Page 232 [232]
OCR
ANDRÁS VISKY music amplify the pronouncement, then it will sound to the viewer as a drama he can experience.” This lesson of Purcarete well describes the poetics of his most recent productions: he tends increasingly to investigate the theatrical possibilities of operatic form. His production of Victor, or Power to the Children (2013) in Cluj-Napoca’ slips unnoticed, as it were, into opera: by the time the viewer realizes it, every rejoinder has long since been sounded in song. It is as if Purcarete’s latest works were testing the rehabilitation of pathos in theater. Actually, I sense every danger of this communal rehearsal process-initiation already in the first rehearsal. Since, as a matter of fact, the director made the entire enterprise largely dependent on my participation, he had to find someone whose decisions he could trust, given that the work is a monument of the Hungarian literary canon and the holy scripture of its theatrical tradition: thus we must read it together and be brave; to listen to (and hear) and observe (and see) the echoes of tradition and face them if they’re unavoidable. Above all because when working with the text Iam liable to take a leap in the dark and deal dishonorably with textual canons, “not consulting with flesh and blood”” as my heart’s apostle, Paul, says. To remain sensitive to every invitation, interior and external equally; and to go to the wall, indeed, to go through it, if that is the price of being able “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” He constructs situations, he outlines and sketches in scenes, then hands them over to Assistant Director Ilir Dragovoja, while we two enter a dressing alcove to work on the text and take account of the interpretive traditions of the Tragedy. Purcarete inquires with great sensitivity about the poem’s place in Hungarian culture and about its theatrical productions that were, in my experience, defining. I begin by mentioning two films, The Annunciation by Andras Jeles, and the animated version of the Tragedy by Marcell Jankovics.” My lengthy explications of both films enthrall him. He returns to the Jeles film several times; he cannot tear himself away from it. Today, though, it would be unrealizable, he says, since the virtual (but very much real) space’s child pornography mania has made an innocent relationship to the naked child’s body impossible. The depiction of the human body, but especially the child’s and the woman’s, is undergoing a thorough alteration of meaning in contemporary culture, one that relates to the identity crisis of Western culture. We cannot relate to the naked body in an unspoiled manner because we cannot relate that way to our own body, either. The purist and iconoclastic movements of the The capital city of Transylvania, known to Hungarians as Kolozsvar. Cluj-Napoca, its official Romanian name, is colloquially abbreviated to Cluj, which is how it will appear henceforth. 1 Gal 1:16. 1° William Shakespeare: Hamlet, 111.2. Andräs Jeles: Angyali üdvözlet [The Annunciation], 1984; Marcell Jankovics: Az Ember tragédiäja [The Tragedy of Man], 2011. + 230 +
