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VALERE NOVARINA AND JANOS PILINSZKY
OR THE POETIC THEATER OF UNSELFING RITUAL
——~<~o»—___
ENIKO SEPSI
The texts of the French dramaturg Novarina, as with the Hungarian poet
Pilinszky’s stage works, are indubitably text-centric, but the former can also
rely on daily theatrical practice. To provide an overview of the different connec¬
tions between emptying and ritual for the analysis of Novarina’s theater, I call
on not only the classics (Gluckman, van Gennep, Turner), but also Artaud, who
calls theater spatial poetry that uses language metaphorically: it exchanges
everyday meaning for another one. Developing the thought further with Richard
Schechner, we can also say that in the theater, “real events” are revealed as
metaphors fundamentally tied to rites. The poetic ritual of art goes further,
to become self-reflexive, self-questioning. The spectator approaches this self¬
enclosing object anamorphically, when it is a matter of ritual. In other words,
it is only in being immersed in the rite that certain meanings become visible.
A recurrent scene in Valére Novarina’s works is that of communal eating, the
supper, just as the central recurrent theme is the consumption of words. It is a
biblical theme, on account of the Last Supper, too, and aside from this, it also
represents the dynamic opposite of self-emptying. The other ritual, which de¬
fines the fundamental dramaturgy, is the threefold unity of statement-denial¬
new statement: Novarina completes the bodily and physical metaphor of the
theater as (the Lord’s) supper by denying it in the same essay. The anti-selves
[anti-personnes] of Novarina’s theater, his reversibly operating time, actions,
and statements relate to theater as via negativa.
THE THEATER OF UNSELFED POETRY
Theaters must become the place of unselfed lyricism. Here, the I is a collective. It needs
an entire wagonful of actors, like Carnival, twenty-two or forty-four actors for the
portrayal of a single person. On stage, the individual is without characteristics, without
limits, unrecorded in real estate registers and without foundation, plummeting into
somatic chasms — and there, all ofa sudden, lies the omission of prayer, the empty space
of prayer: an empty space, an absence... Prayer is nothing other than collapsing onto
the ground and the renewed taste in the mouth of the ground, the humus, the humilitas
humana, human humility. — Valere Novarina
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