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A THEATER PLAY FROM A CONCERT PIECE; POETRY AND RITUAL IN THE GESAMTKUNST WERK?
said that making a show is like forging an alliance. This is what I have been
feeling during the showing of Uri muri. The connection between the actors
and the audience. [...]
Having something new, strange, accepted is a long process. [...] Encourag¬
ing signs were present during the second season. The number of people with
season tickets were slowly but steadily increasing. Strangely enough, the first
real turnabout happened in the world of the opera. [...]
ISTVAN KORNYA: Looking back at these data justifies your initial hopes, but
supposedly the community was not easy to convince.
ATTILA VIDNYANSZKY: I would not say that my spirits sank, but I had such
an anxiety within myself, when in the first year [...] the number of people with
season tickets [...] decreased by 50%. There was a possibility that the decrease
might continue. But it did not. Meanwhile we also made some concessions to
our spectators with rather traditional tastes.
ISTVAN KORNYA: Can we say that the audience changed quite fast?
ATTILA VIDNYANSZKY: Exactly two thirds of it changed. I was sad about
the people we lost, but at the same time we noticed that more people who were
interested in our conception started coming to the theater, specifically. This
proves that there is a wide margin in the audience in rural towns who expect
more from theater then mere entertainment.”*®
Translation: Milán Szabó and Eszter Őri
36 Pátosz, nagyság, költőiség. Vidnyánszky Attila a Csokonai Színház hét évadjáról (Kornya
István interjúja) [Pathos, greatness, and poetry. Vidnyänszky Attila on the seven seasons
of the Csokonai Theater (Interview by Istvän Kornya)], in Kornya: A költöi szinhäz, 13-16.
Gäbor Turi’s connection of Vidnyänszky’s approach to the synthesis of arts to the change in
the audience: “The performances that can be emblematically connected to him [...] are the
embodiments of the total understanding of theater, in which words, sounds, noises, move¬
ment, gestures, dancing, visuals, substance, and music are simultaneously and equivalently
on stage. The attention-dividing, simultaneous events onstage, the verbal and audiovisual
impulses move the act of reception from the territory of concepts to the territory of the
senses, which proves to be a challenge to the audiences used to realist, psychological, linear,
script-based theater.
This was apparent in the changes in box-office numbers. The aspiration of art theater and
the intensive, attention-demanding, complexly worded plays modified the composition of
the audiences in an extraordinary way after the change in directors. Two thirds of season
ticket holders looking for relaxation and entertainment in the theater left, and their space
was taken up by more open, generally younger intellectuals, looking for values.” Gabor Turi:
Poetry on Stage. An account of the Vidnyänszky era, Hitel, Vol. 28, August 2015, 117-118.
* 161 +