a disturbing case from Moldova

The tabloid never sleeps. In Moldova, Boris Ungureanu was shot by his father, the mayor from Hancesti. With a shotgun. One shot. Deadly. The father protects himself by saying that there was a weird connection between son and mother. She was giving him a lot of cash for dirty purposes. He couldn't take it anymore. What looks like a simple boring everyday situation hides much more... This case, presented by Chisinau Journal, is quite interesting for raising some important questions: How does a father reacts in a case of reversed Oedipal Complex, like this one? How does hysterical symptoms, especially those connected to strong sibling relations that I identify here between mother and father, affect children? And I am talking about children of hysterics. Can we launch the hypothesis that they take at some point the role of parents, due to age difference, that can work in a reversed way? And that is highly disturbing for a parent with authority: to become his own child’s child. But the way out exists. This guy found the most unfortunate version of it.

Guilty of Dreaming of You

This short slideshow tells a long story of loneliness, or at least the single-o version. Highly inspiring for my next sideshow. I still try to figure out the lonely charater as a freak of nature, a rarity, an ultimate outcast in a world of being-together.

chicken

Art made by chicken

Felix

He was one of the most talented directors to come. He encouraged me a lot to start directing and our long discussions changed my perspective on theatre. This is all that he left behind. i found them a couple of years later in the student house where he was living. he just dissapeared at some point and i don't know anything about him. Last time when i saw him, he was sleeping at the train station and was asking for money. i also gave him a cd with beastie boys then and he looked happy.

not fair

from Married to the Sea

hats

from Married to the Sea, the Champagne of comics

Arvo Part - Fur Alina

the blade fo grass has the status of a flower

Balanescu Quartet at Urania – Budapest

This concert was taking place in relation to a Hungarian movie premiere, that I won’t talk about. Balanescu made the soundtrack and tours now with the movie. This was the firs gig ever with this new composition. Brand new songs, full of intensity and passion as Balanescu presented it in English before. He was so shy and modest on the mike. But him talking was a complete opposition to him playing. First of all, the outfit: a colorful long coat that looked too big and his typical hat. Already a character, his outfit comes as a necessary tool to hide an introverted self I guess, a hysterical identification to hide an absent body. But just for a moment. When he had his violin, everything exploded. He was not playing, he was dancing. He was changing faces, now sad, now laughing with a big mouth, now a small baby, now a huge monster, now growing, now getting small. Balanescu playing the violin is a Misha Katz conducting. And the music for all this process... a true project of corporeal transformation through sound. Balanescu’s spastic body puts up with his quartet a visual attack where sound is becoming the most real mark of his corporeality. It was explicitly materialized for audience in his struggle with his violin. For the spectator it was a tough experience of the entire nervous system. This is what I would call one of the last experiments to actively end the process of representation through sound. A la Merleau Ponty, Balanescu claims through his music “not the possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine.” His body on stage expresses through sound first of all exactly this lively concreteness.

Pleasant Days (2002)

Director: Kornél Mundruczó

Kornél Mundruczó is one of my favorite Hungarian directors and I went to this movie with a big open heart, not to mention that my friend Gergo who took me there was completely ecstatic about his latest movie, Delta. But surprise! With my entire positive attitude, this was one of my worst experiences in a Hungarian cinema. This movie just doesn't work. I accuse the script, the actors and the director. The good image makes it better a bit but at some points you have the feeling that you are in a hip hop music video from Eastern Europe with all the urban clichés of dirt possible. Minimalism just doesn't work in all cases, even if I am a fan of this aesthetic. Without a strong plot, without strong actors that have something to show and some scenes to act, you can't make a whole movie. I've read somewhere that 3/4 is improvised and the director was pretty proud of that...I won't make a fuss out of it unless I want to blame someone else for my failure. And this is the perfect case that improvisation doesn't work all the time. Or we are not all Godards... But there is another big problem here: by making this extreme micro-realist experiment, Mundruczó falls into the trap of being a misogynistic author. What’s the purpose of all this? One can fairly say: abusing his women characters and his feminine cast in a pleasure of masculine domination. And that is done pretty well. A huge disappointment. I have to see Delta to wipe this bitter taste.

A Place in the Sun (1951)

Director: George Stevens

Filmed partially on Lake Tahoe, a place of nice memories for me, this old Hollywood movie, a box office failure but awarded with 6 Oscars, really pissed me off. The main character, George Eastman, is constructed as a modernist tragic hero from a Camus play (the movie is actually based on Theodore Dreiser's novel "An American Tragedy" from 1925, the title is pretty clear). Going deeper, the plot is based upon the true story of Chester Gillette, who murdered his pregnant girlfriend in 1906. He was tried, convicted and executed in 1908. The ghost of the actual victim, Grace Brown, is said to haunt the house where she lived in New York. Instead of a good ghost movie we have an awful discourse on how unrealistic it is to break your class and status barriers in trying to dream of something that you can never achieve. Conservative bullshit at its purest this movie tells you nicely to be happy with what you have and never try to get more. Unless you want to deal with your tragic guilt of breaking divine rules. And we all know that you don’t want to do that, wouldn’t you?

and i didn't say anything about the women characters that are the most stereotypical boring uninteresting figures i've seen for a while...

The Tiger Lillies at Trafo - Budapest

First impact, the audience. Kind of scary. I definitely had different expectations when I entered the big Trafo studio. The chairs were put in nice rows and old women with their husbands were waiting for the musical performance. No freaks, no Goths, no clowns, nothing that I expected. The Budapest crowd was formed of old ladies, corporate middle-agers and a bunch of nice Western lost tourists. This should be interesting, I said to myself, knowing the songs and Tiger Lillies reputation. And indeed it was. But straight to the show: cabaret to the bone, cheap clown makeup, slap-stick comedy show outfits, typical gags with poor acting, falsetto voice a la castrato opera, playing with toy music instruments and so on. All the Tiger Lillies arsenal that I could dream of. And everything functioned brilliantly. I had a 10 times stronger feeling than watching a John Waters movie: everything is so bad and theatrical that strikes you and makes you stay there into the illusion, in their sad and hysterical world, with their pimps and whores and freaks and killers and circus kids. By keeping an eye on the beautiful theatricality you are not getting out of the illusion but in a Brechtian way, you follow what’s beneath, you get straight into its reality. That you know it’s illusionary. This was my first musical experience of this type: through music, I even got into their characters’ stories, their little gags and their melancholic parts. The public was incredibly receptive: they laughed and cried and applauded. They knew their songs and asked for more. But one thing I still missed: a good old cabaret atmosphere, loud and smoky, drinking alcohol and joking during the show. Coming from the other side of the performance, we, the audience, were not doing the right thing, we were out of the picture. And that was most impressive in their show: a certain type of performance asks for a certain type of spectators that they should slowly become, and that has power and trangressive force. What I thought I would never like in a show I liked it here: their great mannerism, the fact that they played the same songs and gags that they played over and over again for thousand times and you could see that. Their apparent boredom only made them more intense and the atmosphere more potent. All the time during the show I had one friend in mind: Olli (this is his website, just in case), an old clown from Switzerland who told me one amazing thing: a good clown doesn’t have to bring anything new, you need only one good gag that you can do it all your life, till it becomes perfect, a clown is not an actor, we function different. Tiger Lillies are not clowns for sure but they function in a similar way to Olli.

taking music offstage

Trying to think about my favorite songs for last couple of months, I realized with great surprise that most of them were used in one show or another. In directing school, we always made fun of people that are using their playlist to illustrate the performance with no real connection to the show itself. Just a good way to promote the music that they like. I was surprised to see my final list: most of the songs were part of performances because they fit well with particular moment not because I liked them in a particular way outside the show. Afterwards I started listening them more intensively and got addicted. In a way, I plagiaristically identified with my shows and I started to live in the frameworks that I set on stage. What else did I take from stage to everyday life? Have to think more about it, because my shows are about me but on the other hand I am about my shows and other stuff that I create.

This is my short playlist:

1. Bauhaus – Antonin Artaud
2. Graham Reynolds – your move, peterbilt
3. Jay-Jay Johanson – Alone Again
4. Jelly Roll Morton – Tia Juana
5. Julie London – Come on-a My House
6. Beirut – Scenic World
7. Diamanda Galás – 25 Minutes to Go
8. Ian Dury – Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick
9. B.B. King – B.B. Boogie
10. Billie Holiday – Don't Explain

The Tiger Lillies 7 Deadly Sins Show in Budapest on Saturday

Good old cabaret, Brechtian to the bone but with a nice splash of English culture. Can't wait to see the show, I have the tickets in my pocket.

Understanding Derrida: presence on stage

Dealing with performer’s presence on stage, one major problem comes into play. In Derrida's approach, presence is not reality but a reality effect, one that can be associated with charisma, a main tool in constructing systems of domination. By invoking actor's presence as a major tool in relating audiences, you are inevitably linked to a repressive status-quo. That was bothering me for a while and I couldn't see a way out. The answer arrived surprisingly from my last performance, through Jeanne Hamilton’s special being-on-stage. I realized it quite late and thanks to her I understood Derrida's point. Here it is: in order to cut the links with existing systems of dominance that are enforced by performance mechanism, a performance must find ways to deconstruct performer's presence. This is how we did it: in highly intense scenes where the performer’s self was "stretched and exposed" what we were involving was an explicit refusal of the performer to make a greater investment of the self in one procedure or another. By using the good old alienating effect, the emotional commitment in acting was distanced and demystified. The presence of the realist actor that comes from inside was left behind. What was still there was the intensity of the moment that was showed and not lived.


rehearsing what we called "the confession scene", Jeanne with one of her self portraits

The white priestess of black magic

i found this amazing story here. An Austrian woman becomes the spiritual leader in Nigeria and she claims a return to a pre-Christian pre-Muslim faith. An example of hysterical creativity that brings empowerment.

/wrists : the emo danger

I had enough. Every day I read or hear negative news about emos, these kids between 11 and 17, always crying, always sad, extreme posers and suicidal. Everyone agrees that they are completely ridiculous, dangerous for themselves and others and they need some good therapy.
Young girls accused of being emo deny it with a lot of anger. Same situation with the bands. At some point you wonder if there is such a thing as emo. But what is behind this entire mainstream story that I apparently cannot escape?
In Eastern Europe reactions to this subculture take a classical expression: another dangerous Western import that destroys our children. Jokes on emos’ expense got here in poor translations from English, other local jokes are adapted and all of them create a new category to make fun of. But in relation to them, another-dangerous-alienating-element-that-we-should-beware comes in discussion: internet and its destructions, how massively it influenced emo subculture.
Parents are affected also by this media interest in emos, they are scared that their child can become emo and kill themselves. Clinical discourse intervenes here: from the first signals that parents or teachers are dealing with an emo, they should send the sick person to a therapist.
In 2008 in Mexico reactions against emos started to get organized. Various anti-emo groups attacked teenagers in Mexico City, Querétaro, and Tijuana as an opened reaction to their queerness. This aspect is highly emphasized by their critics everywhere, they are directly accused of being queer or gay, in relation to their display of emotions and tenderness together with their fashion statement where differences between emo girls and boys are missing. Queerness is often associated with the theatricality of their display, a hysterical symptom of grabbing attention.
In Russia, a law is about to be voted by Duma to ban emo websites and emo fashion at schools or state buildings, based on the assumption that emo is a dangerous teen trend promoting anti-social behaviour and suicide.
In Romania, Timisoara Police created a collective to prevent events where emo kids are involved. They go in schools to talk to parents about emos. On the other hand, Romanian Orthodox Church reacted also on several times on the emo danger, considered framed by a bigger move away from traditional values and morality. Priests spoke freely about the involved manipulation, corruption and destruction of contemporary Western subject. Romanian newspapers signal that in every school there are at lest 2-3 kids that are emo, especially fifth and sixth grade and are complaining about lack of statistics regarding emo kids.
Emos are attacked on music and fashion grounds as lacking authenticity and being lame copies of Goths, punks or Japanese manga characters. Attention-grabbing effect, posing and histrionic behaviour are generating a whole subculture bashing. Journalists share a charming optimism: soon enough this fashion will die like all the others. Soon enough they hope. What can I say, things haven’t changed much: it was the same reaction towards women in the nineteenth century, as soon as they became visible, having a voice, hysteria came into place to put into mental institutions the most active ones. These teenagers have a voice now, quite a strong one, and with similar tactics are put down exactly like hysterical women a while ago. Besides the hysterical elements of emo culture that I mentioned here and are constantly under attack, there is one more “dangerous” in its subversiveness: their struggle against sexual difference. Many of the jokes are making fun of boys’ lack of masculinity and their queerness. I wonder how a 12 years old can act more masculine…but the main issue here is the heard voice of this generation that has clearly something to say. The response to teenagers’ demand for agency is a typical one: institutionalizing and silencing.