Oldal 15 [15]
PHILTHER AS A HISTORIOGRAPHIC MODEL
Conseguently, Philthers performance reconstructions aim at weaving
together the documents left to us through the various media of cultural
memory. Although they offer performance analyses, they actually carry outthe
reflected exploration of documents thatis similar to ideological criticism. After
all, no matter how many documents are at our disposal, the reconstruction of
past and present performances is possible only through intellectual constructs
created by the researcher. Therefore, Philther provides “mental revivals” of
theatre productions, not disguising the fact that it is not the performance that
can be reconstructed, but only the “whole” of its memories in the researcher’s
mind. Philther is not motivated by pedantic collection of records without
any evaluation, as evaluation already determines the act of selection for
analysis, and the series of analyzed performances emphatically calls forth a
canon of theatre history. It is not simply a canon of shows that are considered
important in some respects, but a canon of productions that had the most
powerful impact on the future: partly the peak performances of social and
psychological realism that have become the vernacular of Hungarian theatre
and partly neo-avantgarde and postmodern or postdramatic performances
based on initiatives of the historical avant-garde.
While one of the most basic manuals for theatre studies intertwined
with theatre practice treats it as an axiom that “theatre history [...] first
and foremost explains what theatre is at the moment”, the centuries-old
practice of writing theatre history tears the past away from the present in
the spirit of objectivity, looking at the present as a field of theatre criticism.
However, a discourse on theatre that takes Heidegger’s claims on the close
links of temporality and historicity seriously,’® also seeks to bring today’s
theatre into history, bearing in mind that contemporary ways of creation and
reception are not independent of theatrical traditions and, in many cases,
have a specific intertextual relationship with them. Marvin Carlson shatters
the illusion of the separateness of the past and the present by means of the
conception of “haunting”, underscoring the fact that all elements of theatre
(from space and language to bodies) are haunted by the memories of several
previous performative moments, so haunting determines both the process
of creation and reception.” For this reason, Philther defines no end point
but brings the series of analyzed performances up to the present and even
sets out from contemporary theatre. This helps to demonstrate how theatre
events of past decades stretch into the present, and if we move backwards
on the traces of these events, we confront a great number of less concrete
15 Robert Leach: Theatre Studies. The Basics, London — New York, Routledge, 2008, 65.
Cf. Martin Heidegger: Being and Time. A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh,
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996, 341-369.
7 Cf. Marvin Carlson: The Haunted Stage. The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor,
The University of Michigan Press, 2001, 15.
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