"We must discard the excess and focus only on the essentials. In oversimplified terms, this was also the message of Dadaism, which emerged as a powerful protest against World War I. Dada, which took a position of total negation, became a side branch of Western bourgeois thinking. It was an expression of disgust, anxiety, and despair in the face of a world in which, in the words of German avant-garde writer Hugo Ball, "Everything is functioning; only man himself is not any longer”."

The movement was born in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, and its father was Tristan Tzara, who, according to one theory, came across the word "Dada" in February 1916 when he randomly opened a Larousse dictionary in a café and decided that the term perfectly described the new movement he represented.

To mark the centenary of Dadaism, Maladype Theatre recently presented Romanian author Matei Visniec's visionary absurd piece, Dada Cabaret, directed by Zoltán Balázs. In addition to the theatre company's regular members—Zsigmond Bödők, Kata Huszárik, Ágota Szilágyi, and Erika Tankó—Erzsébet Kútvölgyi and Gábor Gábriel Farkas also appear in the play staged at the Átrium Film-Theatre.

“Matei Visniec sent me the initial version of the play two years ago. At first glance, I didn't really know what to make of the fragmentary material, but a brilliantly written scene in which Lenin gives a speech on the aging and obsolescence of European civilization kept nagging at me. I think that's why I finally decided to stage it. Some of the characteristics of Dadaism are playfulness, the mixing of languages, the strange combination of verbal and nonverbal signs, so in the performance, baroque falsettos, movement songs, German cabarets, and French chansons are mixed with the world of music halls and variety shows. Apart from the allegorical figure of Monsieur Dada, all the characters were real people: the "Dada-sopher" Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Tristan Tzara on the one hand, and Lenin and Krupskaya on the other. But Stalin and a black cat also appear in the performance”, reveals actor and director Zoltán Balázs.

“In my interpretation, a very powerful gesture of Dadaism is clearing out the clutter. Humanity has accumulated so much over the centuries, in artistic, cultural, and political terms, that from time to time it is necessary to throw it all on the fire. At the beginning of the last century, the Dadaists, in their harsh and restless way, ruthlessly threw everything that stood in the way of understanding the essential things onto the fire. Perhaps the song Boulevard of Broken Dreams, which plays at the end of the performance, contains the essence. Every "-ism", every human endeavour ends up here", says the director, who believes that the Dadaists were troubled and complex personalities, but capable of acceptance. “This integrative attitude is truly lacking in today's world, which tends to exclude, appropriate, and provoke "tribal wars”."

"There is a lack of bold and generous gestures, of authentic (creative) communities independent of party affiliation, taste, and ideology", explains Zoltán Balázs.

This spring, the director staged another play by Matei Visniec, “How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients”, at the Trap Door Theatre in Chicago. "Although the play was presented by a widely recognized avant-garde theater, which has considered it its mission since its inception to introduce contemporary European plays, authors, and innovative theater makers to American audiences open to unconventional themes and performances, it was still a possibility that not all aspects of the Stalinist story would be accurately understood and decoded. However, during post-show talks, it always became clear that viewers were able to draw perfect parallels between the injustices and absurdities of the Soviet system and the manipulative nature of the presidential election campaign in their own country and some of its participants", the director recalls.

The one-man play “I Chose Freedom”, based on a work by Viktor Kravchenko, which has been running with great success since last year, deals with the real mechanisms of Soviet terror.

Kravchenko was an active participant in the establishment of the Stalinist regime, but at the height of the war, he turned against the system and emigrated to America, where some believe he was killed by the KGB. In his 1946 work I Chose Freedom, Kravchenko was the first to report on the true mechanisms of Soviet terror. Zoltán Balázs is touring with the play in Transylvania and Upper Hungary, and a documentary film is also being made about his journey.

Last spring, the Maladype theatre company presented “It’s Not the Time of my Life” (Ernelláék Farkaséknál), a chamber play written by director Szabolcs Hajdu. That same year, Hajdu shot the movie version with the company on a shoestring budget, guerrilla-style, and it won the grand prize at Karlovy Vary, Eastern Europe's only prestigious film festival. It had been planned that the play would be shown again in the fall season at Maladype's Budapest base, but it is not programmed anymore. "Unfortunately, despite the film's success in Karlovy Vary, our structural and financial circumstances have not changed. As a result, we were unable to undertake the production in line with the increased new requirements," explains Zoltán Balázs.

Sonja Makrai, mno, 2016

Translated by Lena Megyeri