Édes Hús

While I am enjoying a perfect cup of coffe at Mignon, where I used to come with miss Ubrankovics I have to inform you dear reader, that she has left our tiny team of three - buy me a drink and ask me why - but life goes on and the show must go on.

So after having cancelled the performances inn RS9, who didn't give us a fair deal anyhow, but still is a shame, I am happy to announce a newcomer who will take on the Hungarian role in Édes Hús in our last two Budapest performances in Sirály at the 26th and 27th of May. 

Kucsera Olga, an old friend and one of the faces of hiradó/news will join forces with our Sophie to please the modest crowds of theatre goers who will come to see us before we take the show to London in the summer. 

Rehearsals are already shaping up, pictures to come soon. 

We are performing in Gödör Club (at the back where normally exhibitions and dance-houses are) on the 5th and 6th of May from 7pm.

Come along and stay for a drink with us after!

I am off to run the technical rehersal with 4 handsome man. Lucky me. 

We small, indipendent companies are very thankfull for all the support we get from:

Yesterday we were in Kulturhaz, and the material they put together and the things we said were all fine.

Publicity is always golden dust - Becky said when I was moaning about the Narancs article. And this littlle report felt like gold as well. 

Thank you Orsi! (the girl who suggested us as a subject and how interviewed us)

We have an other show tonight, we had a wonderfull audience yesterday - actually so far audences have been always very good - apart from one fart and one giggle)

The attention is tagible and there is dead silence where we hoped there would be silence.

But yesterday we had responsive people, they laughed when whe show was funny and wiseld at the end with the clapping.

We were happy.

Oh and one more thing: there was a friend of mine who has never been to the theatre before. And he came and he enjoyed it and he had a lot of things to say about it.

And thats magic to me, that we were his first. And that the show works for people with very diverse back-grounds and agegroups. Thats the other magic, that I was hoping for.

I am happy.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

Tuesday, Monday, Wednesday.

Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday.

Sirály. Király u 50. 8PM

I have now signed the contract with the organisers of Camden Fringe Festival in London, so we are taking the show to Etcetera Theatre in August 14th and 15th!

Today has been also wonderful for another reason: Kállai Márton who is not just my friend but also a great photographer has sent me the pictures he took at our rehersal this week, and they are great.

We have invited three photograpers on the day, who all came from different backgrounds and we are very interested if and to what extent there will be differences in the way they approach their subjects. 

One of the photographers has already seen the performance the other two met with the scneses we have selected for the first time. The session was devided into three parts: first we have played the scenes from the performance that we though were most visual and and might translate best for photography. Than we ran it again with our usual lighting design and fianlly we adjusted the lights to cater for the camera and encouraged the photogarphers to stop the actors or ask them to do something differntly

I will upload the images here giving you the chance as well to compare different techniques and viewpoints through the documentation of our rehersals.

I am going to see my own show today again.

It is a fasciating thing, theatre is - you sit with many people in the same room and the lights are all pretty and everyting that happens on stage you know, most of it you created and everybody is looking at that for a whole hour.
 

Nobody talks.
Nobody is on the phone.
No computers either.

It is a fascinating microcosmos of fictional reality.
It is a very rare and intensive encounter and experience with starngers, theatre is.

Yet there was this person, a little woman with bare feet and curly hair, she had red wine and soure cream in front of her.

This person farted.
The fart was short but loud.

Theatre is really funny sometimes.
 

It was all very quickly over.

We set up the lights we called: spotty blue death - which is a potential title of a new performance, just like Beer for Breakfast or the Mystery of Masturbation.

Beer for Breakfast is inspired by my early morning visits to the shop across the street where I routinely buy 4-6 half liter cans of cheep beer a day and an apple let's say. I do not explain that I am not a roaring alcoholic - I know that I need the bear cans for the lighting.

You see we punch little holes in them after laying them flat and it gives very athmospheric lighting. So this is Beer for Breakfast.

And than the show came, conquered and finished and I talked to the people who said very many interesting things, but what mr Mezos Balazs told me I shall remember for ever:

"I didn't even know until now that Julia got fucked" - and than we drank bear.

I was always very set on having some coustumes to remember. This performance should be pure rather than poor, Juliet herself is a very wealthly young girl. What she was to wear was a central from the start, but the ideas were somewhat eclectic.

Julia today might be wearing Roberto Cavalli from top to toe, floral, feminim colourfull, the envy of Verona.

She might be an emo - she talks about death and suicide often enough, so what would stop her dressing in black and having her hair done at Tony and Guy?

We knew that we didnt want neither the virgin-white, nor the pseudo-renassaince costume, so we said timeless at the end and asked Zsuzsi to join the team.

I heard about her when she won the design price for faboulous multifunctional pieces of clothing that transform into bags for the urban nomads on the go.

Her minimalist style would be able to follow and gently counter-ballance my  ecclectic and mixed style on stage. We also needed dresses that take her though childhood, bedrooms, wedding chappels and the great beyond.

The costumes have to change, but they wont have anywhere to put them, or there wont be a moment where they could put on more pieces of clothing and getting changed was out of the question from the start.

She approached the project with outstanding proffesionalism despite the very low budget. As a designer she was much more interested in working the costumes from a functional perspective and that was just what we needed. The costumes had to look expensive, theatrical, they needed to allow free movement on stage and had to transform in order to emphasise moments of transformation for the character. I would love to put some pictures up, but I must not reveal them.

For now you just have to do with these cosy pics taken at the fitting by Juli.

So once upon a day, not too long ago it all started with Sophie coming around for drinks, she was singing songs and I was comparing the translation of Meszoly to that of Kosztolanyi, and we had chats about how corpses were prepared for burial in the olden days, and looked at pictures and sang some more songs. Her parentes were a great help actually and than she went with the songs to some dear friend with an available piano and learned these very beautifull songs. And we talked about how and why Juliet is relevent to us, and how she might be releven to audiences in persent day.

When one starts a project like that one is literally working with endless possiblities. As a performance artist you cab decide to chop up some vegetables while reciting to be or not to be, so really you have to make some rules.

At one point I was going to translate the whole text, since in many cases the original English lines are fresher than the Hungarian translations, but than most of the times - naturally - I couldn't come up with a better version, or more suitable to our project shall I say. On rare occasions I felt that it was necessary to change the text in both languages, just to make it more understandible, or more feminim I would say, or more experimantal.

The experimental parts than could allow for dance-scenes to be introduced and also would allow the performance text to break out of the paradox situation of one-sided dialouges. When it is potery everything is possible. And Shakespeare is poetry, so it is only just that a contemporary adoptation should carry on lyrical traditions.  The different layers of language would also add to the diverse texture of the performance.

We all have been very enthusiastic about Nora Kovacs to come on board and help us with some of the scenes.

She has read the script and than we talked about what scenes could benefit from her choreography the most. She also told me what ideas she had reading the lines, and we agreed she would come in to do a dance-workshop with us.

At the first meeting she was asking the girls to do excercises that allowed her to asses their skills and style of movement. I have kept two scenes entierly to her ideas. Nora was very happy to take on the challenge to choreograph a dance based on poetry as opposed to music and we hope to do more collaborative work in the future, where we could bring text-based theatre closer to physical theatre.

The balcony scene (one of the cheesiest in the play) is now a dance piece, and expresses the euphory of love in general.

It is raining, I look out the window and wonder: how different will it be to play for London audience.

I have been contacted by Camden Fringe and they gave us exeptable dates, but really shitty matine times. 1.30 - please....

No Shakespeare before Lunch for goodness sake.

I think I am smoking again.

kultúra - visszhang

I am pleased for the girls and feel a bit sorry for myself, but all press is good press. Interesting to look at a theatre as if it was the battle of actors contra director.

Apperantly I should buy the lates issue I was told by Miss Ubrankovics. I wonder....

Wrote Neil McCutcheon on my facebook wall. And I just wanted to write this here. And yes he has seen the performance. And no, he did not private message it to me, it was all very proud and public.

I thought I spread the word. It was a triumph. Did I tell you that?

Molnar-Gal Peter couldn't make it, but Melinda Csomak wrote instead:

Hihetetlenül jó volt látni, hogy egy ekkora dolgot véghezvittél, megcsináltad és jó lett!

And while Judit Csaki thought the we were amaturs (I cant even spell that mean word) Horner Erika - yes she is also a frined of mine, but an honest one, and you know once you have a Hungarian as a friend you no longer need critics, wrote:

This was a wonderful play, booth girl was superb, and the direction was also super.
I loved the whole show, I cannot wait to see it again.
c u on Saturday

And just in case you are interested we did meet that Saturday, drank champaign and she gace me parfum for my 27th birthsday and it was wicked.

Ok, ok, one more and than I let you off, but she is a must:

A jelenetek között nehéz volna választani, hiszen mindvégig hatása alatt voltam minden percnek. Az összes jelenetnek meg volt a maga súlya, ezért nem lehetett egy pillanatra sem kizökkenni a történetből, de talán az a jelenet volt rám a legnagyobb hatással, ahol a testükkel úgy játszottak, hogy a két ember egy testnek is tűnt. A két színészedről annyit, hogy jól választottál, amit számomra az bizonyít, hogy megint nem néztem , hanem velük éltem a darabot. Megint elbűvölt a Júliban , ahogy a fiatal lány tisztaságát hozta, Szófi megjelenésével is a finomságot tükrözi, de azért ő is épp olyan önfeledten tudott hancurozni, ahogy az egy 13 éves kamasz lányhoz illik. Hitelesek és szeretnivalóak voltak. A Júli másik nagy erőssége, ahogy  a kínzó fájdalmat jelenítette meg Tybald majd Rómeo halálánál. A kosztüm, ahogy funkcionált zseniális ötlet. Érzékeltette a jelenet váltást és az érzelmek hullámzását is. Nagyszerű ötlet. A tied volt ez is ugye, ezt te sugalltad a jelmez tervezőnek. A világítás is szépen belesímult az egészbe. Nagyon tetszett, ahogy a kripta sejtelmes félelmetes homályát tovább fokozták a kör alakon beszivárgó tompa fények. A két lánynál, hogy az egyik vadócabb a másik finomabb, kicsit visszafogottabb volt ez megint nagyon jó volt, hisz az ember természete is ilyen, hogy az énjének több oldala van. Mikor jöttem kifele láttam egy nagyon szép virágcsokrot, azt kikapta? Voltak sokan a szakmából vagy újságtól? Hallottam angolul is beszélni többeket. Ünnepeltetek utána? Minden érdekel.  Anyus

Yes, yes my Lady Mother - I shall translate anything for you people on reqest, she loved it basically. Not bias at all. Enquiering about the bunch of flowers is absolutely typicall.

Grinned Misi over his banaba-shake in the Odeon while he was throwing compliments at local divasto the right, and criticism at me to the left. 

Bananashake in the centre,.

For him it was too dense, to much, less is more he said, did't like the costumes, there were far to many lights, too many changes back and forward between languages - he added, while I pulled an english rose and nodded and agreed.

Oppinions are very valuable, and you can not argue with them. At best you can challenge them, but I didnt have that on my agenda. I have been talking way too much lately I wanted to listen. And learn as always - the nerd I am.

I might want to challenge oppinions, modes of spectatorhip, traditional performer-audience relations with the work itself, I have no intention of arguing the preception of the performance.

What I definately would like to do is to share something, to show something.

Altough preception is a factor that I should have taken more into account, or is it the local context? Some people come with their ready-made ideas about how this cannonised text should be staged, people from the industry mainly they are, and perhaps that stops them from appriciating Sweet-meet (Mihaly, Szabados 2009) for what it is. They approach it from what it should be. What they would want it to be.

I changed the title, hoping that that audience would venture in the Shakespearian-unknown with us:

Wellcome the the unconsciouos of an underdevelopped character.

Let's see a few ways we might approach re-telling/remembering the story.

If this was still a tragedy, I would have called it Poison Bones, or Bloody Ribs or something.

This piece was made with love and care for you to enjoy.

Not to high-culture-tickle a select few.

Ok, I was a bit random here, but give me a break, this is a blog and spring just kicked in.