Twenty-third note

The Theatre Ensemble of Sepsiszentgyörgy is here in Budapest. They perform 4 or 5 times different plays, the Yvonne aswell, which I have followed the rehearsals of. Yesterday we watched with Bence a solo performance of a young actress, which I have heard about from her, but haven't seen, because she did'nt play it during the two months, while I was there.
She was the only actor, who was there from the ensemble yesterday, but I met with some of the crew: one of the stage manager womans, who's laughter is strong like a lion's roar; Olga, an always smily tire-woman, who introduced herself to me like this: "I'm Olga from the county..."; a property woman; some technicians and stage hands. It was so much pleisure to see and meet with them, to hear their usual (and actually very lousy) signal at the begining of the show, asking you the switch off your mobile.
I am looking forward so much to see how far did they get with the Yvonne since the premier, when I last seen it, and meet them. They are going to play it tonight in the studio of National Theatre.
They told me they are going to renew one of the plays, which tehy used to play a few years ago, and which were famous about, happy to hear, that I can see a version of The Miracle (A csoda - it is an adaption of Tamási Áron plays, who is a Transylvanian playwright and the nominal of their theatre.) Maybe we could visit the town after our summer workshop, what do you think? I definatly one to go and see, but to go with you to Taize is maybe more tempting.
Wednesday we are going with Zsófi and another girl to Pennabilli, a small village in Italy for a street theatre performance. Just a few days, on next Tuesday we are returning already. Hich-hiking again. But this time not alone. God bless.

Uncle Vanya

Marvelous performance in Kolozsvár (Cluj Napoca - in Transylvania) of the play of Checkov directed by a Romanian director; Andrei Şerban. The sense of his love of the space around us. Genius ideas are the most simple solutions. Strike of a genuis is to explore them.
First we sit on the edge of the stage facing the round shaped auditorium. The actors are sitting scattered in the rows. Here takes place the first act. They climb, jump, run and balance around in the whole space, over the balustrade of the chairs, up on the banister of the balcony... There's a dance at the end, which describes with few sharp gestures the relations between the characters. Afterwards Sonia and Vanya stayes seated in the rows, all lights fade, exept for the lightbulbs of the huge chandelier in the middle. It slowly starts to descend right above Vanya. It is not a fluent movment, it jolts as the machinche is making it come down.
It stops in a little distance above him. First the yellow lightbulbs go out, and there's only the cold blue light of a round neon just above him, and finally it fades aswell.
Light comes back, and Sonya and Vanya are showing us, we should enter the stage.
During the second, third and fourth act we are seated in the middle of the big stage. The flies above stage is enthrallingly high. All the space has athmosphere of an enormous workshop, a place where people do their work, with the raw materials: ropes, iron tubes and other constructions, spotlights, and walls made of bricks. They play around us: at the edge's of the stage on small platforms, in the glass cabin of the stage-manager (with a stong red curtain on the backwall of the cabin), above on the technician's balconies (there are two balconies above each other in around 25 - 40 meters high), on the small backstage; and between us: all chairs are in a distance from each other - the actors walk in between them several times, in most of the cases they were telling monologues there.
The backstage is curtained off at the begining of the second act, you do not expect that something will happen there aswell. Later, suddenly you hear it starts to rain over there. They pull up the curtain, you can see a small model of a house surrounded with mud. The rain is falling here, it is illuminated with cold lights coming sharply from certain directions - creating a big shadows on the faces, when the actors enter into this mud. There are shelves behind, they are divided into small boxes. On some of them files, and some others - as you can discover later - live doves. On the performance, which I have seen they started to move in the best moments, when their wing-beat supported the meaning of the actor's sentences in a batiful, poetic way.
When actors go into this backstage, they get covered with mud, and wet from the humidity of the rain.
It is played in Hungarian (by Hungarian actors), but everything is subtitled in Romanian. Even the begining and the ending of each act is projected. There are tv-screens everywhere around showing all subtitles, all the time.
Elena, the wife of the professor turns her speach into different languages, mostly English, and sometimes French and German aswell. Others take over from her, an answer her in the language, what she used: to please her, to be ironic with what she have said, to show they have same accomplishments, as she does.
The whole evening carries irony and beauty at the same time. Deeply lived situations, but a distance from each event. The close and empathic relation to the situation and story of these people, but a show being in theatre all the time.
At the end the safety curtain mounts, and actors leave to the auditorium to bow. They are playing, standing up in different places of the auditorium to bow - more and more behind, they even go up on the balcony and slowly disappear behind a row of chairs. We - the spectators - are standing up on stage and applauding for the actors, who are waving for us in the auditorium.

I have seen this performance with big luck and a lot of benevolence of very kind actress. We were hitch-hiking from Saint George (Sepsiszentgyörgy) with Bence till Cluj, we were longing to see this performance, because we heard very good comments about it. I got the phonenumber of an actress, Péter Hilda, who was working at Saint George, but now she is at Cluj, and acting in this performance. There is double cast, that evening Hilda was not playing. She made some calls for us to get some places for us, but they told her, there is no chance. The seats are limited, and there were already extra chairs for that night. But still we met in front of the theatre, and she was leaving no stone unturned to fit us in. I have met her once before. And in the last moment we got the last seats. She got a chair aswell, and stayed. She said, she loves this performance so much, that she can not leave it, if she is there.

The meeting of the physical and the virtual travel book

You are here. I should write my paper for university class. The last one like this.
Because of this I stayed at home, instead of hiking with Attila, Bence and You. How much I would like to be there!

Fragments

We have been in Austria yesterday with Bence. We have seen a performance of Peter Brook. Three actors have shown on stage five small texts of Beckett. An amazing woman, and two good actors. Very simple, very short (about 50-55 minutes, which has pased so fast, that I haven't noticed), very accurate.
Almost no set (exept for the lighting, which they have used, and some small objects).
They started with a piece about a blind and a cripple. (Rough for Theatre I.) They both want something from each other, they try different methods to find somekind of relationship, they tease each other, they talk, one helps the other, the cripple even hits the blind. I could feel both of them are acting, and reciting the text in a way, which makes easy to recognize, that these are lines in theatre play, told by an actor.
But afterwards the woman (Kathryn Hunter) came on seen, and told the text of Rockaby. She was sitting in a chair almost all the time, sometimes she rocked, as if she was sitting in a rocking chair. Once she stood up, and did it with chair, as if someone else would sit in it, and rock with it. She was talking in a capturing way. Exact, dry and a littlebit sad sound. And from this point the performance started to wing it's way.
They have made loose game with the texts of Beckett. The last scene was a beatiful fusion of childishness and old age; three woman sitting on a banch, remembering of their young years, leaving and returning to the banch, one by one, and whispering about the one who left to each others ears. The original text (Come and Go) gives the instruction, that the one who leaves, should completly dissapear. In their version, she always walked a few meters away, and than stayed, showing her back, as children do, when they are the seekers and they count in the play hide and seek.

Music suggested by Bence

Bence brought the cognition of this music from his time in France. I think you will like it. Olivia Ruiz: J'traîne des pieds...