Saturday at the Pride: the two sides of the fence

Saturday was a special day. Together with more than 2000 people we marched for Budapest’s “Gay Dignity”. Remembering last year’s violent events and Jobbik’s political statement to do everything possible to stop the March, we expected another riot.

Friday was the first day of fall in Hungary with thunderstorms, wind and low temperatures. We waited for rain on Saturday also. But the weather and the March didn’t follow the predictable script. During the Pride, Andrassy utca looked awfully quiet, no locals to cheer on the sides. In front of the Opera there was one middle-aged woman dancing in support: she was applauded and cheered by the crowd. From some windows you could see other people watching. That was from our side of the fence. As some observed, Budapest Pride became mainly a TV event in terms of reaching audiences outside the event.

On the other side of the fence, like 100 meters away, extreme right-wing rioters were trying to get in but police did a great job in protecting the marchers. Concerning protesters, the only ones we have seen at the Pride were at the Hosok Tere entrance: two groups of skinheads surrounded by cops. They didn’t get in.

Otherwise, from our side the rioters were absent: we didn’t hear them, we didn’t see them and we could enjoy a very peaceful, cheerful, happy event.
Because they couldn’t get closer to throw stones, eggs, tomatoes and Molotov cocktails like last year, the protesters came with a plan B: a crowd of 500 neo-Nazis and skinheads went wild in Budapest's Jewish district. Riot police used tear gas and baton charges against the loud and violent xenophobic group. Police made more than 30 arrests. These people were using dangerous weapons and I heard that two guys with army knives were stopped earlier to enter the Pride. More details of this not-going-to-the-city-for-nothing adventure:

The rioters invaded the heart of the traditional Jewish Ghetto District, started a small fire, tore down signs and shouted threatening anti-Semitic vitriol. The attacks were witnessed by families of foreign Jews visiting the district for the current Budapest Jewish Cultural Festival.

One British tourist trying to argue with the rioters at the edge of the ghetto had to be rescued by police when he was verbally abused and physically assaulted by a gang of 20 attackers. A policeman who tried to break up a confrontation not far from there was knocked to the ground and kicked, as was a woman displaying a Gay Pride T-shirt while standing alone at a tram stop.

(from JTA)

Because how else can you solve a failed homophobic attack if not by an old-fashioned anti-Semitic rampage somewhere close to the Synagogue? These anti-Pride protesters come with a pretty coherent political discourse with their actions: hate all of them. I guess that last year old women hitting marchers with their big Bibles were in a different hate group than these guys...

Another interesting crowd that I actually saw on my way home from Blaha Luija Ter was made of Swedish football supporters. They were in town with their team and because they couldn't enjoy the Budapest tourist attractions, everything being closed in the center with the big fence that was protecting us, they decided to manifest their anger in a very particular way: they joined the extreme-right protesters in their homophobic attack on the March.... Another coherent activity for a day: start getting drunk in the morning, attack together with friendly locals the LGBT crowd or at least try to get in over the fence, get some tear gas from riot police, drink some more, go to the stadium and support your team in the cheerful hooligan style, yell some more and then get back home with your low-cost flight. Full extreme touristic program for a day.

I am still wondering what would have been without that huge fence in between. Will we need a bigger fence next year?

photos by Szandra Gonzales

when making art becomes trafficking

A perfect example of how false is the image of the innocent artist. The persons that were trafficking were professional stage artists, they really had a performance to do in Budapest:

MUMBAI: In yet another case of human trafficking, 18 passengers were arrested at Mumbai airport for trying to board a flight and travel to Budapest illegally on Saturday afternoon. The passengers, all of whom hail from Kerala, were intercepted at the immigration counter before they could board a Thai Airways' Mumbai-Istanbul-Budapest flight. They are currently in police custody. Last week, two Air India staffers were arrested for human trafficking. "These passengers were travelling on genuine visas, which were obtained from the Hungarian consulate in New Delhi,'' said a police official. "However, they had furnished incorrect documents claiming that they were stage artistes going to perform in Budapest,'' he added. This is the second time in the past five months that such a large number of passengers, travelling together on forged documents, have been arrested at the airport. Officials said eight passengers were stage artistes and acting as carriers for the 10 others. There were six women in the group. "The rest, who were feigning to be artistes, said they wanted to procure jobs in Budapest,'' senior inspector Dilip Patil said. "The artistes were to perform on March 31,'' he added.

via The Times of India

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!

Brecht – The Hardcore Machine at MU Theatre Budapest

A few words about Dunapart and the performing arts platform: a huge personal disappointment. An awful crowd, snobbish fancy dressed theatre goers and critics, talking some disgusting French, probably just for the beautiful intonations, claiming the last pantheon of being bourgeois: the experimental theatre.

I went to see one show that was so promising: Brecht the Hardcore Machine from Andras Urban Company, based on Brecht’s Buckow Elegies. It had its premiere last year in Berlin and it is supposed to represent a break with literary drama and post-dramatic theatre that is not performative enough for them and still too much based on texts. “This performance is not a play” they say. And I remember using the exactly same words two weeks ago about my Beckett trilogy. Not following a particular narrative, the performance approaches a young working girl that enters “the wonderful world of ideology and corporeality.”

And more they say: “Labour. Starvation. Sex. Power. Fun. Class struggle is not dead.” Not to mention the goody goody focus on the body of actors, very third theatre style. Very Barbaesque. Very exciting. The first feeling that something is fishy about this show was when I entered the small MU and I saw an awful exhibition a la bible belt post-feminism with pop art playmates spreading messages like “Dworkin and Queer are Dead”. Nothing to do with the show one might say. Not really I say. A show for me cannot exist outside the space of the performance, the artists’ usage of spectators with their breaths, their bodies, their nicely combed hair and their greedy eyes. And this public was just horrible. Together with the unfit space of MU for such a show.

Continuing with the show: beautiful ideas, generous attempts, ingenious solutions, hard working actors but a limited vision, a shitty director shitting his pants, not leaving the actors think with their bodies and dilate them just for the sake of some shitty fixed images, weak scenes and a personal gratification. And no hysterical creativity here. Trying to tell a retro-political revue they ended up with the most horrible clichés that made me feel embarrassed. But on the other hand, the commodification of Brecht is not new-fangled and it doesn’t have to be subtle all the time. Maybe the good news is that Brecht sells and is sold again and these guys proved it once again. Because as good ol’ Brecht said “What is theatre if not a night of good entertainment?”

Like Arpad Schilling after this bitter taste performance, I ended up dreaming of a theatre made in the forest where no one dares to come. Or like Tadeusz Kantor to secretly dream of all artists dropping dead.

Dunapart

I'm taking part at Dunapart. It's a platform of contemporary Hungarian performing arts and there are some 30 performances within four days, mostly theatre and dance shows, numerous experiments which are crossing these borders. and most important, with English subtitles! It's time to get over Hungarian micro-realism. and, yeah, it starts this evening.

Silent as the Grave 8

Silent as the Grave 3

Silent as the Grave at ICR

photos by Claudia Martins

Silent as the Grave - what is all about

Based on: Rockaby, Breath and Not I by Samuel Beckett
With: Elinor Middleton, Joseph Cauthery
Stage design and costumes: Maia Oprea and Yi-Xing Hwa
A song by Trevonic
Dramaturgy: Olga Dimitrijevic
A performance by Mihai Lucaciu






Silent as the Grave can be understood as I, they, we, you are all ghosts within this performance. There is no I to whom the speaking, performing, acting, living can be attributed. Beckett’s work calls for an innacted performance that is unnamable, resistant to subjectivity, authority and identity. What we are trying to find here is a rhythm, in order to comprehend the process of relating to spectators and to see and hear the ghosts, so-called our characters. The spectator is encouraged to find the right fillings/feelings in our show, its intensity is increased through repetitions and denials/affirmations of the shared/ experience. The gaps and static moments in our show are to be filled by spectators that are to face the minimalist construction of the characters, their signs of loneliness, their index cards as narrators and especially their bodily dis/appearance. In an Artaudian sense, these small Beckettian extreme texts have an internal music that is to be discovered by the spectator. That specific sound of a rocking chair that is approaching and holding off the spectator is one of the strongest internal musical elements to be found here. Beckettian ghosts are deprived of money, but also youth, health, fortitude and even a body, as in Not I. Protagonists dry out along with the world they inhabit, the world of a freakshow, where lonely people are exhibited by a vicious Master of Ceremonies. Even their names disappear. Whether they have lived is also uncertain. What we are left with is a special type of respiration as in Breath: the breath of ghosts. Silent as the Grave becomes a schemata of respirations. Breath remains virtual and can achieve its materiality through the dynamic process of relating the audience, by accepting intentional performative correlatives, a game that the spectator is invited to play. By putting together three of the most difficult, extreme and controversial plays by Beckett, all these parts interact and give shape to a sideshow of ghosts. The three segments are not documentary records or something that exists or existed before, but a ghostly reformulation of an already formulated reality, which brings into your world as spectator something that did not existed before the performance. You answer to the call of the freakshow ghosts. Indeterminacies of the performance, its own gaps, and its long static moments are making way for a filling; they anticipate other gaps and various meanings from an active audience. They do not tell a lot about what is actually going on, that part that you are supposed to figure out yourself, in the exquisite position of being a spectator. What you should try here is to stick to your own interpretation as spectator and to try to get away safe till the end of the show. By focusing on the details, breath becomes an animating principle that fills out the details of the internal action of our lonely ghosts, but without reaching any conclusions. Each word and action has to be discovered step by step and this quest constructs the atmosphere of the performance. There is a process of sedimentation, where you accumulate knowledge about possible ghosts and experience. Behind this waiting and distant expectation, there is an active, inner, vibratory perceptibility. Our ghosts are immobilized, their voices become stronger because of stillness and absence. Timing, rhythm and musicality of the words are giving a style of breathing, in the same time giving you time to develop and create the shape of your ghosts. Words have the effect of the Chinese water torture, they are painful to be heard and they are difficult to be shared. The dilation and compression go one by one, our characters seem detached talking or hearing about someone else, they seem very affected talking about the same persons. These sensitive delimitations are hard to grasp but they give a special rhythm to the show. The effects of these short plays are like ebb and flow. Beckett’s schematas are shaping our ghosts but their recognition depends on how you react to it, how you are capable to pick up some of the falling pieces and put them together. Our performance comes to life during this process but its meaning is impossible to identify straightforward outside the performing space and remains virtual on paper. But exactly this possibility, this openness to meaning, can give dynamism to our show and like an ouija board for spiritism, can give voice to ghosts. By questioning different lines of forces, different perspectives on Beckettian lonely ghosts and the whole identity of an I in these three plays, the spectator sets the performance in motion and the results can be relevant only for yourself. This innacted performance gives you something and you give something back to it. As Malone, another Beckettian ghost, once said: Live or invent. The show unfolds its potential through a process of being part of the performance through invention. Through you, the spectator, this performance comes to a shape, to a form of life that is still fragile, even when the meaning can be no longer relevant. Because in theatre we are able to experience things that no longer exist and to approach things that are totally unfamiliar to us. At the end of the show, with the help of the confusing Master of Ceremonies, you can be puzzled: did you get a glimpse of her missing presence, did you understood what was going on there if something was actually going on, or better to say did you understood your reactions in the face of these three plays and your own loneliness? By negating the existence of the lonely characters on stage, you were affirming yourself as their companion for the walk, and through this symbiosis you are the only one who can affirm their existence. She is she and without you, she won’t exist, but on the other side, you won’t be real as you are now real without her, because now you can perceive and recognize your own reactions and feelings towards this boring show. And this is what it’s all about: becoming lonely with your own reactions after our show by being exposed to Beckettian forms of loneliness in an anti-Beckettian performance. Nothing more than a proposition.

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.

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.

Jehanne Complex

Exquisite

Research & Performing Group

Presents

Jehanne Complex

Jeanne Hamilton-Bick (US) will perform.

Deniz Gőzler (TUR), Trever Hagen (US) and Serhan Kazaz (TUR) will play live music.

Arany Gitta (HU), Lányi Katalin (HU), Rencsisovszki Beatrix (HU) and Seregély Beáta (HU) will dance.

A performance by Mihai Lucaciu (RO).

Tuesday, 20th of May, 8.00 PM – open rehearsal

Wednesday, 21st of May, 8.00 PM - premiere

In front of CEU Auditorium

Nador utca 9, Budapest

Everyone is welcomed but seating is limited

Toilet Art in Budapest 2