(Jean Genet: The Blacks; Maurice Maeterlinck: Pelléas and Mélisande – Bárka Theatre)

Two characteristics of Zoltán Balázs’ performances appear at the first time. One is that they show more and more similarity with the modern opera. It has its undeniable history of course, as with Balázs Kovalik and Sándor Zsótér’s directions the operas can become theatrical experiences in Hungary too. Somehow similarly as Wagner thought about it, when he wrote about Gesamtkunstwerk – the ensemble of the text, music, the presence of actors and the world of vision can form a totally new language and word. However those performances which I am talking about are not definitely operas, Zoltán Balázs has created the fusion of theatre and opera – we can say that he uses many elements of opera, the language of opera according to the needs of his theatrical visions. The unit of ration, design and the emotional power of music melt into each other inseparably.

Another Speciality of the performance is that the creators with the help of symbols and rites build a net of meaning which works consistently as a sacral language all through the performance. For it the punctual use of the text is necessary, which Judit Góczán knows well and a vison is needed which can raise the place over reality – with the help of Judit Gombár’s designs of set and costume. The actors learn again every time with all their movements and words the language of the actual performance. The words, accents, movements of vision and melodies form together that world full of meanings in which the mostly pragmatic story can go on slowly.

Without our common sacraments and rites these are artificial words – their construction can be written down with the help of mathematics - , but the highness of music and the ceremonies release the foreseeable logic.

Jean Genet: The Blacks

Jean Genet’s play The Blacks is said to be clown act – of course it is not, meanwhile it is tragic as well; mainly because it would like to reach the catharsis with the help of repeated ritual actions. The definition of the genre of the performance goes on: black mass. If we like, it is a pun (a mass celebrated by the blacks, it is the mass of the blacks, it is a mass for the blacks), if we like it can be what it is literally: a ceremony that brings death and decay, which approaches the sanctity from the side of the Evil.

The audience arrives to an area similar to a stadium. The rows of the auditorium are going up sharply: the arena in the middle is just some steps wide. Our look falls back here all the time: there is something like a coffin there, and a white girl and a black boy in the beginning. Because of the small size of the “arena” and the steepness of the auditorium suddenly we realise that we, the viewers have become the part of it, the players of the game. It is supported well by the fact that the white and the black clan are standing on the upper part of the arena in front of each other: they simply close us into this magic circle. Perpendicularly to the white-black bi-pole, where we entered the area before, a boy and a girl are running in nude dresses, their faces are motionless, they schedule their power up until the end of the performance. They are the Running Village and the Running Virtue – so the pandans of the characters who will play the role of doers of the sacrifice (or murder) and the victims. Their colourlessness and physical effort seem to be the abstraction of the two characters – they are those figures who go into fight with their own body, being, power, and finality.

Of course, the two confronting groups take the main part of the action. Some of them from time to time gets into the arena, the others are similar to two opponent groups, they abuse each other and support the fighters like the supporters of a bullfighting or gladiator competitions. One of them is dressed in black: they are showing off on their side with black, tightened to their head, curly hair, with black lipstick, in black dresses – they are mostly similar to flamenco dancers as they are playing with their fans, with energetic movements. In front of them the whites are shining. Their dress has mannered baroque style, as well as their white wig and lips, the flying of their fans. The difference seems to be enormous, but if we have a second look the two sides are differed mostly by the black and white.

We are part of a ceremony: it is the ceremony of conflict, where victims are searched again and again, in a ritual way, with the hope of getting rid of loathing that way. It is a multi-complex, a play in the play, the game master – according to the play Archibald Absalon Wellington – gets an interesting role during the performance: the director himself sits there between the audience, in his civil clothes, with a microphone in his hand and he complicates and moves on the actions according to the supposed system of the ceremony. The game, which puts him inside and outside the performance at the same time, is similar to Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical presence, to the role of conductor or ceremony master which is accepted by the director during the performance. Now he is working only with the help of words.

If the skin tone becomes an attribute which can be put on and taken off, then the genders and voices can be changed too, they can move freely in the area. The Sounds have their places in the highest part of the stadium (I gave them this name by myself), who come down at the beginning of the performance and sit down into the first row of the auditorium. The actors get the characters’ body, movements, gestures, all movements of their faces – and the movements of their mouth. The singing voices are given by the opera singers – László Sáry has written the score with the needs of an opera.

All elements of the performance are connected to this thought-provoking deconstruction. The sounds in the area – many times counter tenor or bass is connected to a female character and soprano to a male one. There are whites and blacks in the area – their roles can be changed, they can play each other’s role. The victims and doers are in the area – where the one who has to kill can become the prisoner of his victim. At the peak of the performance the Village who wants to kill, stops before the killing of the Virtue. Instead of killing the hated “white” girl, he confesses his love. He gets help to fulfil the ceremony: Artúr Kálid, who plays the ruler of the city of Saint Nazare in red shoes, red skirts, tries to make the desperate boy kill. Every circumstances are there to support the murder: the transvestite shining in red, the side who encourages the Village, and the dance between the flamenco and bullfighting. During these Nóra Parti who plays the role of the victim – Virtue – are hanging from above, swinging. It is a visionary, broken up world. Before the moment of stab suddenly complete darkness covers us.

Then the closing scene of the performance: the opponents change costumes, colour and role. And the chasing the ceremony of loathing starts again. It is unimportant whether the whites chase the blacks or the other way around. The sample is the same. Sounds, genders and roles are wondering in the area. The rite mostly automatically repeats itself circularly, changing up the roles and killing endlessly.

Maurice Maeterlinck: Pelléas and Mélisande

I cannot avoid to compare the two: the French daredevil, Genet, the hero of thieves, who combines the steam of brothels in his cruel but somehow raised, symbolic stories, was one year old, a pitiful one who had been already in orphanage when Maeterlinck the francophone, sophisticated, who was favoured by gods and grew up in a catholic family, got the Nobel Prize. But the dreamy world – interpretations which are coded in mostly mystical sign-system – whether because of the fury of exile or the fragility of over sophistication – in both cases have a very similar result.

The story goes in circle in the case of Pelléas and Mélisande by Maeterlinck too. The performance starts and ends with act of killing of Mélisande because of love. The other archetype is the repeated gesture, which is the girl’s saving from the lake, on the sticks of which Mélisande gets hung up by her long and blue hair. In the performance it is not obvious that who saves who, Golaud or Pelléas, and which one of them kills her – as both of them love the strange girl from another world. Both of them do it: they save and kill her. It is not obvious too if Mélisande wants to be saved and finally she is afraid of death. The only thing which is sure, that the weird girl brings love and jealousy into this palace. She brings to life fainted falling and power beyond (or under) humankind.

It is an easy, mystical tale; a soft system of symbols, which are grown up under a glass shade. The set can entrap cleverly our sight, senses: from one side it quotes the orthodox iconostasis in two dimension – which do not show things realistically, but they can sign, send message of saints here, in to the three dimension of everyday life. From the other side the flat motifs of arch are there on three levels – so it creates a playing area of three layers - , and they are connected by stairs in a way that we can see it on the drawing by Escher. In that way it opens secretly the two dimensions, even connects the ups and downs, makes it circular. And there is another invisible one, a secret downstairs: the bottom of the lake, from where the girl has risen.

I do not have to tell that the characters are moving as an icon comes to life: they know only two dimensions, they can only move in this flappable eternal legend, in this sacral area, which is alien for their everyday life but deep in their feelings and thoughts it is familiar – sometimes they are similar to the Egyptian grave drawings which can be naïve, but made by punctual observation, to its two-dimensional style. Nothing can happen which is not significant. The tremor of the sword, the throwing of the giant ring, the blue hair which appears in the window – all of them have existential weight, have effects on the characters’ fate.

Now the singing and the spoken language are divided strongly. On the program those three bass singers are signed as servants, who are walking on the floors as a Slavic polyphonic choir from time to time (if I remember well they will not appear on the highest floor). This small choir is the background of mood and feelings for the performance in reality: for us it is strange, but its attractive and harmonic sounding suggests that world, which is far from reality, as the set does, and the playing method and the costumes which are similar to caftans. Their song and slow movement put the story into this undefinable, mythical place and time, into this exaggerated and more swirling emotional trap, which can surprize the characters too. From the point of view of intensity the speech is not behind the songs: pictures and unconscious repetitions are there with the help of words – it seems like the characters are talking on the same register where the elevated choir is singing. Mélisande’s manner of speaking is brought up to the extremes: she answers to the others with the click of her tongue, as she would be too weak, too outsider, too abstract to speak the others’ language. She speaks articulated only when declares her love to Pelléas, to the half – brother and rival of her husband – and of course Pelléas is shocked by the speech itself not by the declaration as well as the audience is shocked by it. It could not be a light burden to compose the music after Debussy and Sibelius, who composed the opera version of the play. Látszló Sáry can compose melodies again, which are perfect for this performance; they do not cover aggressively the world of the performance which is divided into prose and songs according to the decision of the director, but they are strong and characteristic enough to overgrow the frames of theatrical background music and become live characters.

The set has its own role too, and the gestures of actors, which project like shadows the actors’ movements: constant power of concentration which never lower can be felt on the stage. The audience gets the feeling that priests are celebrating: life, love, death, with such physical and emotional punctuality as all of their moves would affect the whole world permanently.

They treat the dream carefully; the place where all of us can find something saint.

Rita Sebestyén, Ellenfény, 2005

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)