Tag: UTE FEST

Inheritance Will Kill You If You Do Not Reconsider It Every Day

Inheritance Will Kill You If You Do Not Reconsider It Every Day

 

András Visky at UTE Fest No. 18
© István Biró

For 30 years now, András Visky (Hungarian-Romanian, born in Târgu-Mureş in 1957) has been the main dramaturg of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj. He is a poet, playwright whose plays are staged across Europe and the USA, essayist, lecturer at academic institutions in Romania, Hungary and USA, who also coined and developed the barrack-dramaturgy[1] concept of theatre.

During the 18th edition of The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, hosted by The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj at the end of November 2019, Visky was responsible for leading and moderating the post-show talks with the teams of each production. The sessions lasted about an hour and always begun with an insightful, heartfelt introduction, after which everyone was included in the conversation by asking the right questions. The post-show talks were led in such a delicate, dedicated, distinctive and delightful manner, that they quickly became for the audience and the festival guests just as expected as the performances themselves.

During the last days of the festival, Ina Doublekova met with András Visky to talk about what has been discussed and seen during the festival and what was left unsaid, as well as about the past and the future of culture and theatre and the role of transnational alliances like the UTE.

Union des Théâtres de l’Europe (UTE) was founded in 1990 – the same year when you became the dramaturg of The Hungarian State Theatre of Cluj – with the aim to establish artistic links beyond the still-standing walls after the 1989 changes. What kind of bridges do we need in Europe today?

If I try to answer this question from the point of view of UTE, I think that it has lost its identity, because its goal has been fulfilled. The idea of constructing bridges between Eastern and Western Europe to help through cultural means the European integration, in many aspects, has been achieved. Which is great! When an institution or an artistic umbrella like the UTE can declare “we achieved our goal”, this is great. But on the other hand, it creates a vacuum. If the UTE would like to survive, it would need a new definition of its mission. And this will not be easy because this is never easy. On the one hand, there is a very rich inheritance, a very important legacy, and on the other hand, the UTE has always been progressive. Now, what does it mean to be progressive? In my opinion, one of the most fragile aspects of Western culture is essentially Western inheritance.

I think that this is also true if you look at the European Union – as a political formation it has been and still is very important because it has avoided war, it has avoided the falling apart of the continent after the changes that 1989 brought, and now the question is: to expand or not. From the Western point of view, there is angst about it, from the Eastern part, there is an expectation to make brave, courageous steps.

How has the role of the dramaturg evolved over these 30 years during which you have been holding this position and what does it represent today?

I think that one of the major changes in contemporary theatre is related to the dramaturg. He is connected to the director, whose status would still maintain this classic-modernist instance of the father of the performance. This modernist legacy of fatherhood is going through major changes, which the dramaturg has already experienced on a daily basis. As I explain in the chapter ‘Barrack-dramaturgy and the captive audience’ which I wrote for The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy in 2014, the daily practice of theatre requires a dramaturg who is prepared in various ways. The Hamburgian dramaturg has now become a writer, a moderator in the devised theatre, a video editor if we consider the video as an essential part of contemporary performance, and that means that this person needs to be an expert on the digital, while also helping the press officer, moderating the post-show talks, etc, etc. I have developed, I hope, my own style of doing those sessions because I do consider that theatre is something serious.

What do you mean by serious? And how do you see the place and role of theatre in our contemporary world?

Theatre in this post-religious era that we are living in is maybe the strongest and the unique institution that can literally gather people together and offer the public a collective experience. It offers a real dialogue and understanding of ourselves. As you know, my concept of the dramaturgy is connected to the prison. My first childhood memory is that I am a prisoner in a setting[1] which is really absurdist in so many ways. It helped me realize that theatre can offer the means for individuals and groups to tell, express or reenact their own stories. So, for me, theatre as space is a prison but we enter into this prison by our own free will and the experiences we are going through in this prison can set us free. And the keyword here is freedom. And why am I saying this? Because somebody who is imprisoned lives a double life. For that person, the prison is never an immediate reality. The immediate reality is in the future or in the past– when I was free and when I will be free.

Researching this idea, I found that in our culture, which is controlled by the media, we are also imprisoned because the media creates for us a virtual life which is always in the future: if I get this, I will be happier. Or we want to live in the body of a celebrity. The media creates this kind of virtual bodies and we want to step into them. That is why we are experiencing so many changes of identities.

Our willingness to be what we are is covered by many things and theatre could be a tool to recognize ourselves as ourselves. And to accept ourselves as we are. To consider ourselves as a unique event in the life of the Universe. The theatre can give us a very special strength – to eradicate this sorrow that “I am not like the other”. You do not need to be like the other. And to understand and accept yourself with joy, because my freedom should be fulfilled by myself. Nobody else can fulfil my own freedom. And this way I can be a part of a community. If I am not a free person, I cannot be part of a community in a responsible, useful way. Because nobody needs a person who is not free and who is dependent on many things.

After 11 years of interruption, The Hungarian Theater of Cluj just hosted the 18th edition of The Festival of the Union des Théâtres de l’Europe, presenting nineteen performances from members of this prestigious network, which has been recognized as a Cultural Ambassador by the European Commission. Four of the productions were based on contemporary playwriting – “Concord Floral” by Jordan Tannahill; “The Elephant” by Kostas Vostantzoglou; “I/FABRE” based on texts of Jan Fabre; “How to Date a Feminist” by Samantha Ellis – while the remaining fifteen were based on or were interpreting a text by established, canonic names such as Bertolt Brecht, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg or ancient myths. Was this dramaturgical landscape of the festival surprising for you in any way?

That was not a surprise to me but with this question, you are touching the core of the inner conflict of UTE. The esthetics of this network is post-Post-Brookian, which has big masters and works only with classics. Silviu Purcarete has said it many times that he needs to work with a text which has settled down. Now the question is: is this kind of theatre updated? What would be a progressive approach to this legacy? When the inheritance is very rich, it could become a huge burden. A legacy becomes a burden when we are worshipping it. Being critical to it in a creative way is the only chance of reborn. And the members of UTE know this, that they are now in the in-betweenness of the very rich past and the future, which is not seen. And to exit it, the network will need an open dialogue and to bring in the young creators, who would approach the idea of theatre in a very contemporary way. For me, the ideal version would be to handle the progressive need for doing theatre and the big legacy without hysteria, as I am convinced that inheritance will kill you if you do not reconsider it every day.

Furthermore, the theatre lives in the present time, it is a discourse about the present time. We are living either in the past in a nostalgic way, or in the future, which is the virtuality of our existence. And I think that the theatre addresses the realm of the present time and we are living the present when we are not reflecting upon it. When we are going through a real experience, it is a transformative experience. And transformation is not something mysterious or mystical, it is the anagnorisis in the system of my society, of Europe, of the World, as we are living in an endangered world – languages are endangered, communities are endangered, nature is endangered, etc., etc. And the theater has always been the discourse about the fragility of the human being. That is not a fiction.

Yet, it feels that exactly this very contemporary fragility of humanity, the pressing global issues such as climate change, for example, often fail to be reflected in a daring way in this Post-Brookian theatre form, as you defined it, which is still the dominant form of theatre-making. And this weakens the role of theatre in society.

The inner tension here is between the metaphorical method, symbolic on the one hand, and the performative, which is so immediate, on the other hand. The question is if there is enough intellectual, spiritual, creative power to address these issues. And there is enough of it in contemporary theatre for sure, I have seen many experiments. However, this is not a mainstream theatre. The inner conflict is again that theatre is always about buildings, about architecture and architecture is about legacy. Yet, the daring contemporary theater has chosen to work in intimate spaces.

Clearly, part of the reasons for this choice is also that the politicians and funding-bodies still recognize more easily an established structure and the larger proportion of funding goes to those buildings and institutions.

The political discourse is unavoidable because speaking about the present time in a responsible way means that you are doing a political type of theatre. The politics is always included but there are many ways in which this could happen. And this is the role of organizations like UTE – to address the freedom of theatre from the political framework. I believe that art in Europe should be subsided but not to be controlled by these subventions. 

Talking about politics, legacy and major current topics, the most heated debates during one of the post-show talks you moderated erupted after the performance of “Danton’s Death” of the National Theatre São João from Porto on the questions of representation of women and their role in theatre. Nuno Cardoso, the director of the performance, stated: “We cannot hide it, we live in a patriarchal society. Point. There is no discussion about that. If you take all the heritage of Western drama, you have great actresses and great female characters, maybe the best characters are female characters, but it is always tilted to a man. And it is an issue we need to deal with now.” In your opinion, how can we deal with it in a fruitful way, without falling into harmful extremes?

In the contemporary Romanian theatre there are more and more female directors. Here, at The Hungarian National Theater of Cluj, we announced a competition for young directors. And we offered all our theatre’s resources to the projects we liked. Out of five selected projects, three were submitted by women. Two of those projects are already happening, they are running, and the third one is going to have its premiere in mid-December. So, I do not want to mix my ideas of value with political issues, but I think that we have to find different ways to attract women, to gain their trust, in order to submit their projects, to be part of the image and the landscape of theatre.

I think that this competition has been very fruitful and could be a working model for many theatres. But of course, you have to take risks. Not only because of the women, but mainly because very young directors are submitting their projects, they look very well on paper but you do not know if they might reach a flop. But still, what is the problem? The flop is part of the development. And I like to be part of these processes; I always lead the open discussions between them and the audience, press, etc. We have to work to trust each other more and more.

At The Hungarian Theater of Cluj, you have a different approach to the technicians as well – the audience of the festival saw three of them playing in the opening performance of “Mother Courage and Her Children” (co-production of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and Staatsschauspiel Dresden, directed by Armin Petras) and one in “A Doll’s House” (production of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, directed by Botond Nagy). Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

I am very interested in the theory of photography, though I haven’t taken a single picture in my entire life. However, I once curated a photo-exhibition in our theatre. The photographer was Nelson Fitch, a very young American artist who came to me to make a project. So I asked him to work on this project, “The Invisible Theater”, to follow the technicians, to show how they construct and how they deconstruct, what are these invisible people. I call them “the angles of the performances”. The exhibition was very beautiful and the technicians felt honored. Afterwards, Nelson presented to all of them the photos in beautiful frames.

We invite them as actors in different performances; it has happened many, many times, so for our theatre to welcome the technicians on stage is not a special event anymore. Also, there is a very famous staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dreams” by Alexandru Dabija (the performance opened in 2009 at the Odeon Theater in Bucharest, Romania – A/N) with the technical crew making the scene in the forest, which was amazingly beautiful, very strong and very warm, it was a big surprise.

What kind of impact do you expect this festival to have on the inner life of The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and on its presence in the city?

I believe that this festival is very important for Cluj. Our city has grown in the past years dramatically from 120,000 thousand people to more than 600,000, it’s a big boom. So the theatre plays an important role in the life of the city and I personally have thoughts and projects to try to approach this new community of inhabitants. Because I think that theatre needs to change its policy and not to wait for the people to come into the building but to go out and reach them in the in-between spaces.

 

Published on 26 March 2020

  1. Visky, András, ‘Barrack-dramaturgy and the captive audience’, in Magda Romanska (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, London; New York: Routledge, 2014
  2. In 1958, when András Visky was 1-years-old, his father, Ferenc Visky, minister of the Hungarian Reformed Church, was sentenced to 22 years in prison by the Romanian Communist authorities. Soon after that his wife and their seven children were deported to Bărăgan setting separately. The family was released in 1964 and reunited.

Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe in Cluj. Time for Revolutions?

Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe in Cluj.

Time for Revolutions?

The 18th Festival of the Union of Theatres of Europe was held in the Romanian town Cluj, Transylvania, from 19th till 30th November, hosted by the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj. The program consisted of the performances by the theatres that are members of UTE, one of the most influential theatre unions in Europe. UTE was founded in 1990, by the then French Minister of Culture, Jacques Lang, and Giorgio Strehler, the artistic director of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, with an idea to strengthen theatre links within Europe, i.e. to unite theatrical Europe. Today, UTE is made of thirty-four members, and the Yugoslav Drama Theatre is its only member from Serbia.

The festival presented twenty-four performances from Romania, Greece, Germany, Luxemburg, Portugal, Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, and Serbia. The audience had an opportunity to see some conventional interpretations of contemporary plays (e.g. “Elephant” by the National Theatre of North Greece), more experimental expressions based on exploration of movements, visual and verbal (“The Rebellion of Objects” by Teatro di Roma, “Crazy Grass” by Sfumato Theatre Laboratory from Bulgaria), as well as some ambitious, inspirational interpretations of classics. Serbian representative was the Yugoslav Drama Theatre with its superb “Lorenzaccio”, directed by Boris Liješević. The problem of revolution, raised by “Lorenzaccio”, was one of the main topics in the festival productions. We will here single out three extraordinary performances that explore present-day possibilities of fomenting revolutions on the social and political level, but also on the personal one.

Revolution in Yellow Vests

“Danton’s Death” directed by Nuno Cardoso and performed by the National Theatre São João from Porto is a visually fascinating, poetically and choreographically playful interpretation of Büchner’s powerful reflection on the tragic character of the French Revolution (and any revolution, for that matter). Cardoso establishes a discreet parallel between revolutionary Paris of 1789 and present-day protests by yellow vests movement, first visually, in terms of costumes, but then also in terms of the content. The characters are wearing contemporary costumes, thus referring to a timeless need for political changes, which nowadays means a rebellion against new walls, populism, xenophobia, global anxiety, and terrorism.

The stage conveys emphasized symbolic meanings. The central part is gapingly empty, which puts forward the idea of aloneness and loneliness of the ones in power. A cracked background wall also bears symbolic meanings, with huge fans on it revolving in a hypnotizing rhythm. Their relentless rotation discreetly represents the tragic endurance of cyclic time, the Shakespearean wheel of history which mercilessly grinds. It can be also understood as an associative reflection of Danton’s (played by Albano Jerónimo) painfully cognitive rhetorical question: “Will this clock ever stop?” Moreover, in the context of the plot, the gigantic fan hints at the meaning of a slaughterhouse, since the history of civilization is the history of mutilated bodies, but also of mutilated ideals.

The Portuguese “Danton’s death” offers a pessimistic view of revolution, demystification of its hopes, reminding us of Drinka Gojković’s thoughts about Büchner’s play. Paraphrasing Brodsky, she wrote: “The tragedy of Büchner’s characters does not lie in the fact that they have to go down together with their ideals but, on the contrary, in the fact that they have to live without them”. Not only have the characters lost their faith in revolution, knowing that it devours its own children, just like Saturn, the Roman God of Time, thus symbolically demonstrating that whatever is born in time will also be eaten by the time, but they no longer believe neither in life nor in man. Cardoso’s interpretation of Büchner conspicuously demystifies human nature, through philosophically inspirational discussions about existence, God, nothingness.

Occasionally and discretely, the performance includes documentary black-and-white video projections of close-ups of tortured faces, which highlights the atmosphere of the play, its tragic overtones, and emphasizes the important documentary nature of Büchner’s play. The layered structure of Cardoso’s theatre language is enhanced by the introduction of grotesque scenes that tensely demonstrate the joy of existence, a party of the characters dressed as entertainers while dancing to the idyllic tones of “The Blue Danube”. The feeling of grotesque spreads throughout the entire performance, through the constantly grinning images of tragic victims of the revolution. Everyone is incessantly grinning because there’s nothing else they can do; it is a reaction to the encounter with nothingness.

Revolution and Game

In his study “The Sociology of Theatre”, Jean Duvignaud wrote that the political tragedy “Lorenzaccio” by Alfred de Musset (1834) is considered to be a play which requires great spiritual effort, that it is a play in which love and heroism in its pure form can never be seen, that Lorenzaccio is not a hero with clear intentions, but a weakling who treacherously assassins the duke. These theses serve Duvignaud to explain why the play was not performed back in the time when it was written (it was “rehabilitated” by Jean Vilar’s successful directing in Paris during the 1950s).

Using the aforementioned problems of this romantic play to its advantage, director Boris Liješević has created a successful performance based on a clever theatrical play (adapted by Fedor Šili, dramaturge Miloš Krečković). It is staged in a Brechtian manner as a work in progress, as a rehearsal open to contemporary meanings. In the centre is the play itself, toying with the revolution, which gives rise to the feeling of the ritual character of the revolution in history, a cyclic, eternal repetition of the mechanisms of tyranny, the power which exhausts people, and of the revolution that devours its own children. Very skilfully, the actors Marko Janketić, Branislav Lečić, Milan Marić, Sloboda Mićalović, Milena Vasić, Miodrag Dragičević, Petar Benčina and Joakim Tasić, resorting to various and always appropriate approaches, based on grotesque, but with occasional steps towards realism, consistently present this idea. The performance aptly brings forth philosophical dimensions of the plot too, the issues of the relationship between reason and old age, freedom and power, love and lust, good and evil, which cannot exist one without the other.

The stage illusion is shattered right from the start, in terms of stage design, with a big red crate placed onto a wide empty stage, with an inscription JDP (Yugoslav Drama Theatre, T/N), Florence, 1536 (stage design Gorčin Stojanović, costume design Maria Marković Milojev). Highly aestheticized theatre language and self-irony will be denoted throughout the performance, for example, when actors temporarily break their characters in order to announce the scenes, or when they read the text demonstrating thus that they are not characters but actors and establishing Brechtian distance which requires closer attention on the part of the audience. It is in line with the Brechtian stylistic approach that we interpret the decision that the actors play more roles too, which leads to a relativization of their position, porousness of the border between the tyrant and the benefactors, the villain and the righteous man. Songs make the loose dramatic structure even looser, as well as the elements of ironic creation of spectacle. That is what, for example, happens at the end of the performance, when the confetti creates the joy over the “new beginning” after the murder of the tyrant, suggesting an ironical, disclosing attitude to the new beginning. History, the merciless teacher of life, has taught us that it is only the names of the new leaders that change, while the essence of the power remains painfully the same, firmly rooted in corruption, serving one’s own interests, and constantly putting people in misery.

Nora in the Cyberworld

Henrik Ibsen’s “Nora” also thematizes revolution, but in the scope of private, marital life. In his analysis of this play, Predrag Kosić has written: “A conflict between two people in love, and the society has never in the world literature been private, since great artists have always created the relationship between a man and a woman in order to depict contradictions of society which has always deprived people of their right to make decisions that concern their own lives”. In other words, in Ibsen’s dramatic reflection of the world, the feminine question is just an illustration of a bigger and more relevant issue, the issue of human liberation, which makes this play particularly important in the history of theatre.

In the production of the Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, directed by the young Botond Nagy, the festival audience had an opportunity to see an extraordinarily inspiring, seductive, techno Nora. The entire performance takes place behind a transparent curtain, onto which various drawings, photographs, and animations are projected, bearing associative meanings. The entire staging is very psychedelic, the plot balances between rational and irrational, between losing and regaining one’s reason, which reflects Nora’s deep emotional distress. It begins with a mesmerizing atmosphere, Nora (played by Kinga Ötvös) is alone on stage, her costume stylized, illuminated by red lights, waiting for an online shopping delivery. As the stage gets covered in boxes, her multifaceted drama begins, revealing close links between marital and material interests, as well as the problem of Nora’s deep emotional unfulfillment, which plunged her into the depths of disorder.

Nagy’s “Nora” is truly extraordinary, because it has brought a myriad of fascinating visual solutions that are deeply rooted in Ibsen’s play. For instance, the scene which best reveals her vulnerability and essential loneliness in her marriage is the one in which she is exchanging text messages with Torvald (played by Péter Árus). Their messages are projected onto the second level of the backdrop, a transparent glass box into which Nora is cramped both literally and symbolically. Accompanied by minimalistic, melancholic, electronic music, without a single word spoken, in a tense, stifling atmosphere, we read letters which reveal Nora’s fear of life, which powerfully illustrates the horribly gaping distance between them. We should also single out the truly magnificent ending which aroused a rare aesthetic feeling linking the power of drama and a striking visually-musical performance. The scene opens with Nora lying down, almost naked, in an empty aquarium set in the middle of the stage, like a fish out of water, without the ability to survive. The scene is accompanied by a painfully melancholic Robert Burns’ song “My Heart Is in the Highlands”, performed by Arvo Pärt. Once we reach the famous scene in which Nora expresses her need to become human and to get rid of the marital chains, she decisively stands up, abandons the curled-up position, the corner she was pushed into and speaks up. She is still in the aquarium, but now in a stable, standing position, which underlines her resolve. The scene ends with her mesmerizing singing of “I Don’t Love You Anymore”. After that, Nora steps out of the aquarium, or out of the glass bell, she tears down the final, paper wall, and passes through it without looking back, symbolically demonstrating that every wall can be torn down.

 

written by Ana Tasić

translated from Serbian by Vesna Radovanović

Photo credits István Biró

Published on 23 December 2019