Oldal 99 [99]
VALERE NOVARINA AND JANOS PILINSZKY OR THE POETIC THEATER OF UNSELFING RITUAL
In Novarina’s theater, this model can best be caught in the act in his closing
sequences. For example, the performance of The Imaginary Operetta closes
with the banner “Love can see”, and its unfurling is preceded by the actor’s
prayer in which the performer asks pardon for those actors “who did not act.”
The same prayer is voiced at the conclusion of The Unknown Act: “Seigneur,
pardonne aux acteurs qui n’ont pas agi.” We can find similar attempts in do¬
mestic (Hungarian) examples as well. In some of Attila Vidnyänszky’s produc¬
tions, for instance in The Passion of Csiksomly6," in addition to relying on the
eighteenth-century Franciscan school drama tradition” and on Géza Szécs’s
piece Passion he forcefully builds upon ritual songs of folk religiosity (which are
scarcely in existence any longer), on folk tales, folk poems, and folk symbol and
metaphor systems (in Andras Berecz’s production), in the confidence that for¬
gotten traditions can be effective anew via the theater. Other examples include
Andras Visky’s Backborn,* in Gabor Tompa’s production, which deals with
Holocaust themes using ritual methods. In any event, Schechner also regards
the work of Grotowski and the Living Theatre as a movement from theater
toward ritual, except that “these rituals have not become lasting because they
do not tie to actual social structures outside the theater.”
The adaptation of these fundamentally poetic (Artaud) or anthropological
and theatro-anthropological approaches (van Gennep, Gluckman, and espe¬
cially Turner) to theater (Schechner) provides useful points of reference for
the theatrical rites, which I term kenotic, that can be observed especially in
Novarina’s theater. Poetic rituality offers an explanatory framework to un¬
derstand organizational modes of drama, while rituality concepts that are of
anthropological origin do the same for understanding the dynamics of “an¬
thropoglyphic” processes which, while patterned after actual existence, run
their course on the stage.
10 Novarina: L'Acte inconnu, 181.
National Theater, Budapest, 2017; director: Attila Vidnyänszky, choreographer: Zoltän
Zsuräfszky, dramaturg: Zsolt Szász.
In the town of Csiksomlyé in the eighteenth century, it was still a living tradition to produce
a new school drama from year to year: between 1721 and 1787, they produced a total of forty¬
two separate Passion plays. They were presented in the great hall of the local Franciscan high
school. Because of Joseph II’s edict dissolving religious orders, this confessional theatrical
practice gradually ceased — as can be read in the work’s prospectus.
3 See Andras Visky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Visky#Plays. The play has
also been produced under the title, used by the author, Born for Never.
14 Schechner: Ibid., 122.
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