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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 connections 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 selfenclosing 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 defines the fundamental dramaturgy, is the threefold unity of statement-denialnew 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 + 87 +
