Festival at Pennabilli

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.

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.

Twenty-first note - Chalk Circle in your town

The Chalk Circle Theatre (Krétakör) will be on tour on the Festspillene i Bergen with their play, The Ice on the second and third of June.
It is a tough and cruel performance based on a contemporary russian novel. It is not directed by their leader, but by another young director, who already worked with them before.
Probably one of the last chances to see the ensemble together, because from the next theatre season they are going to alter and probably to split.

Poem by János Pilinszky

The soil is not soil.
The number is not a number.
The letter is not a letter.
The sentence is not a sentence.

God is God.
Flower is flower.
Tumour is tumour.
Winter is winter.
Relocation camp is a pale
territory with an uncertain form.

One day workshop at Vestjyllands Højskole (methods)

About the workshop which Olga and I led at the school.
My main goal was to get to know a little bit the people, who attended the workshop, and to show some ideas, some exercises to them, so they can get to know a little bit my way of thinking and working. And to awaken some searching for the reason for doing theatre today.

One of the exercises was that I asked them to create scenes, when they are suprising us. They were working in couples.
This execise can open you towards creativity. We are all waiting for a suprise, beacuse we all know that this was the exercise. What can still be suprising in this situation?
Suprise is an important tool of an actor. Breaking the expectations. When one expects something to happen, and this expectation brakes, does not come true, he can get suprised, and his attention rises.

After each exercise I encoureged the participants to give comments on each other's work.
I am asking the group to express with words what they have experienced (and not to judge if it was bad or good). I find it very useful, because on one hand the spectators have to find words for their experiences (and translating an experience into language means that you are shaping it, and it can help you to remember it later), and on the other hand it can be useful feedback for the creators - what did my spectators get out of what I have shown. Maybe they thaught about something completely different, what I wanted to show. Maybe they didn't understand, what I wanted to be understood.
In these converstations I am also just a member of the group, who gives his own comments. Sometimes of course I need to pay attention to speak at last, not to affect other's way of expressing their experiences.

An other exercise was that I asked them to make their partner do something without using language, or explaining him with pointing at things or body language. The task is that you have to create a situation on which your partner reacts naturally with doing, what you want to make him do. This act should come as a reflex on your actions.
These were the tasks:
Make me laugh.
Sing a song.
Do the opposite of what I am doing.
Take something out of the room.
Tell a story.
Suprise them.
Take another person to the other side of the room.
Close your eyes. (for a longer while, not just a wink)
Proove, that you like them.

I did with them the transformation of drawings exercise aswell, which I did with you aswell. When they have to choose one of a series of abstract drawings and transform this picture into a sequence of movments. Others have to guess afterwards, which drawing you have chosen.

I had a list of words with me aswell, which are describing different qualities of theatre, and they had to choose the 3 most important for them.
These were the words (I write in brackets, how many votes did one get): emotions (6), story (6), liveness (4), sincerity (4), attention (4), interaction (3), visuality (2), encounter (2) music (1), dance (1), sentences, suprise, imitation, contrast, newness (those, which do not have number, did not get any vote).
There were 11 people voting: 1 from New Zealand, 3 from Poland, 1 from Hungary and 6 from Danmark - 9 girls and 2 boys, mainly in their twenties, one of them was around 50.

The last one and half hour they spent with making scenes in small groups of 3 or 4. I asked them to find something which is disturbant for them in the smaller or bigger world around them, in the community of which they are a part of. A problem, which they can not solve, but which they would really like to, if they would have the power to do so. And they had to make a scene out of this problem.
At this last part there was a group, which made an amazing scene. They were working with the problem of facing with myself, finding my role, my goals, searching for the answer of the question "who am I". They disappeared, we looked after them for a long time. Time was running, we were getting close to dinertime, we wanted to show the scenes to each other. We have found them finally, they were still not ready, they were in a big discussion. I was afraid, that they haven't got further than just discussing theoretically about the problem. But they did finally a beatiuful-beatiful scene. They found 3 big (higher than a person) mirrors on wheels. They started as something very personal, very everyday like with the mirrors, like looking their bodies in them, combing their hair, etc. After a while all these movments became a dance, they started to climb on the mirrors, to push them around in the room. They attached their bodies to the mirrors, as moving them, and we could see ourselves, and other parts of the room turning around in these big glass surfaces. They took their time. The wheels were squeaking while moving in different rithms. At the end, one of them, the boy suddenly left his mirror, than the girl next to him left her own mirror, and reached the backside of his one, and the boy walked out from the room.

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.