production with the All Arts Festival, and we performed Richard III at the Shakespeare Festival. Our performances can be seen not only in the capital, but also in the countryside and beyond our borders. These expeditions generate very important encounters, and we feed the experience gained on tour back into our everyday work.

In the 2018/2019 season, Maladype celebrates the eighteenth year of its existence. How was it actually created back then?

It was founded by chance. In 2001, a Serbian producer, Dragan Ristic, approached several Hungarian directors with the question of whether they would direct a theatre performance sponsored by him, with Roma and non-Roma actors. Everyone found the idea very interesting and exotic, but no one was bold and committed enough to take it on. However, they all agreed that there was this crazy, adventurous guy studying directing at the University of Performing Arts who would definitely be on board. The Serbian producer told me that it would be Eugene Ionesco's play Jack or the Submission, which had failed everywhere else in the world, that it would be performed in the Roma Parliament, and that we would rehearse at night. This idea, based entirely on absurdities, aroused my interest so much that I agreed to direct the play. Contrary to initial expectations, the performance was a huge success, and we discovered that Ionesco's absurdity is perfectly understandable and almost "realistic" when performed by multilingual actors in a non-traditional theatre space. The professional and public success of this performance inspired our next productions, School for Fools and then The Blacks.

This is how Maladype was born, based on the joint efforts of a group of people with diverse ideas.

Yes. However, my colleagues and I had to learn how to consciously build a company, artistically, structurally, and strategically, both at home and abroad. The first seven years laid the foundation for our theatre's reputation. I am confident that, on the threshold of adulthood, 2018 will provide us with a larger venue, where we will finally be able to spend our time not on day-to-day organizational tasks, but on long-term, predictable operations and finding the right balance between looking inward and outward.

Pepita Magazin, 5 February 2018

Translation by Léna Megyeri

A survey on violence in the theatrical rehearsal process

A Facebook debate, which has fortunately faded away by now, about "yelling" as a legitimate form of instruction that is immediately forgotten/forgiven after rehearsal, prompted the editors of our journal to ask artists about the presence of violence in the theatrical rehearsal process. We asked the following questions:

1. How do you deal with stress during rehearsals as a director?

2. To what extent is it acceptable to vent your anger at colleagues, technicians, actors, and others during this process?

3. How should a director talk to an actor, where are the boundaries, what is acceptable and what is not during rehearsals?

4. What hinders collaboration, and what helps it?

Zoltán Balázs’s answers:

– The most important thing in the communication between the director and the team is to develop a common vocabulary that serves as a reference point for what is and is not acceptable. The possibilities are different in every environment; I speak very differently with the members of my own company, Maladype, with whom I spend most of my time, openly and attentively, and very differently with a new team in a foreign theatre. In such cases, I cannot be too pushy or too dominant, while at the same time I have to achieve the change that made them invite me as a director, and it is also important that the trust between us remains after the premiere. How you allow yourself to use more unpleasant forms of communication depends on many factors. At the same time, for me—both with my own company and with other theatres—rehearsals are still an island of peace: the theatre environment is like a war zone, full of conflicts and clashes of will, but rehearsals themselves are peaceful, even if they are uncomfortable; many problems can arise there too. But even so, during rehearsals, you only have to deal with what you are there for, and that's good for the nervous system.

– But even an island of peace can be disrupted by problems and tensions. What do you do in such cases?

– My answer is short: everyone gets two chances. You can be late, be irresponsible, try anything once, maybe twice, but not a third time, because then it's goodbye. The members of Maladype know exactly the parameters of working with me, so expectations and demands are clarified very quickly. Problems can arise when I have to transfer my own habits, dynamism, and energy to a more comfortable environment, because those who are not ready for fast action will fall behind. Of course, the director has to deal with the less efficient ones as well, but for the sake of the final result, he has to strive for harmony. But there is much to be gained from life, good friendships, lovemaking, humour, or sports: for example, before my accident, horseback riding meant a lot to me, and now it's spinning. There are ways to release extra tension and enter the island of peace in a more human way.

– Has it ever happened that despite all the horse-riding and spinning, you couldn't control yourself and started yelling?

– One time, our two leading ladies were rehearsing Don Carlos, and no matter what they did, I kept stopping them: that's not what I said, that's not what we agreed on, it's not right. Then I realized that there was nothing wrong with the scene, I was just trying to quit smoking, and they happened to be the ones who caught those two or three hours while I was venting this pent-up energy and constantly picking on them. I have to acknowledge things like that, and then I feel ashamed for a while, we have a good laugh, and then we continue from a completely different place. Sometimes you have to face the fact that factors outside the theatre also shape communication. And when it comes to professional issues, you have to speak up: I'm not one to avoid conflict, it doesn't matter whether the actor in question is called László Sinkó or Zsigmond Bödők, my job is to get the most out of them, and that obviously requires a strong opinion and determination. Until I can show what I want to show, I will not give up, and there are several methods for this —but yelling is not really one of them. Instead, I persistently look for detours that will still take me where I need to go. I have now learned to sit still during rehearsals, which is my greatest neurological development: I used to jump around, rush about, fly, and throw myself around. Inside, I alternate between hot and cold, but I have to express this inner energy through vocal and verbal means, not gestures.

– Can any form of aggression be part of the aforementioned detours?

– Aggression is overflowing energy coupled with inarticulate expression, whether we are talking about physical, verbal, or psychological aggression. Back when I was starting out, there were certainly times when I “beat up the audience.” When the ladies and gentlemen were watching Pelléas and Mélisande in Gyula, the actors were clicking their tongues, talking backwards, and Orthodox music was playing, and after five minutes, a woman sitting in front of me turned to the woman next to her and said, "Hey, is this how it's going to be?" I replied, "Yes, this is how, and you're staying here and watching it to the end!", and turned their heads back toward the stage. I was aggressive because I felt that the actors were pouring their hearts out and they didn't understand. Today, I think that if the audience isn't hooked after five minutes, then there's something wrong with the performance, something we didn't manage to convey—then they should get up, leave, and come back. I see the world differently now, but at the same time, it is not the inarticulate part of aggression that is essential, but the part that is coupled with determination, strong opinions, and consistency. And this creates conflicts, but conflicts are good for theatre.

Bálint Kovács, szinhaz.net, 2018

During the performance of Theomachia I thought: after 5-6 more performances like this and then we would learn or this new kind of theatrical language gets into us which can be connected to Zoltán Balázs’ works. This language is strange, it has unusual formal signs and it has got its distinguished place for itself by reflecting characteristic and unique method of view in the repertoire of the Hungarian art of theatre. Then we would not watch it as an exotic stranger the one who is moving ceremonially according to András Szőllősi’s choreography, and singing and declaiming László Sáry’s compositions, then the actors who are from different ethnic groups, and with different professional background, between the monumental sets, which were designed by Judit Gombár, in places, which are formed geometrically. The director has made the forth one since then: after The Blacks and Pelléas and Mélisande, he puts together with his permanent creative partner, Judit Góczán, dramaturg, Hölderlin’s drama fragments about Empedocles. This version was performed by Maladype and Bárka Theatre in their so-called regular fusion.

Theatrical syncretism

On my way inside I was watching the graphic of the leaflet: I still understand the leafless trees from Kaspar David Friedrich and the Greek column capitals, but what does the peak of Fuji do with the Raising Sun behind it, on the leaflet of performance of a drama which is about ancient Greek wise person, written by the German classical-romantical-writer. I do not worry a lot: in connection with Hungary’s most heterogeneous troupe and after their earlier performances, the “obfuscation” of the leaflet is not surprising for me. It helps me tune into that already experienced religious-ethnical, shortly multicultural syncretism, which can be found in the scripts of the performance and in the formation of the score of movements: to take the later one as an example, in Zoltán Balázs’ performances we can find next to each other traditional Indonesian dance, kabuki, flamenco, rituals of toreadors or even quotes from Hungarian folk dances and so on. For the first time it can be seen as fashionable wandering, but it is a real functional element in these performances (in Theomachia for example it indicated the Proteus-like fights of Gods over places and times).

In case of the text now we miss the tool of “speaking in different languages” (in Gypsy, Latin or Hungarian language, or in crab translation too.) which he has used many times: we can hear only Hungarian, sometimes in style of rap, swing, bossa nova, unfortunately it is not always understandable and surprisingly many times is has wrong stresses – I feel many times that the dramaturgical scissors did not work strictly enough this time.

At the beginning the well-known living process accepts us: the sound-game which is typical to László Sáry, “introduces” the production: we can hear Empedocles’ name cut up into consonants and vowels, the later ones the actors, who are moving on thin trails of light, hold out to sound with vocals. They use the place in longitudinal direction, parallel to the long table which is covered by white cloth in the middle. When we arrive to the auditorium we can see the table and the actors who are moving next to it on trails in their white dresses, from two sides. There are armchairs at the two ends of the table: in one of them the title hero (Artúr Kálid) is sitting in his thick white fur coat. Behind him, on the other side, on place which is formed between the branches of a bare white tree, a male figure (Kristóf Horváth) is kneeing, the bare umbrella which he is holding in his hand seems to stand in for the missing top of the tree. On the other side of the table both the chair and the tree are empty, just a woman (Nóra Parti) was laying there, her head is covered by a veil. It is good to realise that the actors are moving with the movements of the Japanese butoh dance on the trails of light back and forth, which cannot explain the picture of Fuji but at least it is in harmony with that.

One figure is separated: even his black dress differs from the others’, but his acting separates more strongly the figure, who is played by Balázs Dévai from the group. He is the one who performs the only real scales of action of the performance, while he is setting beautifully in order the table in the centre – for thirteen people. If we take into consideration the speed of this action than it is not hard to predict that it will follow the whole performance on, and it is familiar again: he is in “relation” with the girl on the spiral stairs in Theomachia and with the running couple in The Blacks. His presence is discrete, as if he talks only to us: the other characters in the performance do not take notice neither of him nor of the elegant cutleries, plates, glasses which he puts on the table. Or does not he exist only for us? Empedocles seems to “become his partner” in this strange realistic situation: at the beginning of the play he is waiting for his guests sitting at the head of the table, as a host of a future feast.

On the border of two eras. Empedocles and Hölderlin

The refer of the leaflet to a volcano is right, the graphic designer “misses” just the exact location of it. We have to travel some thousand kilometres west from it: the hero of the fragments by Höldrelin, Empedocles threw himself into Etna, he left the human world behind to become one with the divine nature, to which he is thought to be fitted by himself too. It is not an accident that the story of the wise person who lived on the borderland of the mythical and historical past, brought up Hölderlin’s imagination who would dream himself back into the ancient golden era (as a historical figure he was not only a pitagoreus wise person but a real polihistor – for the better wind direction he would drill through a mountain too): the poet started three times to write into a rhyming drama the major moments of Empedocles’ life and death. The creators put these three fragments into one: on his place of birth, in Agrigento the healer had a great respect and he got into conflict with Hermocrates who stood for the official religion, because of the simple fact that he called himself God. Thanks to the religious leader’s manipulation the society turn against him and expel him. Later one of the cured girls, Panthea who loves the hero can achieve to call him back, but by this time Empedocles, who has turned away from his enemies and students too, decided what to do. Finally, Pausianus, his most loyal student follows him to the mythical top of the mountain. As the poet together with Panthea in his appearance obviously puts up a beautiful memory to his muse, to his love towards Diotima, in that way he can be identified with his chosen hero, with Empedocles. We know well: as Empedocles gets his chosen destruction on the mythical place, Hölderlin got that way the ivory tower of saint madness, after that he was knocking on the German classic titans’ door for nothing with his ecstatic, visionary poems (Goethe rejected him, only Schiller supported him for a while). Why did they understand it, as in spite of his Greek models he was the child of Romanticism: the early sparks of passion of Sturm und Drang got fired first in him insatiably: Empedocles is the early sign of the cult of genius of Romanticism. The almost mad poet’s little bit magniloquent, overwritten text sometimes involves very punctual self-reflection about it: “he understands only his own soul” – says Hermocrates about Empedocles in the play. Some believed that Hölderlin just imitated his madness, as according to a variation of a legend, it is not for sure that Empedocles threw himself into the boiling crater: only his clothes and shoes were found at the side of the crater and he walked away, who knows where. It is important that Hölderlin did not vote by this version.

The Gods’ road. Double optics

We arrived back to the top of the mountain: earlier I answered the question with a joke – why did the picture of Fuji stands in for Etna on the leaflet? – but now I try to give an answer. Now as I was preparing for this article I read the fragments of Empedocles, I found interesting parallels with Eastern religions, especially in connection with Shintoism. The meaning of “sin-to”: gods’ way, the religion itself is polytheism filled with ancient animism. So: the objects of nature are “enthusiastic creatures”, all of them are divine characters. Maybe not everybody knows about Empedocles that he was the first one in the Western history of culture, who divided the material world into four elements (soil, water, fire, air), and with surprising dialectic with the fusion and separation of these cosmical circles he explained the moving of history. Love is the traditional pitagoreus middle for himself: the Ball of the golden era. This is the power which could join in harmony the parts that were separated during the period of “conflict”, so beginning from the middle he filled with life the “limbs”, that way gave “body” to them.

The performance in Bárka Theatre shows the hero through double optics, which belongs to a person who is on the border of mythical and historical era: his followers and enemies are talking about him as a hero, with admiration filled with terrible things, while the speaking figure shows a struggling person, who is calling hopelessly his gods after his actions on Earth from his armchair: “Who could see further than the mortal ones, now groping hit by blindness - / gods, where are you?” With this statement the waiting hero at the head of the table “in the role” of the host gets its meaning. Empedocles, who calls himself a God gets away from his closer surroundings, he waits almost arrogantly the deus ex machina: “Who is the one / who is better than me and grabs the delphi crown from my head?” Nobody arrives then, just the setting by the mystical figure is going on with unbroken monotonously. Then the hero would understand his own lessons in connection with his personal life, that he “has to” leave, he has to leave the human world and has to go on the “gods’ road”: the only possible direction of becoming perfect is the withdrawal, the ritual climbing of the saint top of the mountain, as sugendo, one of the typical tendencies of Shintoism teaches it. This is followed by the falling into the crater, which is the returning itself into the big saint nature, from where everybody and everything came.

After we have examined Empedocles’ work and fate in this double optics, this captivating figure can be seen as the forerunner of future greatness. The most obvious parallel connects him to Socrates, the wise person who fulfils his fate by his lessons tells good bye to his students in a similar way, before he would drink with unquenchable desire to afterlife the offered glass filled with poison. But we can remember as well the scene in Gethsemane garden from the New Testament in connection with the relationship between the hero and his students, the sounding fight between Hermocrates and Empedocles can make us remember Jesus and Pontiff’s dialogue. According to the archetypical vision of the hero’s words and actions the human history of religion and ghost seems to be one process, in which people with divine knowledge and/or power give the role to one another. Many people try to put this apocryphal story of idea into a connected scale of story: for example, Béla Hamvas in Sciencia Sacra. He is the thinker who can see the metaphysical flow of European poetry as the direct continuation of the ghost and religion founders who have moved into books. In the “Pantheon” of Anthologia Humana Hölderlin stands there too: “...when you reach the ending, you will return to gods, back into the saint, free, and young nature, from where you came, from where you were born...” (Diotima’s letter to Hyperion)

Meneh, tekel, upharsin. Pausanias and Panthea

Hölderlin’s Empedocles shows the picture of a bipolar drama. An outstanding figure is standing here against the crowd who hardly speaks or does not speak at all his language. Only Pausanias and Panthea understand and feel the importance of that which Empedocles’ personality means. Others are measured and found to be weak.

“Where do the mortals’ roads take me? / There are many roads, but which one is mine?” – asks Empedocles at the end of his initial monologue. Zoltán Balázs – uses his usual tool – shows the question laid in the area and Empedocles’ active answer. From the characters who are moving on the trails of light the middle character of the group is going towards the hero – for example, the enthusiastic Panthea (Nóra Parti) or the intriguing Hermocrates (Éva Bakos) – always moves on the table: steps on this trail, at the end of which her leader is sitting, while the others are moving parallel with them towards Empedocles. (next to Hermocrates Olga Varjú as Kritias and Erzsébet Soltész as Mecades are moving, while Panthea Rhea and Delia – Gabriella Varga and Kamilla Fátyol – follow them. As the Hero’s Heroic beam covers all of them: in contrast to his tunnel-like movement his tunnel vision makes a counterweight at the beginning of the play. Then as the hero according to the play, starts moving on the road to the top of the mountain, he steps up onto the table himself, that way he enters his own story. Only Pausanias (Horváth Kristóf) his most loyal student goes together with him, in the middle of the table he saves him from the peasants’ attack, but he is frightened by Empedocles’ determination: “now we go up to the top of old, saint / Etna! As Gods / are closer to us on tops.” And then: Empedocles arrives to the other side, and stops at the head of the table, from where he does not move all through the performance. While our eyes sum up the parallel movements which are drawn into the area, including Empedocles’ walking into it, the taken roads from here to there can be seen as aimless wonderings too. Above it with the symmetry in front of us – that we can see the same kind of armchair on the other side with the same kind of tree behind it – the director would neglect the most important action of the play, Empedocles’ way up to the mountain. (I will talk about it in the next chapter.) The opposite movement seems to be similarly aimless too, when people from Agrigento follow humbly Empedocles. They chose Hermocrates as their speaker to invite him back into the town, but Empedocles and Pausanias’ some words are enough for the easily manipulated crowd to humiliate the female priest by getting away her skirt. For the characterization of the turncoat crowd (the choir made of actors) the frivolous musical surrounding has an important role which is created by László Sáry. As in the case of Theomachia the music can stylize “downwards”: the inserted scenes from different trends of fashion, the bossa nuova and swing scenes according to their caricatured way can draw the instability, duplicity, while the students’ (Rodrigó Balogh, Zoltán Oláh, Gábor Szabó) rap, especially the turns taken from slang (“please, please”) can give the antipathetic characteristic of flattery to the group. Only the authentic mouth music made by the invaders on the mountain (it is also the male group) is what it is: the threatening of bandits – but from some point of view this interval is similar to the others: it widens the chasm, which separates Empedocles from the plebeian crowd. And really: during last scene of Empedocles and the people from Agrigento Artúr Kálid is standing alone for a long time at the other end of the table, opens his hands with the motion of the bless giving priests, we can see his arms trembling because of the holding, with the glass of good bye in it. From here one thing is coming, that he falls into the armchair: in one which is similar to that one from where he left.

Zoltán Balázs’ direction makes evident with a spatial act that the characters who are closest to Empedocles are Panthea and Pausanias: that is why we can see them far away from the crowd, who is moving on the ground, even from Empedocles who is moving on the table, they are on the most elevated post, between the branches of the tree, above all the happenings we can see only them there. This high position is the ancient trope of the chosen meditator from the other side, of the shamans. (Or of the students who are surpassing their master? – the performance lets open this possibility of analysis.) Emedocles’ fate and lesson make them “visual” in different ways: while Pausanias follows personally the hero, Panthea never meets him on the stage: they do not have common dialogue in the play. Their only common act happened even before the time of the performance, when Empedocles cured (brought back to life) the girl. This is the origin, from which the beginning picture starts: we can see Panthea on the table, she is covered with a veil, and then in the second scene she wakes up from a dream (death?) and tells the story of cure: then the beginning of her invitation. Hölderlin wrote the most inspired Platonic relationship in the drama literature: in spite of the lack of a real relationship it is Panthea, who can see into the soul of the leaving hero: “life can benefit from suffering too, and pleasure can be found in the glass of death too” – says while the great man tells good bye to life with this metaphor: “nature holds towards me the fermenting cup of fear, from which now I drink the beverage of the final beauty.” Pausanias seems to be Panthea’s acting partner; besides a pair of eyes from above, the female “Philo-Sophia” he is the real witness, he is the early “evangelist” who takes part in the story himself, who during one of the most beautiful scene of the performance gives water to the thirsty Empedocles on his way to the mountain.

Through the gods’ eyes.

Zoltán Balázs takes care that we can take a poetic, beautiful, archetypical picture with us: Pausanias gets the glass from the mysterious character, played by Balázs Dévai, then turns it as forming a fount from his body, we may see as from the real but very thin glass the imagined liquid flows slowly into Empedocles mouth who lays under it. The scene is followed by a silent bell, and then the slowed down act, the characters’ position (they are standing in the middle, on the line of symmetry of the area) can indicate the turn, which is told by Pausanias too: “You have changed, and your eyes are shining, / as you would be a winner, I do not understand you”. – the ghost who lives in the invisible spring water (the Japanese kami) cures Empedocles from his remaining desire of life.

It is worth to compare this moment not only with the inner references of the play, but with the already mentioned analogy of Socrates and Jesus. Socrates’ poisonous glass which he turns into the glass of reveal in Phaidon, is a real glass, as the act itself, the important part of which is the volunteer acting. Jesus in his pray to his Father in the garden of Gethsemane, talks about the drinking out of the glass of suffering, which means the acceptance of human fate and crucifixion for him. There is a real and a metaphorical glass in front of us at the same point during the two mythical and historical people’s life, at the gate of death, as well as in the performance: as the metaphorical “glasses” of the text, Hölderlin’s words embody as actions finally, as the act of watering is the only one which is supported by a “verb” too, after the one and half hour long scales of movements towards different directions. This is a very rare moment, when the object on the table during the play gets meaning in an active way: this gesture turns not only the glass but the whole set table into a sign of nature, of the created nature in the performance.

We have arrived to the crossing point of the two worlds: from one of them with words, marching, sounds so in an abstract way, written in the area like an oratorio, I have talked a lot about the story from Earth, but about the meaning of the other one, which is described by the mysterious figure’s, played by Balázs Dévai, Manes’ long kept acting, I have not told anything. Meanwhile his presence means the third optics, from where the whole story is put on scale again. This is the viewpoint of gods.

Zoltán Balázs talks against the well-known instruction from Hamlet by Shakespeare when he “does not connect” but in contrast in the sharpest way separates the diction from the action. In contrary with the speech actions and their choreographical comments, until his final scene Manes does not even talk, but this mythical figure gets “closer” to us anyway, than the other characters do – who are our partners in our human life: with the romantic hurricane of words, against the exotic butoh he becomes in his stylised character a point of reference and he is understandable at once, his action can be “followed”: the setting of the table itself. Manes by Dévai is as a lively “ticking clock” as his well-known forerunners, but Balázs gets him out of the abstract background of the ritual: with the fact that he is setting, he is doing something meaningful not a stylised action, he is dynamised, he makes time go on, which can be felt uneven and meaningless because of the characters’ moving around. His “enthusiastic” action becomes the “entry” from that maze of mirrors, which existence Empedocles realises, but he cannot see clearly inside it, until he drinks the glasses of Gods that gives life of the other side to him. We are watching the human world from the Pantheon – ourselves too, we are watching our meaningless moving from here to there. Yes, all of our movements can be seen punctually as meaningless and self-serving from above as we can see it through the anthropomorphic glasses of gods.

I admit: I was thinking about all through the performance that what (or who) will be served in the end, on the table that means the world. Finally, during the closing scene of the performance I can see the actors laying there in charming lights of the candles, as they are melting together with the white cloth, I cannot see the table any other way, by which Manes places himself too, than the eternal place and time of gods, who eat every mortal ones. Here I have to tell: I cannot tell any other Hungarian director, who can show us this final interpretation of the text. As in the case of Theomachia I watched amazed the static and dynamic gods’ miracles, I am also impressed by the fact that Zoltán Balázs can show the easy, primer, human acting and its result as the only and most important attribute of gods in his very complex system of signs: the set table with humans and humanity who serve themselves on it -with us. One character from The Blacks, told the only unquestionable sentence of the performance from the top of the Fencing Hall of Bárka Theatre: “we are all pink.” For me Empedocles is over the rituals, this is its very up to date message, which now can show the higher perspective “laid” all through the performance.

According to the passion traditions by Bach, László Sáry puts an acoustic glory around the divine situation; he fulfils Manes and Empedocles’ ending dialogue on the higher level of diction in a recitative aria. The mythical waiter reveals himself finally, he is Empedocles’ tempter ghost, who cannot let Empedocles go to gods without understanding. His aria is some kind of invitation. Unfortunately that is all we can get from the dialogue which was cut not in the best way, which understanding – as a rare exception – becomes even harder because of the over chiselled sounding of the composition, and the two actors, who are playing wonderfully can hardly give it back. It is worth fighting for speaking, but it is worth thinking over, if it is possible to make a musical formation of closer rhetoric, Gregorian-like sentences in case of a more accurate recitative.

With his final words, Manes calls Empedocles a “cloud of dawn”. A cloud of down, which is shone through by the rising sun. Empedocles is the banner of the era in mists, in the filtered light of his mythical memory he can bravely see the Sun without getting blind – for a while, like late invited ones, we are sitting silently in the lights of candles, than during the slowly opening applause the actors give one flower to the chosen ones from the table of the Last Supper.

Gábor Pap, Ellenfény, 2006

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

(Maeterlinck: Pelléas and Mélisande; Hölderlin: Empedocles – Bárka Theatre)

Hands that are drawing each other

On the Dutch graphic designer, Escher’s famous picture we can see a pair of hands drawing each other. The young director, Zoltán Balázs’ performance at the end of the previous season, which is made in collaboration with the Bárka Theatre and Castle Theatre of Gyula, has framed structure too. The structure that is dreamt with geometric rigidity makes us remember Escher’s drawing: The characters who are wondering in the Belgian symbolist Maeterlinck’s forest of symbols with the help of the mirror structure (The Blacks) which the director likes, can become themselves and the mirror images/silhouettes of their identities (that way the two Golauds, the two Pelléas and Mélisandes play and face up with themselves and with each other at the beginning and end of the play).

To the drama which is without story and happening, Judit Gombár designed a rigid, static, authoritative area, which fills all our field of vision, most correctly it is very flat, almost undivided. During it – in contrast to the director’s earlier works – we do not become part of the sets: we can watch a picture, painting, as we are watching the wall that rises up the ceiling, it has three floors (and one more), this wall has arched archways, in front of the wall we can see the characters who are moving wonderfully slowly. Of course, the “understanding” of the set is just seemingly evident: we have to realise, that (like on Escher’s pictures of buildings) the stairs and floors melt into each other without being outworked, underside can turn into over side, from the horizontal there will be vertical and so on. We do not feel the lack of staging omniscient machinery: the floors can show easily and authentically sea side and lake under earth, cave or corridor in the castle (and really: for the first sight it is not a challenge in the graphics of the Dutch master, but of course the tricky things are in details here too).

We have to turn the levels to put at least virtually next to those characters who are hugging each other according to the text but they are separated by floors in front of us. The easy idea has two results: on one hand without any separate “warning” those few moments become more emphasised when two characters touch each other, and we can see behind the actors’ word in reality, their hidden and secret aims, which they do not know either thanks to the consistently built idea of the direction, cannot remain hidden in front of us. The listening out, the sudden caught, the secret learning of aims have an important role anyway in the play, but thanks to the cunning usage of the space it does not become longing watching out. It is proved by the sometimes melted, and always explanatory and complementary scenes and the usage of time (I think about the framed structure) that the choosing of the set that holds on its shoulder the whole conception of the performance self-confidently, has great consequences... (Then I have not talked about the “hidden” symbolism of the set or the possible Freud-like interpretations of the floors and the characters who are moving on them.)

Only a few people try to ease and delete the seemingly (?) rigid borderline between the opera and prose theatre in Hungary with persistence as Zoltán Balázs does it in his theatre with individual perspective. In case of the performance of Maeterlinck’s play that is why the three excellent bass opera singers can get really important roles as the three servants. The trio’s, formed by Antal Cseh, Géza Gábor and Szabolcs Hámori, deeply resonant voices welcome us as we are entering the Fencing Hall, and the sounding, which is similar to the Orthodox liturgic songs, (music: Béla Faragó) can create immediately the necessary associative base to understand the performance. Their frozen movements (choreography by: Tamás Vati) foreshadow an ominous fate. They are much more than simple servants: at the turning points of the story without any story, they sometimes appear as humming storms at the depth of the cave, closing gates, tools or they embody the phenomenon thanks to the emphasized role of the sound effects (percussion instruments: Kornél Mogyoró) which are strange for our European ears.

The text of the drama would also be pushed into background (a so called, ordinary love triangle can be found in the middle of the drama with all of its background and consequence). All of it is the part of the “great plan”: in the audience the visons and sounds, then the sensual artistic experience made by their connection can change the audience’s accepted expectations – in an ideal situation, so the deep concentration is born on the side of the audience at the beginning then it will work till the end. To understand the good theatre we do not need the knowledge of languages: Gabriella Varga is sensitive till the end, she is a translucent beauty, her strange, in the royal court hesitantly moving Mélisande has a close connection with water as an ancient element, meanwhile she is speaking for nothing by using a tongue-clicking language all through the performance, I can understand her, I feel precisely what she tells (wants to tell). It is a great and shocking moment, when during the heat of the love confession (these are the last moments of Pelléas’ life!) suddenly her confused scales become meaningfully: “I love you too.”

The vision of world which is created by the sounds of the three servants, Golaud (Zoltán Seress) will shade by his words. He is the perfect and rigid representative of the hard and cruel masculine world; he is a hunter, who shows off with his strategies, and he “gives” to his small kid a quiver full of arrows. It is almost ridiculous, when he warns his wife after found her in bed with someone else, not to lean out of the window and not to play with Pelléas in the dark. He treats not only his son, Yniold (Rémusz Szikszai), who is similar to a giant baby, but Pelléas and Mélisande too as silly children. To his portrait a small but accurate thing, that is mentioned in the text many times, the wedding ring which Mélisande lost by accident during the game, which can be understood in Zoltán Balázs’ performance as a suffocation “collar”. However officially Arkël is the leader of the country, but the shrunken elf puppet, which István Erdős, a puppeteer holds in his hand, cannot fight against the tall and confident Golaud, as well as Genevieve (Olga Varjú’s performance is sharp and punctual) cannot fight against the “girl, who was found in the forest” to protect her two sons. In case of Maeterlinck we can always find in the background the death that is here on the stage too. The doctor, who is played by Kristóf Horváth tells only some sentences, but the presence of the guarding figure at the top of the scales, with cunning discipline, it becomes the strongest one all through the performance.

In its design the Pelléas and Mélisande is as well structured as The Blacks, or the last direction by Zoltán Balázs, the Empedocles. It is a stage not a destination: it is a risky try to put a sensitive topic into geometrical and ritual “circumstances”, which can cause chillingly effective constellations many times, sometimes we miss the miracle, and instead of it we can get some delight by silent watching of the artistic professionally composed pictures...

The many and the one

As Zoltán Balázs’ (main) audience can get used to it, he puts on stage Hölderlin’s in Hungary still unknown play in the Bárka Theatre, that he builds on the new, beautiful (stage) world around one thought which has been analysed by embarrassing thoroughness (it is the continuation of the developed and invented, forming, and worked out language, structure and message in the School for fools, Theomachia or in The Blacks). The necessary fate of the faceless power that hides its mistakes and virtues in the mist, and thinks his own position immovable forever and the forcefully subordinates under him, to analyse the mood of the two sides, the text, which is the stage adaptation of Empedocles’ three fragments, gives an interesting additive to it as it is rewritten and edited into unity by Judit Góczán, dramaturg and the director. To understand it the knowledge of all parts of Balázs’ oeuvre is not necessary, but the similarities with them – which prove that we are somewhere in the middle of the director’s career – will need some attention too.

When we enter the area the “choir” is buzzing and murmuring Lázsló Sáry’s ominous harmonies and disharmonies that melt into each other. In the middle there is a long table covered by white cloth (it is an already used tool to concentrate the audience’s attention by Zoltán Balázs). There are lines of lights on the two sides of the table, on them three women(figures) are moving with veiled faces, as butoh dancers in Judit Gombár’s gloriously simple, white, shining costumes. Long sounding consonants are coming from three young men’s mouth who are sitting rigidly like statues at the edges of the dining table, they continue and stop the “story” of the strange choir (we can watch for a while the youngsters who are wearing graceful corsets, skirt-like clothes and trousers and French rococo-like wigs). These are the moments of the birth of Empedocles’ cosmos, the stage of the reveal of words. At the one end of the table in huge white fur coat, Empedocles’ (Artúr Kálid) figure almost gets lost, he remains calm till the end and expresses dominant dignity, over his head on the top of a tree, which is made of white rope, we can see his most loyal student, Pausanias (Kristóf Horváth) who dares to do anything for his master, and guards the ceremony with alert attention, with a stub of an umbrella in his hand. (The symmetrically built area duplicates itself, so at the other end of the table the reflection of the tree is standing, later we can learn, why.) As examining the stage of the performance which always goes back to number three, we have to connect Manes (Balázs Dévai) to Empedocles and Pausanias with his black dress, behaviour as he is standing out from the crowd, as we learn it, rightfully.

The already mentioned “lonely” idea does not (only) appear in words later. The director who always uses strong but not sensationalist visions, that find and show their meaning continuously and his permanent co-partner, Judit Gombár who is responsible for the area put in the middle (almost) only one set, the table which will work a scale soon. With the help of each person’ fate we can learn how uncertain the pan of the scale can be (if likes better: the wheel of Fortune), which can rise up unexpectedly than fall into deep. The “great man”, Empedocles, who according to people thinks about himself as god (and soon his only helper) is on one side and everybody else is on the other one. The scale that is formed in front of our inner eyes becomes the exact sing of the unstable power relations. The spatial and mental contrast of the one against more appear again and again, Empedocles’ route goes from the top – form the blind adoration of Agrigento who do not understand him and his thoughts and/or misinterpret them deliberately – though one day goes towards another top, till the top of Volcano Etna, where he will kill himself by jumping into the flaming crater. Between the two there are his critics and fanatic fans: the few selected, who are interested in Empedocles’ knowledge, and the crowd of people of moments, who have not got into that stage of evolution to understand anything from his mysterious speech about the power of nature.

The later ones cannot do any other thing. As the tall and dried Hermocrates (Éva Bakos) said it: “Either he or us!” The owners of power cannot agree with their opponents, that would confuse and make rebel people who do not know the political world. Then it is easier to overwhelm those who think the other way. Before we can hear the lessons from Empedocles’ mouth that can disturb the mood incomprehensibly, they talk about it with writers’ common tools – everybody according to their own mood and interest. The group formed by Panthea (Nóra Parti), Rhea (Gabriella Varga) and Delia (Kamilla Fátyol) examines the great man, Empedocles in his garden and his clues, and from their memories that are bidding on each other, a picture of a wise man is formed. At that point it cannot be known accurately that in Panthea’s eager words valuable sparks are shining, or just other people’s unreasonable adoration have effect on her too. Finally, the end of the performance convinces me about the earlier one: after Empedocles leaves the life, Pausanias and Panthea who are sitting on the branch of the tree on the two ends of the table, are staring silently at each other, and they will take care of the balance of the world. The priest, Hermocrates, and two of her partners Kritias (Olga Varjú) and Mecadees (Erzsébet Soltész) try to protect the immature people, who are unable to think (and their own relatives) from Empedocles. Hermocrates’ speech of hate, which because of its edition, can be in a book of speech, foreshadows the short reckoning by the leader.

After the impressions for and against Empedocles – we have to recognise that neither reasons nor facts but momentary impressions, memories, that are made beautiful by the distance, rule the reports – we get closer to Empedocles’ figure with one more step. Meanwhile we can see that Empedocles’ “rapper” students are not worthy to follow the “Master”: maybe they connected just because of fashion? When they learn that their master would leave them (“the life”), during their first shock and anger they can repeat just meaningless debris of sentences like machines. As before there is another additive to the psychology of the mass who makes image for themselves from insignificance with pure noise (another similarly sharp picture when the mass, enraged by Manes bark at the philosopher like angry pack of dogs). The clinical picture and the scene are irresistibly funny (in case of The Black humour was an important tool and here it is dosed well and follows the whole performance), and frightening at the same time: if his close circle cannot understand Empedocles, how can we want the others to do it? The loneliness becomes universal, it is for sure: he is the pointer of the scale, and even if Pausanias remains with him till the end, finally, he can count on only himself.

When Hölderlin’s text is performed which is not full of complicated happenings, the deep analysis of the behaviour of the crowd can form thick points too. What is happening there? Someone against all prohibition and supplication dare to rebel against the representatives of power that shacks dutifully the thinking. Kritias’s daughter, Panthea does it, who I have mentioned before, becomes Empedocles’ woman descendant, she becomes the female part of his broken soul (by forming a new unity together with the “male descendant”, Pausanias). Against Panthea’s silent leaving there is another way: Mecadees as the representative of blind people dare to ask questions from the priest, Hermocrates. The result of it is the merciless and humiliating dethronement of the later one and her abusing. And as “god blessed people” get rid of the tyrant, they would like to have a new one above them: the foolish ones call back the expelled master from the side of the Etna while they are dancing in a rhythm of bossa nova. However “it is not the time of kings” anymore – say Empedocles on a calm voice.

At the end Manes, the mute celebrator of this art celebration, who self-confidently combine the elements of ritual and traditional theatre, will tell us. Zoltán Balázs has invented a new tool to measure the time – in Theomachia the strange apparition who walks up and down the spiral stairs, in The Blacks the tableaus, the two running figures give tempo and rhythm to the performance. Here Balázs Dévai’s impressive stunt, as he is laying the road (from life to death) into a dinning-table during one and half an hour, an exceptional immersion and extraordinary concentration are needed for it – from the side of the performer and the viewers too. As it is not just about the pure placement of the tableware: thanks to András Szőllősi’s strict choreography the actor, despite of his silence, is tight and with rigid elegance walks, with his stiff and measured movements he is always in connection with the happenings on and around the table and the other characters too. Thanks to his presence the thin, translucent glass in his hand becomes a shining spring.

Balázs Dévai’ tormenting and fascinating scale of movements are not without any ominous tones: the tempo is not by chance, it becomes meaningfully and important again and again. The mysterious figure like a real temper always serves in good time and good place, and the figure who is always underlying in the background, seemed to be innocent at the beginning, then gets satanic features and he has turned out to be the key figure of the performance. The mentioning of the infernal signs is not by chance: there is always reference to Christian symbolism, as the directional analyse weaves through the performance again and again (think about the relation between the Master and the student(s), to the major roles of the respectful women, to the high priest who accuses the master, and above all to the double-edged relation between the thinker and people). All of it is in harmony with the philosopher’s opinion: the study remembers Empedocles as the only mystery play of German romanticism, and accepts that this is the only text by Hölderlin which is close to Greek dramas. That is the reason of the so-called modern feature inside romanticism of the fragmentary play.

Manes puts thirteen plates on the table “for” the characters who are in four groups of three. The actors without their veils and wigs, naked (from their social and stage roles) as dead bodies lie on the cloth of the table of the last supper, between the silver candlesticks, to let the audience concentrate on the end of two characters with all their attention. The two opponents are face to face: Empedocles and Manes. It is a terrifying poetic competition, we can watch a real Greek agon from now on (then Kornél Mogyoró stops playing his hitting music that has emphasised the thesis sentences so far). It becomes clear that all earlier actions want their meaning from this frozen moment. Manes’ (write it in a Latin way and the Romain name of the ghost of dead will be familiar) character is one of the mysteries of the play: Empedocles calls him a bad ghost, a shadow, but we will not learn more about him. His fool and malevolent asking cannot anger the great man: it captivates Empedocles but his confidents closing remarks can give hope to us: “I will be there again.”

In the darkening room only, the wobbling light of the candles give some shine. The audience can feel precisely this enlightening, rare, theatrical moment: the first clapping hands hesitantly dare to break this majestic, long silence.

Tamás Jászay, Criticai Lapok, 2006

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

He did not finish his fragments of the play about Empedocles, which was performed together on Wednesday by Maladype, the Theatre of Encounters and by Bárka Theatre. Unfortunately, Peter Weiss finished his drama about Friedrich Hölderlinről (1770-1843), who fell from German poverty to madness, who was an unsuccessful, lonely poet. It was performed in the National Theatre (1974), it was translated by István Vas, the main character was played by István Avar, and Endre Márton directed it.

I have not known if anybody has performed these poetic fragments of dialogues. It was directed in Berlin in Schaubühne by Klaus Michael Grüber, but it was only a prose theatre (1976) and then Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub were so brave to put it on film together with Andreas von Rauch as the main character: Empedocles’ death (1986).

Zoltán Balázs has irresistible intention to give soul to those play-like texts that have never been played before, that are hardly playable and that are temptations to god. He wants to find his way between unknown ones. Meanwhile use the question of entrance as the object of an experiment (up until the edge of the audience’s patience). Or at least: one of the entrances. In case of Zoltán Balázs, as the director, there is no use asking the theatrical rhetorical question: what makes the chafer?! The question is: can this kind of theatrical form become a chafer, can this bug get head, leg, mouth, nose, brain or it remains an exotic thing in theatre, a topic of tests, of post-graduated theatres.

The performance starts with a non-verbal song. László Sáry indicates those kind of vocal practices, which are similar to the sounds of the world as it is born. The world makes itself sounding into life. Sáry’s active background music can mix in a shocking way the music of different periods and styles together with Kornél Mogyoró’s solos, which create the rhythmical structure by his percussion instruments. He dares to put pop-music and rap into it. It is rare that the mixture of music can be so reasonable than in the case of the magical dramatic poem by the scientist-politician-poet-social person, who lived in 500-430 before Christ, and who wrote his biography-like drama in his solitude, living on the border of Greek classicism and German romanticism.

In the performance by the Maladype and Bárka Theatre the ordinary, everyday saying by ragamuffin kids, with their untimeliness do not cry into the classical text to make to actual on the first level. It handles the two centuries old dilemma with a respectful disrespect: get involved in the world or stay away from it and watches it from there; do we throw ourselves into the cauldron of our changing or keep ourselves in the enclosed meditation... and kill ourselves with it as well as by the jumping into the Etna, leaving only our mental shoes back to the descendants.

From Friedrich Hölderlin’ s play, Empedocles’ death (Der Tod des Empedokles, 1797-1800) remained only three different parts however originally it was planned to five parts: in Agrigento the philosopher’s drama who was planning to join with the nature on the peak of his victories and there is Empedocles on the Etna, where he was about to throw himself into the glowing crater. Gábor Hajnal in 1939 translated with law-level translational work the torso-trilogy. Since then this is the Hungarian Empedocles, Zoltán Balázs the director together with Judit Góczán, the dramaturg, and Judit Gombár, the designer uses it as a dramaturgical starting point. Judit Gombár is not one of those designers, who likes getting involved in everything (or as an employed worker just drawing lines for the future performance), but she is an educated and creative fellow thinker during the formation of the performance.

Empedocles (Artúr Kálid) in his meringue-like fur coat, white trousers is in the solid middle point of the circling world of the stage. He would leave the world. He is adored. He is denied, there is frightening atmosphere between the Whites the only black one is the ghost of dead ones – he is not in the original one – he is Manes (Balázs Dévai). He does not speak during one and half an hour, he is, like an enchanted waiter, setting the all stage long table with white cloth on it. He does it with 13 plates shining in the spotlight, he is walking around the table with parallel foot with affected aggression, rigid posture and a gothic S form of his backbone. He puts down 13 round plates, 13 small plates onto them, 13 soup plates, 13 perky folded napkins, 13 knifes of fish with his frightening, warning, stabbing then ceremonial peaceful movements, 13 forks, 13 glasses of champagne, 13 tiny glass vases with 13 roses in them and 13 candlesticks from the service tables which are in the four corners of the place, onto the Cenácolo to the last supper. He is doing it with leaning backbone as he is taking care of something else, with the widest movements he is setting ceremonially into their strict place. His hour-long setting is a ceremony, trick, ballet interval, concentrated attraction, Confucian meditation. He is the order, well-behaviour, the arbiter eleganctiae in an upside-down era, during the melting of the values. The precise measure of the places of cutlery is like a scale of tricks which is sophisticated in an illusionist way, the placement of knives-forks-spoons between fingers, the violently fine moving, the gothic wings of his tailcoat are floating easily after his body, as if it is made according to Leonid Massine’s gloomy caricaturist-like choreography, meanwhile the inner music of his movements was designed and thought by András Szőllősi, of course. Dévai is moving around dreamy during the setting of the table. Other members of the group are floating in a white contra dream according to the rules of Japanese dance, the buto.

Kristóf Horváth – as Pausanias, he is the Empedocles’ student – holds in his hand the frame of an umbrella with its dead finger above his master but maybe he is funning the flies away from him with a palm leaf. He is getting up very slowly from his cross-legged seat. It is like a dream, as the others, who are lying on the table, are melting down like floating time from it.

The girls (Erzsébet Soltész, Nóra Parti, Kamilla Fátyol, Gabriella Varga) are in their white dresses which are cut till their nipples, the boys (Zoltán Oláh, Rodrigó Balogh, Gábor Szabó) are with white wigs form Hölderlin’s era, in white vests, sandals but their trousers could come from Karl Eugen’s, the princess of Württenberg fashion lover’s court too.

Éva Bakos as Hermocrates, Agrigento’s the main priest and Olga Varjú as Kritias Archon, the main officer of the state, are the manipulators who can turn the social mood. Kálid’a Empedocles and Dévai’s angel of death fight against each other during a singing dialogue in the tragic final. Hölderlin could feel the world more and more unknown, at the age of 37 after a short hopeless hospital cure got into the Zimmer’s, the carpenter’s house who is from Tübingen. He could live forty years on in his gentle unconsciousness, in his happy loss.

Péter Gál Molnár, Népszabadság, 2005

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Who has heard Empedocles’ story once will never forget it. He was the man who jumped into the Etna. This unique way of suicide is not only creepy, but it hints a lot. It would tell a lot even if the history was noted it, the once Sicilian who suffered it, had been philosopher, politician and a poet. it indicates the need for being different even in his death, it is „hubris”, a tragic mistake.

There are only few actions, which can be more than itself. Johann Friedrich Hölderlin may have thought it to be a good topic because of it, who dealt with the ancient hero in many of his dramas and dramatic fragments. Many exceptional works during his poetic career which was ended soon at the beginning of the 19th century because of his madness. After his three opuses the clearly written version was born, which has been worded by Judit Góczán, the dramaturg and Zoltán Balázs, the director that way it only suggests his strange, horrific death by fire. He does not suggest it with any theatrical tool, he may feel that it would not fit to his unique style. As if his soul just flies away from – the double souled – Empedocles.

Individuality always shows evident signs. It can be told about Zoltán Balázs, who sometimes creates his performances with the Maladype Troupe and sometimes with the Bárka Theatre, sometimes he mixes the two, like now in the big hall of the later one. He has those kinds of colleagues who also can create their own unique worlds, in case of vision and sounding too, and they tend to follow him towards new directions. But I will talk about it later.

Black and white again. On a long-long table the cloth is white, and at the ends of it there are trees with white branches. Empedocles who sits at the head of this table is wearing a white fur coat. Manes who is doing the ceremony of setting and he is wearing black tail-coat, with wings reaches the ground, and a black hat. The Agrigentine men are wearing white trousers, white vests and white wigs. On women there are black wigs, white lace veils, white skirts, white belts and corset-like tight and rigid tops from which their breast are hardly become visual. Judit Gombár can soften the whites and blacks who are arguing as yeses and nos. The female skins are looming, the redness of lips are waving.

Vowels are held out; the consonants are snapping again. Percussion instruments, which are following the movements, can emphasize the meaning, sometimes they divide and then connect. Which is composed by László Sáry is played by Kornél Mogyoró, as well as by the actors, for example in the recitativo like dialogue before the final. Meanwhile there are terzets and choirs before, which together with the movements that are connected to them, can make us surprise but may not convince us.

This innovative try cannot be questioned, it goes towards characters and humour. It is a group of cha-cha-cha dancers on the stage of theatre. But the three men who are singing rap is stranger than revealing. Mainly the Gypsy rhythm can find their place in this choreography, which meaningful texture is given by slow movements, reserved gestures and stylization which is about artistic care. Where we can see closed fingered hands again and again, the vision of those death-like rigid, opened fingers will be emphasized which we can see risen up in the end, in the light of the candles on the set table, which is decorated by flowers and candles.

This ending picture seems to be a catafalque. It does not say good bye only to Empedocles but to the others too. All those – from the society, from the crowd, maybe from us - , who has thought him to be god first, then condemns him, then after all they would accept him to return to them with a late gesture of the wise man, who is different from them, and above all he has found the meaning of his existence in his difference. That is why the peak point of the performance is the scene of monologue, where Artúr Kálid rises up to euphoria Empedocles’ determination to death. At about this time Balázs Dévai as Manes has talked for the first time, with the same stress as he did the ritual setting before. We all have to practice the weight of presence to the audience. As well as Kristóf Horváth as Pausanias who shows serving devotion and loyalty, and the turncoat trio of Zoltán Oláh, Rodrigó Balogh and Gábor Szabó, who have changed identities too. From the women stands out Éva Bakos’ fanatic hatred as a priestess, next to the more vivid Erzsébet Soltész and more reserved Olga Varjú. In the triad of young girls, Kamilla Fátyols shows an opening personality, Gabriella Varga is a matured elegance and elevated grace, while Nóra Parti’s Panthea is in love, she is vivid and sensual and shows a partner in love too.

The outstanding form of culture has always been characteristic to Zoltán Balázs’ works in theatre, and it is here again. Maybe the barbaric surrounding of Theomachia had stronger vision than Empedocles, which reflects the taste of the antique South and of Hölderlin’s era and ours as well. Meanwhile it is evident as the Hermeticism of the director’s world, its sterilized closed nature has opened a little bit, its abstractness almost gives place to the story. We have the possibility to see the shocking death of the hero again. We do not only notice a sign, but we are crying because of a person. Sense and sensibility – they are not against each other at all.

Erzsébet Bogácsi, Kritika, 2006

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

It is a captivating, unique and tough performance. We can see these kinds of performances only abroad. I know about Zoltán Balázs, that he studied form Robert Wilson. Dedicated, young actors can certify that idea, which Zoltán Balázs has found out. That system of symbols, which he has built up, he has used precisely. First time during his work we can find incredible humour in his performance. Empedocles’ road goes from one end of the table to the other, but everything can happen during this road. The end of the performance is incredibly special. I have chosen Empedocles with great respect, love and pleasure.

András Márton, szinhaz.hu, 2oo6

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

Report about two performances of the POSZT

"During poor time why do we need poets?" Hölderlin asked it. The question of form and time, of the aesthetic value, of the vison of world and its value of truth. Are there these kinds of values anymore? Can we reflect on these classical works with that effect and power after the common horizon of analyses, which has disappeared? (Of course, we can, and have to if we have an inner desire to face up with these shiny desires with dark power, with visions which is partly connected to theatre. We do not care about the common horizon of analyses but I am not a Gadamer...)

Paolo Magnelli - Alexander Balanescu - Željka Udovičič: Good bye Europe, Europe good bye! National Theatre of Miskolc; Director: Paolo Magnelli

"This is the only play of ‘56. This text is written based on improvisations, according to memories from school. Balanescu’s music has an incredibly interesting relationship with the performance. The verbal and motion theatre parts have sad effects, that kind which we all could feel, who lived then. This is a very serious performance. I love it very much." /András Márton /

The performance from Miskolc is connected to the troupe. The picture of stage makes me remember The Dead Class, that product was not that memorable anyway, but something really moved on the stage, when the experience of creators seemed to be reliable on the side of acceptance too. This is a special state of action, that some part of the audience knows the object of the performance, their own life and past only form the books while the others do it from their own life experiences – the acceptance of them is hardened a bit (what is that Riga? – someone asked me). The humour on stage was built on elements of motion and verbal theatre. (The verbal part gets two on a scale of five, but not everybody can be born to be writer!) The one thing why we can like the performance, Good bye Europe, Europe good bye! is its manageable size. “We are just signs, and there is nothing behind us / We are without any pain, and we have hardly forgotten / to talk on the far unknown region”. I quote Hölderlin again. This performance is from a register about the fact that how we must and can talk about ‘56 and about the time after it (if I understand it right it is about the era up until the end of the 60s). Do we need an Italian director to get the courage to be able to talk about ourselves?

There are things that I did not understand (it is not to measure me, but I did not care about this misunderstanding a lot: if I did not, than I could not!). And there was Alexander Balanescu! Do we need more? (We need! As he was playing alive with his orchestra only in the second part of the performance, but why? Who can tell a rational reason for it, as earlier we could hear his music in the can.)

"The order of fate is about the fact to be able to understand each other/and if Silence comes, then we need a Language for it too, a common one.” I can feel Hölderlin’s idea valid there in connection with the performance. After the great fall of the wooden floor (the end of the first half of the performance is marked wonderfully by the deafening sound of an almost two hundred kilos part of a wooden floor as it fell onto the stage from above), as Balanescu was walking to his seat the troupe (men-women) shiningly in their ballet skirts, without any words, could communicate perfectly with their audience. If there had been the Silence, as Balanescu played music, but the performance became more talkative without any words. And that graceful, giant black veil, as it slowly covered the auditorium!

The performance left some space and sense of lack after it. It is not wrong, but I was spoiled during the POSZT, we cannot get every day the whole theatrical experience (catharsis, orgasm and so on).

After many quotes from Hölderlin a real performance by Hölderlin was coming:

Friedrich Hölderlin: Empedocles

Bárka Theatre – Maladype; Director: Zoltán Balázs

„It is a captivating, unique and tough performance. We can see these kind of performances only abroad. I know about Zoltán Balázs, that he studied form Robert Wilson. Dedicated, young actors can certify that idea, which Zoltán Balázs has found out. That system of symbols, which he has built up, he has used precisely. First time during his work we can find incredible humour in his performance. Empedocles’ road goes from one end of the table to the other, but everything can happen during this road. The end of the performance is incredibly special. I have chosen Empedocles with great respect, love and pleasure. / András Márton /

"He is talking without asking, he finds his problems in his thoughts.” - quotes comes into my mind, and I do not need to search for it. “My heart is sitting on the branch of nothing, its little body is silently shaking”. This performance comes from this era.

In Empedocles we can follow the man’s steps towards the saint place. The wondering of Empedocles, the soul of backward, the deepness of the vison of world, as through all danger he can get up until himself – until the god-like nature of human life – and the performance is creating the meaning of the formed language during this time. This performance belongs to form. This ruled formed poetic language is the theatre itself. Zoltán Balázs after the experiences static nature of Theomachia can form a complex world with rich theatrical system of signs, where the constant pace of the setting and the wonderful simplicity of marching serve the freedom of human life and thoughts as a “food”.

Artúr Kálid’s (Empedocles) shining power even in his silence and Nóra Parti (Panthea) talkative mysterious beauty, and her unique voice... I can write similar adjectives about all characters. About humour too which is very useful for Hölderlin’s play. Meanwhile something has happened during the performance, for which neither the director nor the actors cannot be ready. There was a short cut. Only the emergency lighting remained. During this incredibly nice and sensitive performance the pure lighting of work made the actors suffer. It is similar to the situation when they throw a rock into the lake, the surface is waving, the characters are shaded. In that way with this strange and extraordinary effect the table is set, and humanity is served too.

After the performance there were strange lights on the street, the working on the solution of the disorder was still going on. I was walking towards the Horvát Theatre. To the concert of the Muzsikás band and Alexander Balanescu. The small outside stage is crowded, I did not want to push, so I was sitting on a bench, I was watching the sweet cherry tree, the fruits in the untouchable highness, there was a nut tree too, under a lamp, it was shining with wonderful, vivid green colour. I could see the reflectors of the stage from the bench too, butterflies were flying into the light, they were shining too. They were shiny butterflies. Meanwhile people were wondering from the concert, they came out to call someone, so slowly I could stand there to be able to watch. They just started the duos by Bartók, it sounds well from CD too, but it is something different alive. As I could see the crowd, I noticed their moving. As later the bass started playing (what else could it do?), even more. Could we dance sitting? Or we could wave a little?

I have seen and heard Balanescu playing music twice during two days. (I could fall asleep satisfied, I did not care about the cars that crashed into one another according to Viktor Bodó’s direction two kilometres away in a straight line, or anything else... We could not have everything at once!)

Róbert Balogh, terasz.hu, 2006

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)

The moderator of the discussion:

Péter Galambos, journalist

Invited commenters:

György Karsai, critic, theatre historian

András Forgách, writer

András Forgách, writer:

As an earlier chooser, I would start with that whether I would chose it? I got to the conclusion that it is on the border, I am sure that it would be on my list, as a strange something that cannot be listed anywhere, but I am not sure that it would be between the finalist, maybe yes, because it is such a ”sensitization” of the theatrical view, it is unique in Hungary.

So I am very happy that it is here, because thank for it we can talk about those things which would not come up in connection with other performances. I like the director very much, I have a personal prejudice in connection with him, I have worked with him, he was still a college student, when he played in The Mischievous Child in Szolnok, which I wrote. He was incredibly creative, not only as an actor as he has a very multi-talented sensibility towards all parts of theatre.

I have written different viewpoints for myself, which I will take into consideration, and I will built my opinion from them. It will be about ten points. During the last ten years an opera-like way of thinking has appeared in the Hungarian art of theatre, which was not here so intensively before. It is not only Hungarian, it is universal, to make it clear opera has started to define the place of theatre and not the other way around. The interesting things usually come from the opera or musical way of thinking. I have noticed that in a funny way in Hungary there is a club Z, by name Balázs Kovalik, Zoltán Balázs, Sándor Zsótér and Kornél Mundruczó, we can call it that way as there is a Z in all of their names... The four of them show totally different types of worlds, but there are also overlaps in connection with their shapes, culture, preparedness and the story of their lives. It can be interesting to watch and think over this performance from this point of view too.

I do not have to mention that it is a performance with music, which structure can be better defined from the point of view of opera. It is an emblematic play: it is Empedocles. It is a fragment, the writer started it three times, but he could not finish it any time, he could always write its beginning, but in an interesting way, these beginnings, these first starts, these could go on over time. The first and the third versions are similar to the three scenes of a play anyway I think he wanted to write five scenes for his play. It is interesting – here I jump a little – that Zoltán Balázs’ typical technique to choose plays that others would not, either they are esoteric, mysterious or problematic, and here he steps out mainly as an interpreter or decoder artist. He does not direct Chekhov or Shakespeare, we can do the list of The Blacks by Genet, no one has done before him in Hungary, they have not done Theomachia, or I do not know about it, and Empedocles is on this list, which is a very problematic play for the first sight as we are reading it. So he has an enormous freedom both as a director and as an interpreter, because the viewers do not know it, they have not read it, so he can do what he want to, but because of the complexity and mysteriousness of the thing on the other hand he faces up against a serious task, a barrier. That way he puts the level high.

Fragments and incompleteness. It is very interesting – and here I jump to the structure -, there is no aim where it goes, anyway we know Empedocles’ life, he jumped into Etna, he was a very important thinker, doctor, politician, philosopher and in the end he jumped into Etna: so we know the end, but Höldrelin did not write it down, we just know it, and how can the director ease this fragments and openness we can learn it clearly from the set.

There is a long table, the two ends of it is closed by two trees, we can tell that they are white trees melted into each other, there are white balls on them, this is nature, and the table is in the middle, which can function as nature, and as the very accurate formula of civilization, with the continuous laying of it, during a very decorated and complicated ceremony, so it could become the metaphor of civilization itself too. If I want the whole thing is like a catwalk, the runway of fashion shows. As it is closed in the ends, and by the end of the performance the two endings change their places, it is obvious that the director invents a very close structure here, where the aim is the arrival. I would quote there if I was able to Kafka’s fragment, according to which there is no aim – which we call aim, is the journey, or I can add to it, that this is the movement itself towards the aim. Zoli chose obviously a very closed, abstract spatial and directorial deterministic ease of the fragment-like nature of the play.

To the solution of esotericism and to the mysteriousness we can connect another metaphorical meaning of fragmental structures, that we can see theatre as an experiment with theatre. As an experiment, where the actors’ work is as important part of the performance as the so called actions, and we must say that each situations of the actors, their exercises, as I could see it in the Bárka Theatre and here too, each moments have become more intensive and deeper, the presence of the actors has become richer, than in the Bárka Theatre. It is very interesting that the director defines this fragmental structure from the point of view of the actors’ work in a way that he gives them very concrete and important tasks.

The fourth point is the esoteric solution. Can we consider it as a solution, here is Empedocles by Hölderlin, which is a mysterious play itself, it has autobiographical characteristics too obviously besides history of culture, he wrote it after a big heartbreak and we know that originally he wanted to be theologian. It is obvious that I can see a metaphor of Christ here if I want to, many characters refer to it, here with their outspread arms, with the sacrifice, the great question is that the interpretational sets of tools use not only Christian one, but many other types of cultural signs. They use not simply the Christian one, but as in the case of the so called world music we can see the mixture of styles, it is very conscious, there is a painting by Hokusai on the poster, so we cannot see Etna in the background, but a Japanese motive, which is brought there, with a strange figure in Spanish wig, fur coat, a dress with the frame of an umbrella with a world of tools, a pink corset and half naked bodies: so many things are mixed there consciously. It is a point of view, about which we can speak, if this eclecticism is solved in this performance.

I go on, if we see a performance which is not in connection with Christianity, with a religious aim, which actions are not defined, as its beginning and ending are the same, it is a mirror-like case, than what is going on in the deep, here I just throw in a name, as it happens with Greenaway, at least in case of film art, it gives really deep connotation to the story, the method of the very strong Eros, homoerotic tension and opening to widen the meaning, than there are these culture historical or theological moments.

I have to tell that sexuality gets the place of philosophy, this nice homo-erotic colour of the hardly visible nipples, of the relation between the students and their master, this demonstration of bodies, goes towards erotica anyway, the mixture of styles also makes us remember Greenaway’s baroque tide, meanwhile Zoltán Balázs uses really pure set of tools. Which is not far from Empedocles who was Plato’s great admirer (at least according to Hölderlin).

In case of Zoltán Balázs it is very important for me, and that’s why I am waiting for all performances with great interest, and follow them, it is the reason that for me seriality is the only meaningful thing in art this is my mania, it has meaning, and we can observe things, it is no use analysing the performance alone, but it is more interesting and wealthier if we can see a scale of performances.

I have seen Jack, or the Submission, Theomachia, The Blacks but who has seen only some of them, they may not recognise, that something is forming there but it has not reached the point of absolute sovereign thing, we cannot tell that it has a final directorial language, but a unique language is forming there, about which we can talk, but I emphasize only one element of it, the movements around the table here, we can refer back with the length of the table, which has appeared in case of Jack in the lines of windows, but there movements, this endless unit, with the girl, who is going up and down the stairs during Theomachia, the running man in The Blacks, at the closed tribune, but someone can find a moment which means the closed nature of time, and the inner infinity. From the point of view of Hegel we can talk about good and bad infinity, for me after I can connect to Zoltán Balázs’ thinking in its problematics, it gets into the category of good infinity.

The work with the actors is my 8th point. It is very strange because we can see a mixed group, we can see the troupe of the Bárka Theatre, those permanent actors with whom Zoltán Balázs works together, we can see new faces and it is strange to see whether a homogeneous actor playing is formed or some actors’ performance got emphasized and their performances get separated from one another. I do not want to analyse them separately I just mention. From this point of view, as I have mentioned the practices of states and operas, I would refer to that type of thinking in connection with circuses, as each tricks appear, the most weird one is the appearance of humour in Zoltán Balázs’ oeuvre, which makes me really happy, there are the three rapper students or bandits or anyone else, who are following them. So the circus-like way of thinking appears in this closed world and gets connected to the closed time. Usually my last point is the aesthetics.

In Hungarian theatre it has appeared since the 90s, then I called it: theatricality without depth, but it has appeared anyway, as in Europe it has been for 20-30 years that means that the set, the performance itself is a very strong aesthetic statement, and not a theatrical statement. It is defined form the aesthetic point of view. I have written down some painters, I do not know how well known Delveaux is, these naked women, the covered heads, or Magritte’s kiss with covered head, or Carra, who is one of my favourite Italian painters, or Chirico, where appear the half puppet, half human models in a totally abstract metaphysical area, where time and the working with time is the fundamental problem of the actors’ work. It can appear beside Zoltán Balázs’ personal intensity, like an aesthetic factor, which can work totally independently from the performance as a power which effects the viewers.

It was very interesting that there was a short cut yesterday but the performance could go on. Fortunately the working light went on to the table, and at the beginning of the performance there were long beams of light painted on the floor, so this deterministic light worked very well during the performance, maybe it was hard to the director, but it proved the power of the performance for me, that it could go on after this catastrophe too and it could become a valid performance.

György Karsai critic, theatre historian:

Attlia Forgách has told almost everything. I would like to talk about this performance from different point of view. I feel, so I think when we talk about this performance, and about those things which we have seen from Zoltán Balázs, or what was built into it, where he is, the most important thing is what is happening in this theatre here.

Zoltán Balázs always invites us to think, to play together during his performances, to try out some ideas together. It is even braver as we could not see it in case of all performances, even during this festival, it would not appear as directors’ need. Never!

First of all about the topic: we cannot talk about a common cultural treasure that is performed here. We can expect that the audience has known the topic. We can think about the way, how it is put on stage. It is a historical drama as Empedocles was a real person, not Plato anyway but somebody else. Pre-Socratic philosophers were his partners, his forerunners in thinking, and he brought something new that he - as he told it at the end at the other side of the table where he got finally, I do not know how well could it be understood as a joke - , would like to understand the mechanism of nature to get on the same level with God that way. There is not any arrogance in it, when he made himself called as God, from his point of view. It is a complicated story in the Sicilian surrounding from the V. century...

András Forgách:

...I would like to tell – sorry to interrupt you - , that in the play Hölderlin talks about Plato. He forms a fiction. In real life we know that he was the member of the Pre-Socratic group. That way Plato came into my mind.

György Karsai:

I would like to go on to the text and speaking. It was a brave decision too that Judit Góczán and Zoltán Balázs use Gábor Hajnal’s translation, they have had it and did not get it retranslated. It brings up questions for me. The first time when I read Gábor Hajnal’s translation I thought it to be old fashioned. Maybe it could become more alive with another text, meanwhile the text and its presentation mean a fantastic experience in this surrounding. The performance could show us that a connection can be formed between the stage and the audience if there is a permanent tension.

It is shown there between – and I will tell many examples if I have time – the movements and the text. There is a wonderfully slowed down monotonous movement, which is a kind of challenge too. It is a little bit annoying to tell the truth, that when we arrive to theatre we feel that we join into something.

This story does not begin here and there – I repeat that this gives the invitation like feeling of the performance which is obvious with the setting and the table - , it goes on with the same speed, the same way, we get one piece of this whole endless story.

The most important piece of it as it will be the end of Empedocles’ story. In contrast with this slowed down moment we get a live dialogue during the first two-thirds of the performance, sometimes a speeded up social discussion. The characters do not speak that way as it is indicated by their movements. I cry out inside again and again that well they know what they can do. It brings up thrilling feeling in the viewers – or at least inside me.

The rap: I have noticed humour in The Blacks too. I think it is a strong and important performance. That kind of performance makes us remember it. Here the different genres are mixed very punctually. Everybody raises his head when the rap sounds in the performance to which Artúr Kálid’s Empedocles answers too. It has its precise place in the scale which the performance wants to show, that how many function can this character have in the life of this town, he is a philosopher, ringleader and doctor at the same time. In the text everything has its textual and conversational elements too. There was something in the tone of a priest, then sometimes he gets up against the leader of the other town as a ringleader. And then when it is rap everybody has to decide themselves that whether he leads as a ringleader or not. Probably he has this role in this town.

The three men in wigs: this is a choir. I think they get eclecticism in too, there is a sign of antique drama playing very punctually again on its place, a choir that sounds precisely, this is up to the genre in which they are playing. There are the women on the other side, who form their choir in a more complicated way. The veil can hide, we cannot see under it, we cannot find out that who is under it. There is tension again, that I am looking for Nóra Parti, because I would like to see her.

The space: the set table is a very complicated question, obviously it is a visual focus. It is there in the focus, you cannot leave it meanwhile it has a space formation power. It is not a table of course. There the direction opens the gate very wide. We can mention for example: the famous scene of Hair, when Berger dances on the table, and they have to take care not to kick the plates. Inside the performance it is a coherent scene, for me as a viewer it is very good that I can understand it, and then when I go outside into the street and talk to people who have had the same experience, then... well yes there is a football championship, then it is said that you can remember it too... these moments, the solution are the parts of the game.

If we are there by the set table, then talk about this type of moving. Who is this Manes, who sets the table? Well we have time to think about who he is, he must be a figure form under earth as it is signed by his colours. But we do not have to make it so concrete. A good figure from under is in black, but then he has the Turkish hat on his head, and a light pink corset. I was sitting quite close, and I liked these small details. There was a point when the whole group had the same kind of shoes; everybody had greyish leather shoes, both men and women wore it, except the two characters: Manes and Empedocles. Empedocles was bare foot, Manes had black shoes. They have formed a separate world, which will get its importance at the end. On the two thrones - which is another layer of interpretation - , which is a castle-like dining place, and they are on the two ends of a giant table, on the one end the king is sitting on the other end there is the secret, the place of his partner. But then the table is obviously not a table, but a strip, a fencing strip, where they live through the conflicts. There are always parallel movements with the area of this table. These characters, who are going around and around the table, never meet.

In this performance there are not any physical connections. I agree with those points that András has mentioned in connection with eroticism and that he likes seeing female breasts in theatre, it is not bad if they are there, but they have not brought up those erotic attraction to the viewers, I think. It is so weird, all these clothes, the old powdered wigs, the skirts, all these and the giant fur coat. When Manes, Pausanias in the end put his hand on Empedocles’ head, this movement could have many meanings from Christianity up until the Buddhism. And then I feel like to understand the tree, which is not a tree of course, there are not branches, they are not imitated to be a tree, its from is similar to a tree, as they are made of strings, and those part which are hanging there are much more ominous and similar to weeping willows. From the Indian way of thinking the picture of Buddha is there immediately, where Buddha is sitting at the foot of his tree, it is good for him and he has become wise. The first part of the play is about the fact that he is sitting there with motionless face and they can do anything what they want to, he has already arrived, they cannot touch him. Then he can be moved from this position - I do not want to talk about why -, in a logical and coherent way inside the performance, to make him move to the other side, where maybe a clown like figure who is marked on his head, non-European, but Eastern like way, or something like it, a figure who is similar to Buddha touches him. It means the transfer of power, blessing, the ending and the end of something. All of it is very complex.

Again about the setting of the table. It is an enormously exciting phenomenon, and there is my only problem, at about the 5th minutes of the performance the viewers can understand that the performance will finish when the setting is over. But what is he setting, for whom and what will happen with it? It is obvious that he is not setting for a meal. Somebody is setting to sit somewhere. But there are no chairs. Then what he is putting on the table, it will be a dinner of fish with three courses, but practically there will be only two, as the number of cutleries is enough only for two. This process is a very well placed scale of events. When people start thinking it over, then they can see more and more layers of it, and it is good to play with it. Meanwhile for example, this table, this can be a seesaw with trees at the ends, but it can be a bridge, which leads from somewhere to the other place.

And in the end about the bodies and costumes. Judit Gombár has created something great again. This monotonous feeling, which characterises the whole performance, does not mean that there is some kind of leisure feeling in this performance. We have to watch very carefully continuously. The things happen and form continuously and this is another perfect example of creating tension.

András Forgách:

I would like to ask one more thing, why there are 13 sets? Why are not 12 and one more? I always want it to remain 12.

Zoltán Balázs the director of the performance:

I think that 13 people celebrate this performance not 12. I have a musician, about whom we have not talked a lot, and he holds together all my performances. His name is Kornél Mogyoró, and he gives his life and blood for this performance. What he does is almost as complicated as Balázs Dévai’s setting, or any other of my actors’ work is.

There is this kind of thinking in Hungary that directors should be put into any kind of group then they can be interpreted easily. Zoltán Balázs nowadays is the representative of the theatre of ceremony. But it is not true, as ceremonies are not so simple, and those things that happen together in one place and time are not obviously ceremonies.

I think this strange setting of it all tries to interpret my relation to time. As András has mentioned The Blacks, the runners in case of Theomachia, the figure who is going up the spiral stairs, where the story strengthens the walking around the circle. I thing I have got a role, torn out of continuous time, from which I could see one important element of that, which is emphasised for me by some people, whether the beginning, the middle or the end of it. The important thing is that why that exact one.

In case of Empedocles I can see someone’s final days, ending moments, and meanwhile I can understand many things from the background story, as I cannot see the sin, which he did, that he told himself to be God, but because they always refer to it this Calvary cannot begin at the last moments, that is why I understand many things during the backward effecting linearity of time. The eternity of the setting, and the tension in it, if there is, is interesting for me, that waiting and predictability proves the fact that people know that life is as long as it is marked, but they do not know when it will happen. It could happen any time, as in the case of Empedocles it is wonderful, that he could leave this story any time, he would not need to play through the whole one and half an hour, he could say after five minutes, that it was enough, than to say continuously that I would leave, leave, leave.

For some reason he would not leave. This man is going to set until he decides that the moment has come when he does not have any other things to say, he has done everything and did not manage to. He could stop Balázs Dévai’s setting any time if Artúr thought about it seriously that the time was coming. But all of it is only about the suffering of a figure who always tries to define himself, his intention to analyse, himself, his life and his sins, or even to make a list of his mistakes and that way indicates the direction and time for the viewers in which they can become the part of this performance.

I would not like to make viewers hurry. I think if somebody comes to theatre they want to watch it, wait something form it, want to understand it, as they see obviously that the title is Empedocles and the writer is Hölderlin. It is not a popular category of We are not afraid of wolf, they must take their time to it. I think that those people, who work in it, they know precisely what they do. So for me there are 13 as it is celebrated by 13 people.

Péter Galambos, POSZT.hu, 2006

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)