My favs for 2008

I was thinking a lot lately for the highlights of last year, what happened and what changed. A lot of stuff but here are just some personal favorite items:

Favorite movie: Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski by Werner Herzog - even if it was made in 1999, I watched it so many times in 2008 that i've learned most of the lines and had favourite parts for special moments. I anticipate that it will be a well-watched movie this year also.








Favorite performance: The Funeral by Péter Nádas, directed by László Bocsárdi, Comedy Theatre Bucharest, I've already wrote about this show here









Favorite album: Beirut – Gulag Orkestar from 2006 - happy to discover Beirut in 2008, it can change my mood in a second (maybe that's why I've listened it so many times) and then you cannot stop listening to it, you have to go for the whole album on and on.



Favorite art exhibit: Love, Erotica, Passion Exhibition in Prague - erotic themes in 15th to 19th century at the Clam Gallas Pallace in Husova Street. I hope they still have this exhibition. Well organized, wonderful possible explorations. The art pieces were taken from Prague City Archives, National Gallery and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. Amazing expressions of sexuality in so many twisted ways.

Favorite book: Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria by Juliet Mitchell, from 2001 - this book made my life easier and gave me a lot of exciting ideas for my work and being-in-the-world (not only the academic one)









Favorite live show: CocoRosie at Trafo - a complete show: music, performing, costumes, images, interaction and Sierra and Bianca, I had it in my mind for so long.





Favorite moment of 2008: open rehearsal of Jehanne Complex, the idea that we actually did it, and there were people there to close the performing circle. A great experience all in all, it gave me a great feeling concerning theatre, my projects and what you can do with amazing people that you can meet in so many contexts but never like in a performing situation.

Two Romanian performances in Budapest

I went last week to two shows from a shabby theatre from Bucharest that i would never think of attending in a local situation. But my subject re-position, on the margins of Romanian culture, made me curious about what these awful Romanians with their horrible theatre culture have to say. Last week i had a great feeling: to be detached from a culture that is stuck in pre-1968 epistemology that is, first of all, vomited on stage.

But about the two shows and their complete opposition:

One was made without a director, specially fit for 2 old actors unable to move and get out of their emplois. The rest of the actors on stage were simply there, no acting involved, always ready to give a line or to create a situation for their two decrepit stars in order to produce the big joke that everyone in the audience was crazy about. Disgusting shite. The worst part besides the first-year acting school cliches was their usage of a famous Russian play that brings public for sure. One of my all time favourite plays with so many insights and dark complicated parts was transformed into a cheap slapstick comedy with no characters whatsoever, just 2 dead actors on stage, and dead in a Peter Brook way.

The situation changed for the next show: a Hungarian play staged by a Hungarian hysteric male director with a strong creative standpoint. Same company, that he was telling me about after the play: "Isn't it amazing that i manage to do it here?" The performance was a mise-en-scene in the most sincere way: in a Butlerian way, Bocsardi shows the fake of heterosexual matrix, nothing more than an act played by some actors who don't know what they act but they have to play for an audience with patriarchal expectations. Impossibility of representation, relation spectator-performer, end of narration, dilating the performing body, the character as abjection and many more ideas are explored in this small show. One of the best directors that I've seen for last years.
I wanted to read some reviews after the show and it was oh so predictable: Romanian critics crushed the show in their specific style, their Christian rightist instincts never lie. And they are true in pushing this show on the margins: it is definitely dangerous for their theatrical milieu. the most apprecieted part was the moment when the Actress has a long monologue on showing her love and affection for the Actor, the place where the matrix is shown just in order to be deconstructed and proven empty later. The critics got only this moment of expressing "noble feelings" in an old acting school way and that's everything they enjoyed in the show. That was for me the moment where I felt the tension in a special way: they started well they can't ended in this patriarchal manner. I was hoping that the show will go on. And it did. Just in order to show that it is just acting, that they can fool you, that there is nothing behind, the stage is empty, no essentialist oppressions are hidden there and are just shown, acted out, put on display, not lived. And the last scene worked perfect in this sense: the dead characters were all the time on stage in their coffins, they are killed once more by the actor, in a gesture that proves their emptiness, a lack of flesh, a lack of corporeality, just full body masks.

Damn right: Death to the characters!