András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy: Memories of the Body , livre ebook

Intellect Books

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

250 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Widely considered one of the most innovative voices in Hungarian theatre, András Visky has enjoyed growing audiences and increased critical acclaim over the last fifteen years. Nonetheless, his plays have yet to reach a wider English-language audience. This volume, edited by Jozefina Komporaly, begins to correct this by bringing together a translated collection of Visky’s work.

The book includes the first English-language anthology of Visky’s best known plays – Juliet, I Killed My Mother, and Porn – as well as critical analysis and an exploration of Visky’s 'Barrack Dramaturgy', a dramaturgical theory in which he considers the theatre as a space for exploring feelings of cultural and personal captivity. Inspired by personal experience of the oppressive communist regime in Romania, Visky’s work explores the themes of gender, justice and trauma, encouraging shared moments of remembrance and collective memory. This collection makes use of scripts and director’s notes, as well as interviews with creative teams behind the productions, to reveal a holistic, insider’s view of Visky’s artistic vision. Scholars and practitioners alike will benefit from this rare, English-language collection of Visky’s work and dramaturgy.

‘Each Text is a New Beginning’: Refigurations of History, 3 Remembrance and Liberation in András Visky’s Theatre

Jozefina Komporaly

Barrack Dramaturgy and the Captive Audience

András Visky

Introduction to Juliet: Confinement as Embodied Experience in András Visky’s Juliet

Jozefina Komporaly

Juliet: A Dialogue about Love

András Visky

Juliet (original title: Júlia): Production History

András Visky

Juliet in Korea: A Pedagogical Perspective

Jeremy D. Knapp

Introduction to I Killed My Mother: When and Where I Killed My Mother

Karin Coonrod

I Killed My Mother

András Visky

I Killed My Mother (original title: Megöltem az anyámat): Production History

András Visky

Introduction to Porn: Code Name ‘Porn’: Political Protest and Spiritual 201 Redemption in András Visky’s Theatre

Ileana Alexandra Orlich

Porn

András Visky

Porn (original title: Pornó): Production History

Ileana Alexandra Orlich

Conversation with Melissa Lorraine

Jozefina Komporaly

‘Holy Nakedness’: Interview with András Visky

Márti Sipos

‘God’s Accountability’: Interview with András Visky

Márti Sipos

Sujets

Arts visuels

Histoire des Arts

Histoire des arts visuels

Théâtre

ART

General

Politics

Eastern Europe

General officer

Performance art

Theatre

Performing Arts

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	03 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783207343
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1625€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Playtext
Series editor: Patrick Duggan
Copy-editor: MPS
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Production manager: Richard Kerr
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-78320-732-9
ePDF: 978-1-78320-733-6
ePUB: 978-1-78320-734-3
Printed and bound by Short Run Press, UK
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: In Search of Lost Reality
András Visky
Introductory Texts
‘Each Text is a New Beginning’: Refigurations of History, Remembrance and Liberation in András Visky’s Theatre
Jozefina Komporaly
Barrack Dramaturgy and the Captive Audience
András Visky
Part 1
Introduction to Juliet : Confinement as Embodied Experience in András Visky’s Juliet
Jozefina Komporaly
Juliet: A Dialogue about Love
András Visky
Juliet (original title: Júlia ): Production History
Juliet in Korea: A Pedagogical Perspective
Jeremy D. Knapp
Part 2
Introduction to I Killed My Mother : When and Where I Killed My Mother
Karin Coonrod
I Killed My Mother
András Visky
I Killed My Mother (original title: Megöltem az anyámat ): Production History
Part 3
Introduction to Porn : Code Name ‘Porn’: Political Protest and Spiritual Redemption in András Visky’s Theatre
Ileana Alexandra Orlich
Porn
András Visky
Porn (original title: Pornó ): Production History
Ileana Alexandra Orlich
Interviews
Conversation with Melissa Lorraine
Jozefina Komporaly
‘Holy Nakedness’: Interview with András Visky
Márti Sipos
‘God’s Accountability’: Interview with András Visky
Márti Sipos
Afterword
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
As editor of this anthology I am grateful to everyone who has offered support, advice and opinion during the process of putting together this collection. I would like to thank Patrick Duggan for his encouragement and for commissioning the volume, and Jessica Mitchell at Intellect for helping me navigate deadlines and follow editorial procedures. Many thanks to Routledge for granting permission to reprint András Visky’s essay on ‘Barrack dramaturgy’, and to Harmat Kiadó in Budapest for their kind permission to reproduce (in English translation) previously published interview material with Visky.
My gratitude goes to those who facilitated the development of Visky’s work, be it by commissioning, translating or staging it. Particular acknowledgement goes to Timothy Bentch, who on behalf of the Song for the Nations Foundation commissioned Juliet by András Visky, and also initiated its imminent English translation and its first international tour. Also many thanks to the National Theatre in Budapest (Hungary) for commissioning Porn , and the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj and Theatre Y in Chicago for championing Visky’s work as a playwright and dramaturg on either side of the Atlantic, in Hungarian and English respectively.
A volume like this would be impossible to conceive without joint efforts, and I am most grateful to all my collaborators for their creative input and stimulating conversation: Mátyás Bánhegyi, Karin Coonrod, Erzsébet Daray, David Robert Evans, Melissa Lorraine, Natalia Gleason, Jeremy Knapp, Judith Nagy, Ileana Orlich and Ailisha O’Sullivan. I am also grateful to theatres and photographers, too numerous to name here, for facilitating the use of rare production photos – and to Koinónia and all other publishers for citations and references.
Last but not least, I wish to thank András Visky himself for venturing into playwriting (we first met prior to him writing for the stage), for accepting the challenge of working with me on this book and for being such a fascinating conversation partner in all matters theatre.
Jozefina Komporaly
Preface: In Search of Lost Reality
For the last three months, I have lived with the anxiety of having to write a foreword to the English edition of three of my dramas. My situation was made worse by the fact that my plays would be accompanied by several insightful commentaries and I am unable to reveal either new points of view to my plays or any secret information originating from me, the writer, as I have no such thing up my sleeve. A dramatic text goes out from under its writer’s control very swiftly, and indeed much sooner than one would imagine: this happens as the play, so to speak, starts writing itself, flowing freely, after having won its fight against any authorial control.
My worries were further exacerbated by the dramaturgical work whereby I compared and contrasted four Hungarian translations of Julius Caesar in order to prepare, in Silviu Purcărete’s words, a ‘direct but poetic and at the same time preferably contemporary’ text for his production of this play at the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj. In other words, I attempted the impossible. Translating Shakespeare into Hungarian eventually means sacrificing that very dramatic explosive that creates the linguistic tension. The Hungarian language, with its long words, often made up of four, five or even six syllables, prompts the translator to be inventive and use artistic license when creating the equivalent of iambic pentameter, yet most of these translations tend to contain numerous unpronounceable words. In the process, nevertheless, poetry escapes drama. Poesy survives but no longer features the dramatis personae: the life of real people, their movements, their flesh and blood, their gestures, their look seeking our gaze and their aura are all gone. It is as if we were confronted with an eloquent-speaking mummy, an illustrative object from a bygone era. Theatre, however, is not a museum, let alone a mausoleum: Yorick’s skull does not speak Yorick’s language, Shakespeare himself recognizes and therefore it is Hamlet who has to enter Yorick’s days of yore so that we can perceive the world beyond our perception. In fact, Shakespeare’s language sounds directly accessible and simple even to my Transylvanian ear when I read this text out loud or when I listen to it. Yet, ‘we don’t want to stage a play by Shakespeare but a performance envisioned by Shakespeare’, Purcărete makes it clear at the first rehearsal, which may sound like a barbarian idea to a literary scholar unwitting of contemporary experimental directing practice. On the other hand, I am convinced that Shakespeare’s lines in Hungarian, and supposedly in many other languages except for English, would not be in iambic pentameter but in free verse – characterized by its own strict linguistic rules and pure dramatic rhythm of thought conveying and sustaining the inner fluctuation of the characters.
When we talk about a play, we are already talking about theatre: there is no other way of understanding a play than through and in the theatre. Our ‘understanding’ therefore takes place by way of the text in action, i.e. through the placing of a written text into a non-verbal ‘formation’, which is none other but the performance, born in front of the audience only to vanish later. The written text is in fact a document of a multimedia event that took place in the past: this way the play is always open and indeed unfinished. The text of a play is an invitation not only to enter the space of linguistic expression, which provides us with endless possibilities, but also to sense and interpret this space as if all the action happening here was a real series of events happening to us. The openness of the text consequently means that writing for the stage is always imperfect in some sense, with its perfection embedded in its openness, from which it follows that any text opens up only in the context of its relationship with its free creator. This is not merely to say that the performance enacted on the writer’s mental stage creates the play in its capacity of a linguistic ‘formation’. Actually, many other things that belong to the life and functioning of the theatre – including theatre architecture and conventions (or aesthetics), the practices of the audience, schools of acting, cultural traditions, the structure of the full institutional system of the theatre and so on – precede the birth of text. A so-called historically faithful performance of a theatrical text is thus impossible: those who hinder it are the actors themselves, who are our contemporaries, and the audience, who wants to be their own contemporary in the theatre. In other words, the audience is the subject not only of their own culture, but of those views and political relations that incessantly call upon and invade them. Heiner Müller’s outspoken words, quoting Wolfgang Heise, are essentially a paraphrase of this idea: theatre is ‘the laboratory of social imagination’ and not a ‘drug of hope’.
In its significant moments, theatre has never believed in the romantic notion of the writer’s god-like sovereignty. And likewise, it has never claimed that plays are perfect creations. Instead, theatre has put forward the view that a play is a linguistic creation that can be enacted and re-enacted, prepared for the stage, repeated and re-created in many ways. It has posited that a play will remain with us, giving us a task to complete within the broader process of understanding our age and ourselves in it. Nothing is more embarrassing and at the same time more ridiculous than those contracts that, in an attempt to secure the playwright’s interests, stipulate that not a single word of the play text can be altered, and which deem all theatre people – from actors to scenographers and directors – potential slayers of the