Performances
Matei Vișniec Pockets Full of Bread
Duration: 1h10'
Created and performed by Kiss Attila and Molnos András Csaba
THE MAN WITH A CANE: Enormous capacity for indignation, agressive, manipulative, duplicitous, stubborn, somewhat coward, somewhat faint-hearted, willing to let himself easily impressed by problems he cannot solve, faithful to his own limits, suspicious, perfect for the role of destiny's victim, he prefers to be the executioner.
THE MAN WITH A HAT: Easily impressed, ambiguous, sly, impulsive but also rational, accomplice, secretous, somewhat coward, poetic when helpless, comfortable with his own conscience, convinced that he can save the world by postponing action, generous when it doesn't cost him anything.
„The message of this story reaches the invisible corners of our cowardness, which is typical for human nature. Due to excessive debating over the virtues and beauty of action, my characters are paralysed precisely when they should react. Does this remind you of anything familiar?" (Matei Vişniec)
Hans Christian Andersen The Snow Queen
Duration: 1h10'
Edgar and Gerda, friends since they were born, were separated during a storm. Edgar wakes up in Snow Princess's bed, in the faraway North, with a heart made of ice. Brave Gerda goes on an andventure in order to save him. On her way, she is helped or hindered by many fantastic beasts, yet her love for Edgar gives her strength to keep going despite all obstacles.
Andersen's classical tale is transformed on Timisoara's Hungarian stage into a bitter-sweet story, which offers to children and adults alike the opportunity to choose which side they will take - in the eternal struggle of feeling and reason.
Andersen's classical tale is transformed on Timisoara's Hungarian stage into a bitter-sweet story, which offers to children and adults alike the opportunity to choose which side they will take - in the eternal struggle of feeling and reason.
Patrick Ellsworth Dancer in the Dark
The imperfection of the judicial system, and its inevitable errors, can be considered bearable when counterbalanced by divine justice. But what if the immanent justice also fails? Selma, an immigrant living in the USA in the 1960s, who is in love with musicals, seems to be the perfect victim of both faces of justice. Selma is a loving mother, good friend, eternal dreamer, but she will be destroyed by the money and interest-driven putrid system in American pseudodemocracy. By using the generous genre of the musical, the performance asks questions about the inerrability of the legal system, the American Dream and our personal limits.
Jörg Graser Rabenthal
Duration: 2h 20'
Our primal instincts are staring at us behind the aquarium which is placed somewhere between the absurdity of the bourgeois decadence and the sensual charm of the suffocating carnality. A fish chef, a waiter, a bored customer and his wife have started an unusual game. „I sometimes wonder, were you less cruel to me, would I love you less?"
Forbidden Books
Duration: 1h 20'
Hungarian translation: Panna Adorjáni
Romanian translation: Oana Hodade
Coproducers:
TESZT, Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre, Timișoara
Temps d'Images festival, ColectivA Association, Cluj-Napoca
Instytut Adama Mickiewicza/Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Poland
The Paintbrush Factory, Cluj-Napoca
Partners:
Universal Pleasure Factory
Special thanks to:
Panna Adorjáni & family
Arni
Bhkata
Catinca Drăgănescu
Marta Keil
Gzregorz Reske
Michał Rogulski
Sandra Bullock
Through this work makers attempt to translate their Eastern European Hubba Bubba flavoured millennial nostalgia into a language as modern as a new student apartment readily furnished with the finest and cheapest of IKEA. We offer our imagined and/or lived pasts and presents. Ours and yours as well. Forbidden Bookscelebrates our failed attempts at making sense of our insignificance in a world that is as isolated as it is viral. We might sound cheeky, but we never cease to seek for some serious poetry in the times after the irony
Görgey Gábor Wiener Walzer
Duration: 1h 10'
There are times when the option of not taking a decision does not exist. Then, the good decision is seldom the right one. Our human value is at stake. How honest can we be in taking responsibility for our actions? How far are we willing to go in the name of personal interest? Being innocent is irrelevant when circumstances accuse us.
The question in this game is not about who is the guilty one, but who can remain innocent until the end?
The question in this game is not about who is the guilty one, but who can remain innocent until the end?
after Heinrich von Kleist The Marquise of O.
Duration: 1h 10'
During the past four years, the Trojka Theatre Company from Budapest has been searching for new theatre interpretation forms, using elements of physical theatre and movement. In this adaptation of Kleist's story, we follow the original dramaturgical and narrative line. The three scenes represent three time sequences, which are not disposed chronologically. The most evident point of view is the hero's, in this case the heroine's: we are acquainted with what happened, the consequences of these events and the world around, from the viewpoint of a raped innocent woman. All the characters are played by only three actors, but the cast is made in a logical way, starting from common features of characters or their relationship with the main character.
Heinrich von Kleist's text, "The Marquise of O.", is a metaphor of complete submission. Ugly, sentimentalist and absurd altogether. While being unconscious, the Marquise of O. was raped by the soldier who just minutes earlier had saved her from another rapist. Months later, the young marquise became aware of her pregnancy but she could not explain to anybody how she had gotten pregnant, so she was shunned by her family. In a final act of despair, she tries to find the father of her baby by posting a newspaper ad.
(Szász Hanna, dramaturg)
Heinrich von Kleist's text, "The Marquise of O.", is a metaphor of complete submission. Ugly, sentimentalist and absurd altogether. While being unconscious, the Marquise of O. was raped by the soldier who just minutes earlier had saved her from another rapist. Months later, the young marquise became aware of her pregnancy but she could not explain to anybody how she had gotten pregnant, so she was shunned by her family. In a final act of despair, she tries to find the father of her baby by posting a newspaper ad.
(Szász Hanna, dramaturg)
EXIT
Duration: 110 min
Somewhere in Great Britain economic migrants are locked up inside a theatre building that has been out of use. They have arrived from various Eastern European countries: they want both to get out and to get in somewhere. Those from outside have promised them that everything will be sorted out and that they should not do anything other than wait. We analyse this seemingly endless wait through seven scenes. This laboratory situation is perfectly suited for self-examination. It is about us, those from the East, those from the Balkans: the emigrating immigrants. What do we think of our reflexes, our habits, our inherited and learned behavioural patterns, our lack of trust, our prejudices, our fears and desires?
We are alike, we all desire love and safety. But the road to these desires can be very different. How do we cope with being locked up? How does community form? How do we tear down old relations in order to build up new ones? How do we reformulate our goals? What do we do, what do we sacrifice to survive? All these questions become especially interesting with regards to Hungarian-Romanian-Serbian relations. What memories and fixations determine these relations? How are ethnic and cultural differences overwritten by a crisis?
Performed in Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian and English with English, Hungarian and Romanian surtitles
Frank Wedekind Spring Awakening
Duration: 2h 20'
The play presents the destinies of several children, portrayed using relaxed lines and flowing scenes. Adults cannot comprehend this torment, even though they have already overcome such pain - good intentions are not enough, and the intelligence which wants to understand is helpless. When the catastrophe finally arrives, every parent is left hopeless and desperate. Only hazard will decide when will the catastrophe take place and which one of the school children will be hit, of all the pupils dominated by irrational school, ashamed of newly awaken instincts, yet driven by them. Neither good education, nor bad education can help. Life is a huge circus, where everyone is executing their own clown production with maximum dedication, and every number is also a lethal jump.
Lukács György
Lukács György
Dysphoria show
Duration: 80 min
This innovative theatrical installation uses few words to draw attention towards mental (in) sanity and the isolation of the individual in the modern world. Is everything that we consider to be normal also healthy and natural? The performance urges us to reflect about the vast grey area which separates normal and abnormal, in a world where depression and anxiety are induced as everyday conditions. Seven performers trapped inside a Leponex pill, seven disorders and dysphoria, a profound state of unease and dissatisfaction.
based on Molière The Impromptu of Versailles or the Monkey House
We will travel inside the memories and dreams of a great artist by looking at the legends and documents written about him. There is no coherent narrative line, we are in the middle of a memory. But whose memory is it? Molière's? His contemporaries'? Ours? This imaginary travel is evoked, discovered together during all four acts. Every act is a world in itself. Every season of the year, every act is a performance in itself. Four performances blended into one. A circuit of human and artistic desire. Starting from death until birth, and from birth until death.
Fanni Sényi
Fanni Sényi
Shakespeare, Sonnet 66
Duration: 80 min
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
The Last Move
Duration: 1h 45'
The ghosts of a glorious past. The grotesque elegy of four actors left with no home or work, who can only accept the past and live in the bearable reality of their own memories. An honest confession about actors, given by actors who are afraid, happy, enraged and in love just like everybody else. Last but not least, they laugh at themselves just as we laugh at ourselves while looking into the mirror. An ironic swan song, written for four voices… a last move.
Tuncer Cücenoğlu Avalanche
Duration: 1h 20'
Can every aspect of life be governed? And what kind of life can we aspire to where even birth is looked upon with disdain? In a village where even the slightest noise can bring death, surrounded by snowy mountains, living under the constant threat of avalanche and death, people are forced to take measures and live by rules which, long-term, make life unbearable. Nine month of silence, three months of feasting, noise and life. In a world marked by the threat of danger, in a world coordinated by irrational fear, does a new life have the right to a personal truth?
I'll say this much, and then I'm gone...
Duration: 50'
A name. Two dates and a line between them. As if it were enough. If we could just say everything by this much. About how he/she lived, what kind of person he/she was, if he/she loved chocolate or what was his/her favorite color. How many times did he/she cry out of joy or sadness? If he/she was ever in love… And what were his/her thoughts about life and death…
Levko Estella`s and Magyari Etelka`s performance is gently spinning, with smooth gestures the wires of losing, forgiveness and letting go. It`s not seeking for answers, but questions, exploring and underlining. It brings all the things that are not spoken about, or which we find difficult to talk about, closer to us while in the same time it puts them between quotation marks. It`s not judging, but merely pointing out. It shows us the fragility of life, the irreversibility of the caresses and words we share, the soundness of life which, in a brief moment, comes back into itself. It gives us time and space to talk about all the things we should say before we go.
Levko Estella`s and Magyari Etelka`s performance is gently spinning, with smooth gestures the wires of losing, forgiveness and letting go. It`s not seeking for answers, but questions, exploring and underlining. It brings all the things that are not spoken about, or which we find difficult to talk about, closer to us while in the same time it puts them between quotation marks. It`s not judging, but merely pointing out. It shows us the fragility of life, the irreversibility of the caresses and words we share, the soundness of life which, in a brief moment, comes back into itself. It gives us time and space to talk about all the things we should say before we go.
