Performances

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. 

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?

The musical recording was cordinated by Válik László.
Trumpet - Meggyes Ádám
Violin - Tijana Stanković
Cello - Márkos Albert
Bass - Ajtai Péter
Accordion - Móser Ádám
Viola, drums - Porteleki Áron 


For children aged 4 and older

No matter how hard we try to phrase it in more profound ways, with different characteristics, the national identity as a basic identity will after all be determined as a linguistic identity. This is perhaps its only tangible aspect. Minorities are determined by communities of their own minority, respectively of the majority, and also, the so-called community of the mother country. They cannot be different as they are increasingly burdened from all directions to be what they ought to be. Discrimination and obligation forces them to always face up with the identity that the minority and majority community place upon them. A minority cannot be different. Because of this paradox they become different. They are the metaphor of otherness. They don't belong anywhere. Also, they don't have a home of their own. But they have their own hardly definable identity of being different. At the same time, they view the world both through their inferiority and superiority complex. They are subordinate but act as if they were on top. They want to be both accepted and different. Both thanks to their ethnic identity and like those who can afford to be different.

As a matter of fact, we have spoken many times about how do we differ, resemble, and we have almost blasphemically thrown it in your faces our truth about you, about us. Stereotypes, big truths, criticism, the lack, failure or victory of political and social responsability is serves as mere inspiration, it is not more important than the message that refuses the spoken, ethnically restricted language. If they don't understand this in Hungarian, they will understand it elseway. Anyway, Hungarian is only understood by Hungarians. I am not interested in what we have in common, nor in what makes us different. After all, all languages serve to deliver meanings that are above the ethnic, that are universal, universally human. After all, this is what the performance is about. About human language. About a human theatrical language. This theatrical action takes place in a state that precedes or succeeds language, this language is true in an aesthetic and poetic sense. It does not want to tell a story or be told. It refuses, stands against the spoken language. Why?

I should let go of the actors. Instead I should make up a crazy story with the audience! How could I make the audience act in a trance, how can I make them live with maximum intensity at least for one and a half hour, to live a concentrated version of eccentric life, without any restraints, taboos and prejudices, for at least 90 minutes? How could I offer them the illusion of a life that is as magical and unforeseeable as a play that is that well written... that spans over centuries... with the ease of a lioness crossing a savanna packed with pink flamingos. Even more. How could I make the audience ignore what is happening onstage so they can become the center of the universe, right there, in the auditorium, during an hour and a half? (Radu Afrim)
 

Asking someone to kill his own son is a horrible game to verify the faith. Abraham was ready to pay the price, he trusted the will of GOD, and he was richly rewarded. Today we sacrifice entire national economies, which must pay absurdly high prices in order to regain the trust of imaginary financial markets. It’s the same game. Capitalism is a religion, capital demands trust and obedience. And we hope to be rewarded. After the former Hungarian prime minister publicly admitted that his government "fucked it up, not a little but a lot", he again succeeded to gain the trust of the Hungarian PEOPLE at the following elections. Trust is both rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious, willing and unwilling at the same time.

We all trade with trust, we all negotiate for trust, we all manipulate with trust. In this game, there areno innocent victims - we all know what it is about. Trust is a weapon to fight with fear, insecurity and uncertainty of the future. Trust is the fuel of power. And this is where manipulations begin. If there is no trust, there is no trading, no bankers, no politicians, no democracy, no love, no God. NOTHING. Trust is not a question of choice. It is a matter of necessity.

7 performers from Hungary, Romania, Serbia and the director Bojan Jablanovec met for the first time in January 2015 and from the very beginning they were faced with the question of trust. The performance is a series of images and situations on manipulations with trust. Trust is a wall of questions, which is impossible to climb with rational answers. Trust is a knife between the two dancers. Trust is smoke in the eye. Trust is a flower that nobody knows how to water. Trust is a chewing gum – when it loses its flavour, spit it out and take the fresh one. Trust makes no sense unless it is constantly put to the test. It’s a game. A very old game.

Bojan Jablanovec (1961) is a Slovenian theatre director, the founder and artistic director of Via Negativa. He graduated from the University of Performing Arts from Ljubljana and worked at several Slovenian theatres between 1993 and 1999. He then decided to give up working in state-subsidised institutions and started researching theatre in other ways. He founded Via Negativa in 2002, a creative and informal community of Slovenian and international artists (actors, dancers, musicians). In 2012 he founded VN Lab, a contemporary performing arts laboratory that functions as a workshop and is the home of open-minded young artists from all around the world who wish to improve their stage presence and artistic talent.

Via Negativa is a platform for research, development and production of contemporary performing arts, based in Ljubljana and founded in 2002. VN is focused in devising and exploring different performing strategies, with an emphasis on ethics and the liveliness of performance practices, procedures and genres. The VN creative field focuses strictly on basic performing elements and on the relationship between viewing and performing. VN deals with this relationship as a complex flow of points of view, expectations, judgments, conclusions, recognitions, stereotypes, prejudices etc. VN insists that performance should always consciously radicalise and relativise its own position with self-irony and humor.