Twenty-second note

I have seen an interesting performance, full of energy of young people, students from high school. It was something unusual, unexepcted from a high-school group, I like they have the braveness to leave the path of high-school theatre groups. Their leader is guy nearly my age, which I think is also great for them, and for him aswell. It is not a routin for him how to lead a group like this, how to work with them without text, based mainly on confronting them with themselves.
When one has no routin, of course it takes longer time to reach results, and of course he makes mistakes, but these mistakes are useful, and they are signs of true intention.
Before and aftrewards I had some beers with friends, and friends of friends.
We are busy organizing the international workshop. Lot of questions. I invited another girl, Dorka, who studies directing in Transylvania to lead the workshop with me. It would be inspiring to create something together but with different aspects off different leaders. The idea is, that each person works with each leader, and at the end we put some scenes together in one work demonstration.

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.

Nineteenth note

Back in Budapest, an intermission in the rehearsals in Transylvania. I am reading Ödön von Horváth plays. Greatly written bitter dialogues, which slowly build up a story. People, who are struggleing, and keep making wounds on each other. This is the way they are only able to interact with each other, this is how they are able to express their pain. He was half Czech, half Hungarian originated, and he lived in Vienna, Austria, and wrote in German.
One track on the CD of Magnus's band (the Blood Sweat Drum 'n' Bass Big Band) perfectly matched to one of his plays; Kasimir and Karoline, a story about a young couple, who splits up. If I would make a performance or a film out of this play, I would definitely use this music.

And a cruel and fantastic Romanian movie: 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. As minimalistic as possible, one camera (sometimes in the hand), no music. All in behalf of telling a story of an illegal abortion in the Romanian dictatorship, in the eighties.

The Daughter of the Turkey-herd Woman - first part

We are making a performance of a Transylvanian Gipsy folk tale with the ensemble of Föld Theatre. The title is Wise of the World. To collect material to our performance I am reading other Gipsy stories, they are amazingly beatiful.
There is one, with an enthralling description of a love relationship which goes through on abundance of tribulations.
The Daughter of the Turkey-herd Woman
There was once a very wealthy king and a queen, who had no child. So they had take on someone to take care of their poultry. They employed a turkey-herd woman. After several years she became pregnant, and at the same time the queen became pregnant aswell. They have given birth to their babies on the same day. Both babies, the daughter of the turkey-herd woman and son of the king and queen were beatifully shining, and the entire white world (= the world where humans live) was shining from their beauty, when the parents were holding up them, to show them to the sun.
When they became six , and they had to go to school, the king has decided, that since the girl has born in the court, so it is his duty to pay her education, they will go to the same school.
They went to school each morning together, hand in hand, and the young prince thought that the girl is his sister.
Once, when they were fourteen years old their classmates told to the boy: "This girls is not your sister, she is the daughter of the turkey-herd woman, and you are the son of the king.
The boy didn't want to beleive, what they were saying, he went home, and asked his dad, if the girl was his sister or not. The king told him the truth.
The boy mused on what he had heard. And he decided, if the girl is not his sister, she will be her wife. And on the next day, when they were coming home from the school he nipped the girl, and another day he stroked her. The girl didn't counter the approaching of the boy. They matched to each other more and more, so much that in secret they started to make love to each other.
But one day the king has noticed from his window what the youngsters are doing, he called for his wife.
"Don't you notice something on these two kids"
"Not at all, they're playing, and going to school together."
"Mind, what I'm saying to you; some day we are going the have a big scandal, that God gave a child to this girl."
So the queen ambushed them again, and when she realized, that they are kissing and petting each other; she deliberated with her husband over what shall they do. They can not permit their son to marry a girl with a poor background. They decided that when the prince will finnish the elementary school, they will send him to study in Germany, so he forgets the girl.
The prince obeyed his parents will. They made him a passport, and escorted him to the trainstation.
The boy was not even on half way of the journey, when he took his golden pen, and started to write a letter on paper, white as the snow. My true love, thanks for God, I'm fine. I'm here and here. I love you very much."
But it was the king, who found the envelope on the gate-post. He became angry and burned it in the fireplace. And when the boy has arrived to the school, his first thought was the girl, so he wrote to her again. But the king received it again.

Second note

I had an idea today, how we are going to continue with Kerek a káposzta (Round Cabbage), our performance with Anikó.
On one hand I would like to continue performing it, because, it was succesful, we had audience, and people keep asking, when are we going to show it again.
But on the other hand, if we would do it the same way, as we used to a year ago, it wouldn't be inspiring for me.
I remember in the last times, when I used to play with LEGO, I was only interested in creating some buildings, little towns maybe, but I didn't really play with them afterwards. I feel sometimes similar interest with the performances, which I am directing. The process of creation is interesting, and some performances (the first ones) are interesting, but than, when we are ready, a new subject needs to take away my interest.
You know, I would like to find forms and ways of making theatre, when something is not just an imitation on stage, but it really happens.
I think I am still far from this, but I'm on the way.
If something really happens, we really do something. Otherwise it is only talking about something.
For me these two games with the bottle, what we have played lately (one, which I didn't participate after our workshop in my grandparents appartment, and the other, what we played in Transylvania, on that very special and bizarr place, near that hunted house) were very interesting experinces. I wouldn't call them absolutly positive experiences, but I am very glad, that I had them.
I thought that in Kerek a káposzta we will make the audience sit in a circle. And we will play a bottle game with them. We will do what the one, whom the bottle is pointing at, asks us to do. I don't want the whole performance to be improvised. I want some structures, which are ready, when the show begings, but I want a lot if things to be decided there, right at the time, when the performance is happening. We have to find the best form for this, with Anikó.