Oldal 99 [99]
OCR
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 domestic (Hungarian) examples as well. In some of Attila Vidnyänszky’s productions, 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 forgotten 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 especially 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 understand organizational modes of drama, while rituality concepts that are of anthropological origin do the same for understanding the dynamics of “anthropoglyphic” 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 fortytwo 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. 41 42 + 97 +
