28 October 2009 | editor
NORA
East West Theatre Company (Sarajevo/Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Henrik Ibsen: NORA
Directed by Haris Pašović
The brave and challenging Nora breaks all stereotypes. It is both spectacularly entertaining, with outstanding dances, costumes, lights and music as well as profoundly serious in its approach to the philosophy of liberty, individualism and women’s rights.
Nora and Torvald Helmer are a power couple. They are good looking, successful; lead a sophisticated life and style, and are both incredibly sexy. At first glance, the life of Nora and Torvald Helmer is the model of a happy marriage in the modern world. Torvald is a rising star in the financial world, very concerned about his public image, loves expensive cars and collects expensive watches, and at the same time enjoys a blissful family life, alongside a wife with top-model looks, and a precious five-year old daughter. His wife Nora, similarly, enjoys shopping, exclusive brands, clothes, shoes, perfumes, watches and luxury lingerie. Their sex life is very liberal and extravagant.
Nora’s friend Christine suddenly comes back into Nora’s life, turning it around. From an ascetic, hard working young woman, Christine soon becomes a femme fatale mercilessly ascending the social ladder, powered by ambition and greed. Her lover, Helene Krogstad (in Ibsen’s original, a male character) blackmails both Nora and Torvald. Dr. Rank, a friend of the family, is dying of a terminal disease, and decides to admit Nora and that he is in love with her. A financial crisis beguiles Torvald, while Nora starts to lose her composure. Their idyllic world starts to crumble…
“Pasovic’s “Nora” is not only a rebellion of a woman and her desire for freedom I self-understanding – it is an analysis of modern society and Western world….Maja Izetbegovic is fascinating as a contemporary woman in emotional breakdown but also with a possibility to achieve freedom….” Dnevni avaz, Sarajevo
“Fantastic Maja Izetbegovic (as Nora)” Azra, Sarajevo
“Splendid directing, excellent acting” San, Sarajevo
“New ”Nora” impressed the Sarajevo audience” Nezavisne novine, Banja Luka
“Maja Izetbegović played brillianty. A true queen of the stage..” Dnevnik, Macedonia
28 October 2009 | admin
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS
‘Weöres Sándor’ Theatre (Szombathely/Hungary)
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS
Based on Victor Hugo’s novel.
Written and directed by: András Jeles
The story takes place in England at the end of the 17th century. The philosopher and magician Ursus is an educated poetic soul, a man of noble feelings, who travels around the country in a caravan with his loyal wolf Homo, also educated and wise. On an early winter morning, a child turns up at his doorstep whose mouth has been so severely mutilated that he seems to be laughing constantly. He brings a little blind girl in his arms. Ursus takes both of them in – the boy is called Gwynplaine, while Ursus names the girl Dea. When the children grow up, they fall in love. The three of them roam around the country together and earn their living as comedians. In the meantime, it turns out that The Man Who Laughs is a lord’s son and he has to take his seat in the House of Lords, where he delivers a passionate speech of accusation in defence of the oppressed. The grotesque difference between Gwynplaine’s ceaselessly laughing face and the sombre message makes the lords burst into bizarre laughter. Gwynplaine leaves the aristocratic splendour with disgust, he wants to return to Ursus and Dea but he can no longer find them.
“András Jeles has created a world on the small stage of ’Weöres Sándor’ Theatre which prompts us to take a stand, which divides us, you can’t hide from it, you can’t not be present.” Szilvia Pais-H.
28 October 2009 | admin
InTimE
Pál Frenák Company (Paris/France & Budapest/Hungary)
InTimE
Choreography: Pál Frenák
Pál Frenák was born in Budapest in 1957. Being raised by deaf and mute parents was a formative experience of his childhood. His primary means of expression was thus sign-language, which has made him susceptible to facial expressions, gestures, and the use of the body for conveying ideas. He left for Paris in the mid-80s, where he studied Cunningham and Limon dance techniques. Thanks to his French wife, the architect Catherine Frenák, he discovered the world of contemporary arts, and was familiarized with the unconventional use of shapes and space. The work of the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, the work of Francis Bacon, the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his personal relationship with French painter Jean Olivier made a great impact on his later work. In 1998 Pál Frenák Company – which had existed in France for a decade – became a joint Hungarian-French company, based both in Budapest and Paris. Comprising a variety of classical and modern techniques the company’s profile stands for a unique style and dance language. One of its most important characteristics is the use of mime, sign language and body movements that reflect on various genres (circus, theater, fashion shows).
Besides his creative work as a choreographer, he regularly teaches professional workshops, organizes free performances with the company to initiate school children into the world of dance, participates in meetings with the public, emphasizing continuous dialogue with the audience, as well as with other branches of art.
The new piece of Pál Frenák is part of an elemental process that links the works of the artist, and follows the creator’s logic. But again, his unique dance-theater experiments with new nuances. If in Instinct he tried to face the absense of relationship in solitary instinctuality, Frenák’s new piece shows us an insightful view into the subtlety and complexity of human relationships. InTime was nominated for the Lábán-prize in 2009.
28 October 2009 | editor
FROM SCRATCH
The Symptoms (Budapest/Hungary)
FROM SCRATCH – free associations for actors and dancers
Directed by: Réka Szabó
We know It to be vociferous, forever on the run, rowdy, often vulgar. And yet It can look so lonesome, all walled up, with the blinds down. It has a callous face but It is still somehow vulnerable. Its façades glisten. Its arms and face always in some other place: all desire inside, while living on the outside.
We do a headstand, take a look at It, laughing.
„For all the humor that takes up most of the stage time of From Scratch, we are constantly aware of some strange, intelligent type of sadness underneath, something that very faintly resembles anxiety, and this sensation is enduring and seamless. Réka Szabó’s team handle the topic of the modern day, this transient shebang, with remarkable dignity, refraining from satirizing or ridiculing the heroes and victims of our times. From Scratch is modern, in the genuine, non-hackneyed sense of the term. It is fascinating, entertaining, and playful as play, even as it invites deep contemplation. A bit of social criticism, a bit of music hall, a bit of comedy – and lots of theater, of the highest European order. This performance would hold its own on any stage in the world. It is a high-powered artistic statement of great value.” (Tamás Halász, Ellenfény, 2005)
Dancer-choreographer and mathematician Réka Szabó has been present in contemporary dance-life since 1995. She has been building her own dance company since 2002, which was in 2006 reborn under the name The Symptoms. In her work she merges mime and dance with words and seasons it with humor. She likes to rely on the personality and creativity of actors and dancers, and stresses the importance of thinking together with them.
The company’s pieces from their street performances to the „unknown genre” performances, which were meant to be played in theater spaces, from free improvisation to choreographies using real-time video-technique involve everything; they process the social problems of our everyday life and mix it with humor: they reflect on the world of conscious consumption, path-searching, dreams and science.
Their improvisative, audiovisual performances have been invited multiple times to museums and gallery spaces. During the last few years, The Symptoms have appeared at several important dance and theatre festivals all around Europe.
„Réka Szabó dancer-mathematician together with her company makes the most peculiar performances of our theater scene. In their performances dance, text, music, drama and humor merge always differently. They don’t care about the genre-boundaries, but are interested in language in a broader sense. They just as well evoke on stage Thomas Mann and a mathematical law.” Sisso
28 October 2009 | editor
BL
Andrea Ladányi – Gergő Borlai (Budapest/Hungary)
BL – music dance theatre
Andrea Ladányi is one of Hungary’s leading choreographers and dancers. A nearly fifty-year old performer with an ageless body and a vigorous, youthful presence, Ladányi is a born rebel. She graduated from the Hungarian National Ballet Academy and danced as a soloist for both the Győr Ballett and the Finnish National Opera, where she worked with Jorma Outinen. She founded her own company, La Dance in 1995 and took a second degree as a director-choreographer in 2005 at the University of Drama and Film, where she has since been the head of the movement department. She is the holder of many awards and a Merited Artist of the Hungarian Republic.
Gergő Borlai was born in 1978. He is a multi-talented percussionist of many instruments. He started playing the drums at the age of three and became one of Hungary’s leading men in his self-taught genre. Till 2009 he has contributed to more than 130 CDs. He played in concerts with Tommy Campbell, Steve Smith and Trilok Gurtu, Hiram Bullock, Al DiMeola among others. He has came out with two of his own solo-albums: “17″ and “Sausage”. He twice won the Drummer of the Year Award and the Golden Disk as a producer, and in 2001 he won the “Golden Drumstick” prize. From 2008 he is an accentuated endorser of the Meinl Company.
BL is born out of Gergő Borlai’s percussion music, part composed, part improvised, and the dancer Andrea Ladányi’s dance and choreography. The show is based on a basic element of human existence: rhythm. Its musicality is created by the tension between the percussion instruments and the dancer’s body. The presence of both pre-composed and improvised music, their power and flow collide with the movement of the dancer. Music-dance-theatre.
28 October 2009 | editor
WOYZECK – HINKEMANN CASE
Bitef Theatre (Beograd/Serbia)
WOYZECK – HINKEMANN CASE – based on Toller’s Hinkemann and Büchner’s Woyzeck
Directed by Ana Tomović
It is silly to claim that we feel what we can hardly understand.
The new production of Bitef Theatre, Woyzeck – Hinkemann Case, is a dramaturgical and directorial experiment, taking two classical German plays, Woyzeck by George Büchner and Hinkemann by Ernst Toller as its starting point. It is concerned with the issue of endangered masculinity in Serbia today. It is an attempt to reflect on current post-war reality in Serbia from the perspective of a generation that lived through the 1990’s utterly inadvertently.
28 October 2009 | hajna
APARTMENT HOUSE STORIES 0.1
Sputnik Shipping Company – Modern Theatre and Behaviour Research Institute – Laboratory (Budapest/Hungary)
APARTMENT BLOCK STORIES 0.1
Directed by: Viktor Bodó
We are all tenants.
Apartment House Stories 0.1 will hopefully be the first stop on a long journey. We could as well say, with the smile of an 18-year-old who has just passed his school-leaving exams: Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to our first lodgings! Now we would only show you the living room, the rest we ask you to imagine, please. This living room is a sterile place, to put it mildly, but you can lay a mattress anywhere. The reality of the lodgings is our common reality: it is the diagnostic result of microorganisms, compressed into a theatre performance, where the life of an organism can last only a minute – or just as well for ever. People working in a theatre, tenants living in an apartment block, or, if we are lucky, even people travelling in a tube carriage can represent the cross-section of our society. This is going to be a real challenge for us: to compress the reality of an apartment block, a reality which may in itself be infinitely condensed, into a theatrical space. Flat-dwellers and tenants, guests and squatters, spectators and actors meet, or pass by each other without even saying hello, in Apartment Block Stories 0.1. But the flat will be crowded, we will even have to find a place for the Fish Pond Choir with its 20 members. But when have lodgings ever been spacious?
Don’t be afraid to come – we are all tenants.
28 October 2009 | hajna
DRUNKEN PROCESS
Scene Gorica (Velika Gorica/Croatia)
Bernard-Marie Koltès (based on Crime and Punishment by F.M. Dostojevski):
DRUNKEN PROCESS
Reditelj: Ivica Buljan
Drunken process, is a play by an intriguing French author Bernard-Marie Koltès, based on Crime and Punishment, a novel by F.M. Dostojevski. The play had its premiere in October 2008, in Scena Gorica theatre.
A year after he wrote his first play Bitterness using a new and fresh approach to My Childhood by Maxim Gorki, Koltès decided to try and tackle an adaptation of one of the most famous novels in human history Crime and Punishment. In order to present this unique masterpiece by F.M. Dostojevski, in his play, Drunken Process, Koltès uses internal chaos in Raskoljnikov and alcohol induced hallucinations of Marmeladov . The tragic and grotesque death of Marmeladov takes us to Raskoljnikov ’s world of ultimate desperation. Cut off from the outside world, Raskoljnikov analyzes his crime…
(Dostojevski and Koltès are strongly connected by the ever-present feeling of nostalgia that runs through their work.)
“I don’t want my part of the sky any more, I don’t want my part of the rain, nor my part of the world. I want the whole sky, all of the rain. I want to cut space with a knife…” says Raskoljnikov
The play is directed by Ivica Buljan . The cast consists of the most famous Croatian actors and actresses: Ana Karić, Ivica Vidović, Gordana Gadžić, Enes Kišević, Lucija Šerbedžija, Ana Vilenica, Goran Bogdan, Stipe Kostanić. The part of the police investigator vas given to the leader of a well known Croatian bend The Beat Fleet, Mladen Badovinac.
“Scena Gorica has once again produced a relevant play of contemporary artistic theatre.” (Helena Barut, Vjesnik)
“Buljan’s theatrical reading of the Koltès text ia a kind of project that every theatrical stage would like to have.” (Bojana Ćustić Juraga, Glas Istre)
28 October 2009 | hajna
VACATION FROM HISTORY
Shadow Casters (Zagreb/Croatia)
VACATION FROM HISTORY
Concept, Script and Directing: Boris Bakal, Katarina Pejović
The performance is the first part of the trilogy Process_City inspired by Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial and its philosophical and political implications.
Vacation from History is a meta(physical) comment on Kafka’s work: a travel on the edge of collective and individual consciousness, through the realms of dream and death as the only safe refuges from history.
The performance premiered in April 2008 in Zagreb, in the library “Bogdan Ogrizović” and since then has been performed over 20 times in Zagreb (on 3 different locations), within the frame of 2008 Croatian Theatre Showcase and International Conference PSI#15, Sarajevo (MESS 2008) and Belgrade (BITEF 2009).
28 October 2009 | hajna
RUNAWAY
National Theatre Štip (Štip/Macedonia)
Vasil Iljoski: RUNAWAY
Directed by Dejan Projkovski
„Has Runaway returned, with its whole irony to truly withdraw us from our¬selves and from our numberless confusions or it has returned to leave us for good and eventually to escape in those voids, which we do not want to look at because the light hurts our eyes.
Does Runaway with its all irony and grotesque parody would like to present our own prisons, our powerlessness, our total closure in front of the fake golden calf, before it leaves us?
Runaway as a kind of Orpheus, is trying to find the hell through the dark and the last sound, not with its harmony.” D. Projkovski
28 October 2009 | hajna
EX-POSITION
Shadow Casters (Zagreb/Croatia)
EX-POSITION
Directed by Boris Bakal (Katarina Pejović i Stanko Juzbašić)
As the second, central part of the trilogy Process_City, Ex-position tackles one part of Kafka’s novel The Trial: the parable Legend of the Law, in the form of a unique travel through one’s own memory, feelings and sub-consciousness.
Ex-position is secretly in love with the movie Amélie Poulain, evokes Shakespeare’s King Lear, quotes Shadow Casters and Felix Rückert, attentively reads Herr Franz Kafka, sig. Giorgio Agamben and Mr. Danijel Dragojević, while thinking all along on the project B.E.N.E. (S.A.D.E.?).
After its premiere at 2005 Urban Festival, Ex-position was subsequently presented at Eurokaz International Festival (Zagreb, 2006), BOK International Festival (Bjelovar, 2007), Indomitable City Festival (Križevci, 2007), International festival FIAT in Podgorica (Montenegro, 2007), BITEF – Belgrade International Theatre Festival (Serbia, 2007), Szeged International Festival THEALTER (Hungary, 2008) and Sarajevo International Theatre Festival MESS (BiH, 2008).
28 October 2009 | hajna
SOM FAVES
Ivo Dimchev (Bulgaria)
SOM FAVES
Ivo Dimchev is a most promising and renowned young choreographer and performer on the Bulgarian contemporary dance or rather physical theatre scene. His solo performance Lili Handel, opened in Stockholm in 2004, was a surprise success at THEALTER (Szeged/Hungary) in 2005. As a result, he had the opportunity to work with Hungarian artists in Budapest and Zsámbék in the following years. Since 2 years he is doing his master studies on performing arts in Dasarts Academy in Amsterdam. He took part in many European festivals in the past years and cooperated in a number of international productions as director and choreographer. In his work Dimchev expands the notion of choreography by combining different art forms and means of expression. His new piece Som Faves was commissioned by the Tanz im August Festival in Berlin this year.
„Som Faves is a performance based on a bunch of subjects, objects or personalities I find myself related to. In this project I am less interested in physicality but more in the questions of content, aesthetics and musicality.” Ivo Dimchev
„If you want me to be your mother, you will have to go to the theatre…” Ivo Dimchev
28 October 2009 | hajna
MONEY, BLOOD & LOVE
Via Negativa (Ljubljana/Slovenija)
MONEY, BLOOD & LOVE*
*Money, Blood and Love is an excusive title for Via Negativa presentation at Desire Theatre Festival Subotica. All pieces presented under this title originate from 2009 performance series VIA NOVA. Money, Blood & Love consists of three performances as follows:
28 October 2009 | editor
DIEVOUCHKA
Béla Pintér and Company (Budapest/Hungary)
Benedek Darvas – Béla Pintér: DIEVOUCHKA
Directed by Béla Pintér
In Dievouchka we see staff officers, officers, privates and Jews on forced labour,mingling with each other. It is them, who move the story forward in the army barracks, the dancehall and out in the remote and vast Russian steppe. Its presentation is elevated and all-black-and-white, both in the broad and the strict sense.
The time is World War II: however, the story-line, as opposed to giving an historic account, is merely an assumption of the epoch.
We created Dievouchka’s particular musical style by blending elements of Puccini’s late romanticism with operetta and radio hits of the day, some of which are emblematic even today.
Throughout the whole play we sing. What the audience sees, is no operatic work. It is pure theatre with actors, whose voices are far from being beautiful, pacing in an extremely measured, odd way.
We, who were born into perhaps happier times, with this work, would like to commemorate that ill-fated generation, who, just like us, cherished the hope of a brighter future.
‘Everyone has got his Dievouchka’.
Béla Pintér
Béla Pintér and Company have worked together since 1998, establishing themselves as one of the most significant and innovative independent theatre companies in Hungary, winning the Hungarian Critics’ Award four times. Their aim is to create contemporary theater performances based on their critical-ironical observations of society and themselves. The surrealistic world which is so characteristic of their performances emerges from the melange of reality and dream, authenticity and kitsch, with some elements of Hungarian folklore. Thanks to their successes the company is considered to be one of the most significant and inventive contemporary theater.They are equally at ease with authentic Hungarian folk art and postmodern forms of theatrical expression. The company has created most of its productions at the Szkéné, an independent repertory theatre at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where it is now in residence. It was here that Béla Pintér trained as a dancer and performer working with some of the leading experimental theatre groups of the 80’s and 90’s. Since 2004 the company has been touring all around Europe. This year, the first time since its formation, the company have skipped the pond: they performed at the Festival Transamériques in Motréal and at the Lincoln Center in New York.
28 October 2009 | hajna
OUT
Via Negativa (Ljubljana/Slovenia)
OUT
Via Negativa is an international project of contemporary performing arts since 2002, based in Ljubljana. Our fields of work are theatre and performance, with a focus on connections between the two. We consider a theatre performance to be a relationship between the spectator and the actor in real space and time. We deal with this relationship as a complex flow of points of view, expectations, judgments, conclusions, recognitions, stereotypes, fallacies, prejudices, tolerance or intolerance, knowledge or lack thereof; all these trigger various emotional, rational or irrational responses. We are on stage in order to trigger this relationship and invent strategies with which to get the relationship’s dynamic running. We work with an actual presence, which is why communication is at the fore of this relationship, before aesthetics; points of view and thought before craft. We feel we are most real when we touch upon something that can no longer be rationalized, when we no longer have to pretend to understand something we do not. We work as a collective in which each individual fights with his reasons, his body, his imagination, his skills and energy for his own sense and position on stage. This is why each performer of VN is also the author of his or her own performance. VN is an open type project, meaning that we are not bound by set-ensemble logic of a fixed number of constant members. With this in mind we organize annual workshops where we keep developing a flexible model of international production of contemporary performing arts.
We dedicated the first seven years of the VN project (2002-2008) to seven aspects of man that are commonly known as the seven deadly sins.
Stage is power. Granted by the spectator. Performer’s pride is in how he uses stage power. OUT is a performance that tests the logic of pride in the relationship between the viewer and the performer.
OUT plays with the performer’s anticipations and the spectators’ expectations. Once they assume their place in the theatre, their roles are clearly divided: the performer is there to show something, the spectator to see something. The performer makes a claim on the spectator’s gaze (the stage), expecting attention and understanding; the spectator assumes the position of the one who needs to be seduced, expecting fascination. From the very start pride is inscribed into their relationship. It can be triggered by some lack, a void, an insecurity that opens up between them. OUT is a performance testing how the spectator and the performer will act out their roles in a situation in which it is no longer clear what they can expect from each other. Ten performers consciously enter the pride game. The spectators can accept the game and amuse themselves, testing how far the performers are prepared to go in a situation in which it is impossible to get anywhere, or they can demonstratively reject the game and leave the auditorium.
With the OUT project, Via Negativa concludes its seven year cycle (2002-2008) of performances on the theme of the seven deadly sins. Our notion is that anger, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, envy and pride are core aspects of every individual’s identity. Each of these human attributes opens a conflict which is built into the subjective self of each individual: on the one hand, one builds mechanisms and strategies of defence from these negative drives to conform to society’s demands of control and suppression of these drives; on the other, one develops various forms of release, because one cannot stand the pressure of one’s own subjectivity. OUT is a performance that explores the basic mechanisms of pride in the theatrical situation and tests the logic of pride through relationship between viewers and performers.
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