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)