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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
side of the hammer blows: we stand here at a civilizing Good Friday moment,
something new is coming, a sort of cultural resurrection, and I find the wolf
howls too metaphorical compared to the fact that here, everything is being
born, via the sound of water burbling into the tin bucket and the sound of wind
produced by actors and their microphones. The scene perfectly reproduces the
fear of new people, familiar to us as well’? — we need to create this turning
point acoustically, somehow. I convince him. Vivat! He asks Sirli to create the
“toaca” sound after all; let’s see what it adds to the expectancy and to our fears,
and to the atmosphere of Lenten lack of meaning.
Here we find that untranslatable word, “toaca,” which the Romanian¬
Hungarian dictionary can also only describe thus: “the hanging wooden or
metal plate that replaces bells in Orthodox cloisters”,’”* since for most of us,
the meaningful ritual content of the word doesn’t come through. “Toaca” (in
Hungarian dialect, rarely, “téka”) is tied most closely in Orthodox territories
to Lent, rather than replacing a bell, as the dictionary misinforms us. Once
during Easter Holy Week I was in Voronet, and there I experienced the unique
quality of the sound that reminds one of Christ’s sufferings: an Orthodox nun
was taking part in a procession around the outside of the monastery church,
carrying the planed wooden plank on her shoulder that, transfigured, she
was beating with a wooden hammer, following some unknown inner spiritual
rhythm. Inside the churches, they beat two dried, hanging wooden beams with
two wooden hammers. It is a sound simultaneously sharp and refined (wood
striking wood), unusual, acoustically impossible to mistake for another, the in¬
strument of the church “poor in spirit.” This is the only “musical instrument,”
besides the bell, that the Orthodox Church accepts; all other musical duties
fall to the human voice. In Cluj, the “toaca” resounds from the tower of the
Orthodox cathedral during Lent, and meanwhile the city slowly grows quiet
until the Saturday night’s resurrection service, when the faithful bring home
the eternal flames from the graves. Culturally, in this region, this sound evokes
the suffering of Holy Week in the viewer, and it promises the resurrection.
Byzantium. Purcarete hands the chief priest a gasoline canister (he will
use it to sprinkle the heretics being sent to the pyre), and then asks that he be
provided platform buskins to be at least 8 or 9 inches taller. He’s a great, aged
bird, 120 years old, he says, and then he himself plays the role with great gusto,
the way he imagines the character. Everyone breaks out in laughter, and by
the end, so does he. No inhibitions, play, theater. Purcarete likes the byzantine
scene more and more, enriching it with newer and newer details.
77 Translator’s note: Visky here alludes to the waves of African and Middle Eastern immigrants
that so alarmed many in Europe.
78 Semantron in English (from the Greek: onuavtpov), also called xylon (€vAov). Go to https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y lviidJRx_w for a demonstration of toaca playing with informa¬
tive subtitles (accessed 28 August 2020).
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