Oldal 265 [265]
OCR
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 RomanianHungarian 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 instrument 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 informative subtitles (accessed 28 August 2020). + 263 *
