At the beginning we just try to understand it. We lose the safety of our senses. The mouth is moving somewhere else than where the sound is coming from. Somewhere above us, black hooded people are singing. The “blacks” and the “whites” – who are standing opposite to each other on the stairs of a circular arena and measuring each other hostilely – are just mouthing. A black and white silent movie is in front of me from the last decade – I think –, while the area is filled with wonderful singing. My head is buzzing, and I am amazed by the fragmentation of the sound and vision.

The colours of the characters’ clothes and wavy wigs are different, but in reality, all of them are “black” and comedians. The actors of Maladype, the Gypsy theatre - independently from their origin and identity - are blacks in this performance. The production in the Bárka Theatre is a Hungarian premiere: when in 1967 Károly Kazimir asked for the rights of performance Genet did not give it to him. He insisted on performing it by black people. Maybe this solution would satisfy the author too.

"Ladies and gentlemen! You are whites. And you are viewers. Today we are performing for you...” Archibald who is sitting between the viewers introduces the performance – on his own voice - he is performed by Zoltán Balázs, the director of the performance. He speaks to the audience, - to us - and to the community - to the black comedians, who are dressed in white, as they are viewers too, as we are; that is their role tonight.

Archibald introduces the actors. The leader of the ceremony is the director. I remember the School for Fools and Theomachia (previous directions by Zoltán Balázs); the basic problem of both of them was: the relation between the dictator and the community. After Kronos, the cruel ruler of gods and the Curates, and Folial the terrifying master of the fools, Archibald comes, the leader of arts and theatre. Is he a dictator? Priest? Helper? How big is his power? Can he prevent that a new element gets into the ceremony? Many similar moments can be found in the performance – infinite movements, geometry... As we can see the same world forever, but from a different point of view.

It is said that if people are standing on their heads, or looking through the obscure of the camera which can turn the world upside down with the help of a small hole, the brain can get used to it very fast and turns the picture back. I also accept this new situation fast, I can see the actor, and hear the singer, the system is ready.

A dark-haired boy and a blonde girl are opposite to each other, and they are running in place. They move very slowly, synchronised, they do not stop for a moment. Apparently, they do not care about the actions around them – there is a long way in front of them.

The blacks introduce a sacrificial ritual and they replay the killing of a white woman (they put her dead body into the oval, wooden altar-coffin in the middle of the arena), to convince the white viewers, the judge about what they have known so far. That the blacks are: scar-faced, smelly, gluttonous, piggy, white eater and hater of all other colours too, lousy, sweating, burping, spitting, goat lovers, greedy, farting, shining of fat, dripping of sweat...and we can go on with it. They are watching a performance to prove what they have already decided, and to get the rightful, white sentence. That whole comedy is for it. And for what else? Why do they accept it, why do the blacks try to recite to the rights of the whites? “We are those, who they want to see us, and in an absurd way we remain it till the end.”

They hate and provoke each other to hate. Their ceremony is an anticredo. They try to make the dark walls of the night to stiffen, to strengthen their opposition, to give evidence of their cruelty. They are excluded but they want to be hundred and thousand times more excluded.

Felicitas (Erzsébet Soltész), the black queen, she is the dignified representative of an ancient, instinctive, barbarian world. Like an engrossed bird god, she is chewing seeds and after a long, long time she speaks Gypsy language. On Szabolcs Hámori’s bass sound. Snowflake, the grey black woman pushes the ceremony thirsty. Éva Bakos’ restlessness is connected to Beatrix Fodor’s soprano voice. Bodo by Judit Réka Kiss is chubby and greedy, the flapping of her black fan indicates her intensity and determination. The marked place of their ceremony is far away, they have to push their partners that their turn can come, and they can do their obscene-grotesque cancan, that mocks the pale ones.

The Village: Balázs Dévai. He is a flexible, explosive and irritable black “hunter”. Like a furious bull he is beating and blowing. His voice is given by László Böröcz’s tenor. His lover, the Virtue is played by Nóra Parti, who sounds on alto voice. Their love affair is the hunting, it is started as the replaying of the white woman’s ritual killing and ends in a strange, gentle lovemaking through a breakout attempt from the rigid, regulated world, leading by hate. Balázs Dévai’s Village starts running in a place, he rises his knees high up, for moments he shows his unit with his alter ego, with the Village, that running through the performance. He rebels, throws down his “mask”: the beautifully sounding tenor voice, and uses his own. As he leaves at once the order that stiffen the rebellion into hate and the world of the performance too. But the “real world” outside the performance is just an illusion. There is not entrance of the area of the performance. Here everything is just relative. If we go backwards it gives the illusion of the fact that we get others far away.

The world of the performance is closed, geometrical. The characters are bounded by they are reflected into one another. It can be seen well in the scene of the dream play in the heaven. We can see the tripled variation of the Village and the Virtue’s love affair in the same time on the stage. The hooded singers (László Böröcz and Apollónia Szolnoki), who have given voices to the Village and Virtue start playing like freed shadows, they follow like shadows the actors during the bigger part of the performance, but now “they get into life”, they appear in their body – however they have not been hidden so far – that get emphasized here. They get into contact with their counterpart of the “other dimension”: with the body of the Village and Virtue, with the actors who give movements; they variate their movements while they are arguing, The singers and actors are presented together like Village and Virtue. The girl and the boy on the opposite “edges” of the circular stage are running on silently, towards each other, in one place. I know, but I can understand it well in this scene (while they do not change, just run), that they are the possibilities of the Village and Virtue too. They represent the energy and determination with which the two lovers are coming towards each other.

The poetry of love enchants Virtue and Village and together with them the snoring, sleepy white queen too, who together with the Virtue replies to the Village’s love words. But this idyllic unit that turns into itself – which is counterpointed well by the white audience’s mocking malevolence and their parodistic despair – can last only for a moment. The lovers get back their “voices”. The queen wakes up too and shouts for help, as her voice has been stolen.

The whites are grotesque and posing. They are painted, delicately lacy, decorated. Their queen, Kamilla Fátyol grimaces by batting her long eyelashes. Her servant, Kristóf Horváth is erotic and cheeky: he is watching the black performance with exotic interest. The missionary, who uses János Balog’s alto singing voice and Rodrigó Balogh’s tenor judge are more interested in the prices of oil and rubber than any performances by the blacks.

In the gulf that is unbridgeable between the two groups, around the altar-coffin (or above the actors on the highest floor of the arena) Hermina Fátyol’s Diuf and Artúr Kálid’s Saint Nazaire, as the representative of the city of Nazaire are walking around. They are opposites and parallel, they are each other’s “masks”, they talk on the other one’ prose voice. Their gender and identity are uncertain. “And if one part was white and the other was black?”

On the peak of the ceremony Artúr Kálid plays the white woman’s victim character. With red scarf around his waist, he provokes the Village with graceful dancing movements of a woman, who dances wild flamenco, like a roaring bull gets closer to his “loot”. I get confused: do I see an imitation or the replaying is “real killing” too? The moment of fulfilment is covered by blackness. When it gets light again, Hermina Fátyol, the leader of Diuf appears again, like Buddha, floating between the sky and earth – and she reports now as a white, sorry as a pink – woman, in colourful dress about her new (after death?) perspective.

The world of dreams, theatre, visions, games and all moving “reality” go on and on. The action is full of unexpected, imagined turns, while we are watching a ruled, static, closed into arena with metal frame ceremony-performance. The ceremony-like world of theatre which is performed in a stylized area has strict, rigid rules, but they have got away from the logical order of reality. In this absurd, visionary world, which is far away of the reality, why we would look for cause-and-effect relationship? Which was once true and stated could lose its meaning the other moment. The altar-coffin get revealed, there is not any dead body in it, and the box itself does not exist.

Diuf the killer, got pregnant during the ceremony by the Village’s longing, gives birth to a child, they are similar to the characters of the performance, the actors go around the non-existent box in an ancient, wild dance, and they come up like their own counterparts “reborn” from the cradle-altar-coffin thing, and that way they paraphrase and question the story of salvation. The “last” judgement is kept without death and the dead one too. “The black skin tone is not irregular any more. It turns into a crime...”

The roles, because of the geometric, reflection-variation editing method, are exchanged. The two queens stand for the ancient oppositions, the truth of the oppressed and oppressors, and that way they fight their combatant, creepy, heavy dancing-battle. They change their masks, voices on the altar-coffin but it does not change anything, everything remains the same.

Many times it is close to end, then the vision of rite is going on in front of us. It is hard to get out of this enclosed world. The city of Saint Nazaire announces that the sentence has been done, the case is ready, and the fact turns out, that the actors entertain the viewers just not to realise any actions in “reality”. The traitor has been executed. But the new saviour is on his way. His voice will be deep, his colour will be, his colour...

Then the “mountains moves”, the runners in a place is getting closer to one another, and they meet divided from the two parts of the altar-coffin. Panting in an idyllic happiness.

Meanwhile a new Babel is built from the empty phrases of the black and white culture, from the hate, the prejudices, the bodies, the voices. Everybody has worked on it together, it has turned into a stone and has not collapsed yet. The blacks and the whites are singing a weird, canon which text turns the basis of our culture upside down and which has a beautiful sounding on the highest floor of the arena. The beginning humming and dizziness are coming back.

Borbála Sebők, Criticai Lapok, 2005

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)