Extracts from a letter - three

When I was following the rehearsals in the town of Saint George, I learnt a new instruction, which I never heard before. It wasn't a seldom case, when an actor heard the director asking him to play his partner. You are not playing yourself, your are acting him. Sounded the instruction.
What does this mean, I asked myself, how does this make sense, what is the meaning if an actor starts to act something, which is not based on his own character, but on one different. And after hearing several times, I asked the director himself, what he meant by this.
It was a cigarette break, we were standing out on the cold and dirty corridor, it was under construction in fact, they repainted it for the premier. This play was performed in a small studio of theatre, which was based in a grey office-block, a department of the state health-care company. People, who came to take out or prolong their insurance were queuing up at the other end of the corridor, separated from us with a glass-door. They used a different entrance, but it happened, that clients due to some misconception entered on the gate of the theatre studio, and asked about health-care. After I asked my question, a middle-age lady entered from the street, a few steps above us. She looked upon us, and stoped at the top of the staircase. Excuse me sir, Administratia Asigurărilor? Althaught we didn't look at all as any administration office, people are prepared for unusual circumstances in this country. She didn't know, if she had entered to the high estimated office, or somewhere else, something unknown, who knows where, so she was as modest and polite, as possible. She was in need for something, so she had humilate herself.
The director showed her the way. She contatly descended on the stairs, and passed through us with eyes falled down.
You see, she was not acting herself, she was acting us. She didn't know who we were, and what she could expect from us, she went under us, she acted us. The man, who is the care-taker of the building, who came before the rehearsal, because I asked him to fix the circulation of the heating, as we were freezing in the past days, he was also acting us. He went above us, as he considers us as intruders in the health insurance's building.
Acting the other person, oh, that's a wise discovery. How rare is a man, who never plays others, but remains himself under any circumstances. How big is the tempation to act the one, who you face with, either beacuse you have more power, than he does, or exactly because you have less. There's a potency, which drives you to go above, to go under.
Just to fulfil the expactions, to follow the track, which is marked.
When one shows the sign of being above you, your path is marked, and the opposite works aswell, when you see people giving you the higher position, it is not simple to stay on the same level, your own level, a human being, equal to any other.

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.

Eighteenth note

I dreamed about two female lions this night. We escaped from them into my room with my mother and my oldest brother. I was holding the door, but they were stronger, they pushed it in, ran a circle in the room, made some wounds, and they went out. We tried to make a barricade, so they won't come in again, and a little later we moved back to my brothers room, because it was easier to close his door. My father was outside, and we tried to worn him with some form of telecommunication (maybe phone) to be careful.

I am in Romania, and I am participating on the rehearsals of a play about an encounter of a girl, who does not speak and a royal court. I do not have any duty on these rehearsals, I am only here to listen and to watch. The theatre is the one, where we have been together at the end of last summer, and where you were waiting with me for the director. The evening before, we had been in another town nearby, on the lecture of the Danish lama, and after on the party with him, in a discotheque. Than we slept in that big open garden, which seemed for the first glimpse abandoned, but after putting up our tent, you noticed some clothes hanged out on a rope, and in the morning a woman came out from the house and looked at us in a frightened way. We both haven't slept a lot, it started to rain, and you ran out to fix the tent. When we were waiting at the porter's lodge of the stage door, you fell asleep lying on some chairs.
This town is very small, everything is very close to each other, which I enjoy a lot. I rented out a room from a young girl, who is teaching art in several schools of the town. My room is almost empty, except for some plastic dolls in the corner, and her drawings on the walls, a lot of big nudes. This apartment is about 10 minutes walk from the theatre. The atmosphere of a theatre in a small town reminds me a little bit the experience, which I had at Odin. The mystery of big and untouchable actors disappear, and theatre becomes a profession, as normal, as anything else.