Performances
Radu Afrim Naive, Completely Frivolous Details in the Life and Death of the Audience
Gerome Ragni – James Rado – Galt MacDermot Hair
Vassily Sigarev Guppy
Via Negativa – Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre – TESZT – MASZK Association – THEALTER – Kosztolányi Dezső Theatre – DESIRÉ – Infant (RO, HU, SRB, SLO) Manipulations
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.
John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men
The limit-situations of a wanderer’s life... when your only wish is to feel at home somewhere in the world; a piece of land where you can sleep quietly, at peace. The moment you don’t have to go on. The moment you have arrived. But how could you truly arrive anywhere if you can’t even set off?
We are talking about a story in which social and individual loneliness becomes the symbol of an entire era. Lack of real communication, the impossibility to talk about yourself, the uselessness of the search for a place that you can call home – the anatomy of loneliness.
based on Neil Gaiman Fortunately the Milk
Who would have thought that getting a box of milk from the corner shop can become an exciting adventure through time and space? Fortunately, dads are extremely ingenious and inventor-dinosaurs are truly pleasant companions.
Here is a true family story which honors dads’ smartness, tenacity and courage. Let’s take a bow for fathers who, regardless of the green men’s attacks, of the pirates’ sharp swords, of the fury of a God-volcano, do everything, even the impossible so that they go back home with a box of milk for their children!
Kokan Mladenović-Góli Kornélia The Beggar's Opera
Whores and beggars. Petty thieves and white collar criminals. The ups and downs of not one, but an always corrupted system. But survival is a must. The show must go on…
The Beggars’ opera is a well-known, pretty simple story. Love, betrayal, cheating and unfaithful lovers, easy women and dangerous criminals. But in Kokan Mladenovic`s concept, played by the actors of the “Csiky Gergely” Hungarian State Theatre from Timisoara all this easy going story telling turns into something much more actual then the original 18th century play. This performance is a journey through theater and drama history, through eras and political systems, styles and languages, it`s timeless social criticism.
Half the world has the fate of a whore,
Each tries to sell himself,
They all sin and then, what shall come of us?
What shall we be?
(fragment from the play)
Neil LaBute Some Girl(s)
You have a rising career as a writer, your young and beautiful fiancée is looking forward to marrying you and running away with you. What’s your natural reaction? You are a man, so, most probably, you panic and start calling your ex-girlfriends.
And this is how Guy’s Odyssey starts. He re-lives parts of his past, trying to find himself, wanting to start a new life, without any hard feelings from his exes (in the show one actress embodies them all), and with a clean conscious. Some Girls or Five in One is an out of the box show, played in a hotel room, having us, the spectators only centimeters away from the actors, witnessing these meetings which are a bit embarrassing, a bit sad, but with the scent of real life as it is or could have been for each of us.
Andrzej Saramonowicz Testosterone
What defines a real man? Muscles? Beard and moustache? Power? Money? Biology has an easy and eternal explanation: testosterone.
Seven stories which are not that different, which, in the end prove to be one a common story of life, love, sexuality and of the deepest secrets of the soul. Each character’s story is outlined by the character’s awareness of his own failures regarding his relationship with women, which get different dimensions for every one of them.
Gimesi Dóra - Fekete Ádám The Knot-Fairy
She is Knotty.
- And who’s that?
- Me.
- She’s nutty!
- And now, the question: what does this Knotty do?
Well, she ties knots. Balls. Ties. But what knots, what ball, what does she knit?
Shoelaces, of course. She ties the shoelaces for lads and misses and there’s no pair of scissors, knife or spell that could untie Knotty’s knots.
What if she really exists? And there is no spell?
Wajdi Mouawad Scorched
In a world that most of us perceive as colder and colder and more and more individualist, the past and our predecessors' stories often remain in the background. But we can't have a proper rapport neither with the present nor with the future without looking into the past, as there is the place we can find "truths that can only be revealed when they have been discovered", as one of the characters in the play states.
Staged in a national premiere at the Hungarian State Theatre "Csiky Gergely" from Timisoara, the play Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad (Canadian of French expression and of Lebanese origins), is a puzzle-like story about the loss of a mysterious past full of darkness and which is difficult to recover. The subject depicts a sinuous initiation itinerary of the twins Jeanne and Simon, in their attempt to decrypt their mother's past, the history of a woman who, before her death remained silent for five years.
The play was adapted for the film nominated for the OSCAR in the category "Best Foreign Language Film" of the year 2011.
7/7
based on Lázár Ervin's story The Seven Headed Fairy
„It's the seven-headed monster, the one who damned you...”
In a perfect world, where everybody looks like they belong inside a fashion magazine, where everybody is handsome and famous, perfect and successful, how do the different ones find their place?
The play was inspired by the "Seven-headed fairy" fairytale, written by the Hungarian writer Lázár Ervin and tells the story about self-acceptance and accpeting the others. The subject was transposed to our present days, which by their perfectly polished expectations, make our lives more difficult.
