(2016.)
… the theatre is mobilizing only a few groups of people, quite a small segment of society. And this, no matter how hard we try to sugarcoat it, is rather true.
AP: Hi, Gáló. First of all thanks for accepting my invitation for this talk. Intially, the idea was for me to write a piece on my own, something about TESZT where I worked as a collaborator this year, some essay about what this festival is really about, why and who was it created for, what is hard or what is good about it? But I can`t do this alone. So I dragged you, the so called artistic coordinator of the festival in it, so that we can say something together about our problems and difficulties regarding this festival. But not in that “it-was-really-hard-but-somehow-we-made-it” style, and not by screaming at each other as we did on our way from the Jászai Mari square to the Blaha Lujza. Maybe we can find a middle way, a silver lining, as if standing in front of Saint Peter – why is it going to be a TESZT next year or why not?
GZ: I am more than happy to be here, thank you for the invitation, even though I think it`s going to be quite difficult to be personal and intelligible at the same time, but I know that is important to break out from the familiar, because this is what most principally connects to the unworldliness of the TESZT. During the eight days of the festival we were able to see exactly how rich and colorful we are able to talk about certain things, how important it is to assume this personal aspect, even if it`s hard or we do not succeed in doing so.
AP: You are writing about the unworldliness of the TESZT, and I agree, and possibly others, whoever experienced TESZT would agree too. To us it is somehow obvious what is this “the dead rabbit” we call unworldliness, that one thing we feel when we are at the festival, that special something is not some fictitious brand, trend conception. It`s the result of years of hard work. So, how would you explain the ideas, beliefs, principles shaping this festival, and mostly this year`s edition?
GZ: Most certainly it would be difficult to find some expressions that do not seem clichés or empty, so the best solution in this case of “the dead rabbit” would be to bring it to Timisoara, so it can be here with us for the eight days of the festival. When we talk about TESZT, we usually talk about public experience, about celebration, about meeting, about the possibility of a dialogue, about the coexistence of different theatrical cultures and aesthetics, about the importance of experiencing together. So most probably, the presence of the dead rabbit would mean that while we are trying to make it understand something about the festival, we learn more about ourselves and each other. But there are no definite answers, only guesses. This year`s edition is also proving this, mainly because in most of the performances the presence of the public is essential, so basically we are creating this festival together.
AP: I am glad that you immediately started talking about the public’s presence, because I have a few examples of how this personal presence was included, willingly or not, in the selection. I will start from those performances which let in the audience directly, let’s say by letting the public create the performance. The first one that comes to my mind is “The State” by Alexander Manuiloff, and the “Quintetto” of the Italian Marco Chenevier and Smeralda Capizzi. And there are also “Second Time”, the reading performance of the Slovenian Simona Semenič, or the Random Scream’s “7 Promises”. And because these performances were giving the audience a lot of space to express themselves, sometimes we could have felt that we learned more than we wanted to know about the others, about those who we shared these experiences with. You have attended all the shows which were part of the program. For example, you saw “The State” even three times, in three languages. What do you think, what have you learned about the public of the TESZT? And what does the term ‘festival-public’ even mean? How could we describe them?
GZ: This whole thing is mostly interesting from the point of view of what do we all experience in these moments we spend together. What is the role or the weight of our presence in the performance? The shows you mentioned– even if they are similar at a certain level – are totally different from these points of view. In the case of “Quintetto”, the public is helping the artist create the performance, they are present body and soul, but their freedom is limited. The creators of “7 Promises” are offering vodka in exchange for a promise, so everyone is offered the chance to act, they put the audience in a position where they can choose to participate or not, and this is true for the present of the show and for the future as well, because the life of those who will make that promise will change, even if it is only for a short time or in little, insignificant things. The important thing about Simona Semenič’s performance is that she shares something with the public, something that is deeply personal. By telling people about her illness, she is healing herself while she is listening to her own story being told by other people over and over again. During “The State”, the audience has complete freedom, because the creator of the show, the artist is not there, anything can happen, and this way the performance is going to be different every time, it is going to be as the public makes it. The three performances of “The State” in the festival were completely different, but they managed to show something every time about the audience who “played it”. The audience of the first one was mostly made of experts of the field, they were much more active, they had opinions, they were criticizing, while the others were hiding in the background. The English version of the show was attended mostly by students, a younger generation for whom it was important to collaborate in an organized way. During the Romanian version, an elderly lady left the room after a few attempts of collaboration asking for her ticket back, emotions were getting out of control, one person was quite provocative because they were bothered by the passivity of the others. If something is truly valuable eventually it will be greeted positively, so it’s worth taking some risks, but we have to be more cautious about what and how we are communicating.
AP: The fact that something is about to happen with the audience – let them be an insider or just a simple follower of the theatre’s work – is the biggest challenge and the most interesting prospect of a festival in the same time. It’s a challenge because it is hard to structure and process the personal happenings, it is hard to talk about them. The performances that are actively using the public are in the more fortunate category, because in these situations even the more radical individual reactions can be built in the texture of the show, so there is a chance to start a dialogue about what is going on with them during the performance. It is a bit harder when, only by watching something, you become a co-producer of the show. I’m thinking now about the performance of the k2 Theater from Budapest and the SPOT Company, “What is Hungarian?” played as an off-program. We were listening in the dark to improvised stories that simply and humorously present everything that is Hungarian. “Eggshells”, the Portuguese performance, could be familiar to last year’s “Thealter” or the OPEN Festival from Budapest. It starts out from a very intimate space, a place where two dancers with their eyes covered are reaching for each other’s bodies, a place that opens in the end and lets a dozen strangers in, to end their dance together. And last but not least, the performance of Ivo Dimchev, the closing and healing show of the festival, “I Cure”, which is radical and lurid while the whole time is nursing and cuddling the audience to tears. The inner structure of the show seems to be deeply closed, a musical web where every move, every sentence, every piece of the scene, even the body of the performer is a complex element of the structure, and regarding its closeness it still manages to be inviting, accepting, because the one thing, the one person it shows us, is gentle and fragile himself. I feel that, from the moment we start to focus our attention on the audience and its place in the festival, we start to discover how many times, and in how many ways, we are letting them alone in the more traditional theater.
GZ: You are probably not the only one feeling this satisfaction. Of course, while we are talking about how important the presence of the public is, there are some who are deeply uncaring about this. There are those who just simply want to be laid back, keeping the biggest distance possible from the story they are watching. At this moment, we are at the point where we try to accentuate the importance of being together, we create possibilities to be as such, trying to fill up with content, but we miss seeing the quality if this togetherness. And while you are dissatisfied by the attention and the space the audience gets, an organizer maybe is much unhappier because of the attention and space the theatre itself gets.
AP: How can all of this be related to TESZT? Do you think that the theatre from Timisoara doesn’t get the attention it deserves? Or TESZT? But these are two different thing, aren’t they?
GZ: No, we cannot separate these two, because the TESZT is the theatre’s project. It’s more like a matter of proportion, how much attention is given to every one of them. This year we were expecting the vice mayor of the town to come to the official opening, but he did not even notify us that he wouldn’t come. The mayor was walking in front of the theatre during the festival, but he didn’t have time to come in. The Erdely experts in this field are rarely present at TESZT, with the exception of a few critics. We have educational programs that are extremely hard to fill up with students. We don’t have access to halls which are appropriate for theatre plays, we don’t have ideal conditions for playing. I have to underline these are not real dissatisfactions, only examples to understand how many points of view we have to consider during organization. At the moment, we are at the point where we have to shift attention from one thing to another. But course, a little attention is still better than no attention at all.
AP: Are you trying to say that there is a shortage of infrastructure and human resources for the best version of TESZT? For one, Romanian or even Erdely theatres are in a much better situation than the ones in Hungary. There is a chance to meet, there is a professional discussion capable to cover the region where I, for example, as a student from the Cluj University, have grown up, and where I occasionally go back to continue the dialogue this region has to offer. On the other hand, the question is still: can these forums reach out to the local community and how can they become an organic part of the city’s life. In the light of all that, where do you see the TESZT’s function in the near future?
GZ: There are at least five different theatres in Timisoara, so anyone can choose the one they like. It’s hard for TESZT to get rid of this idea that it is the Hungarian Theatre’s festival, even if we know that is more of a city’s festival. Many invited performances are nonverbal or English, we translate every show in three languages, so theoretically it’s not just for a small segment of the population. A lot of theatre critics are coming from outside the country, there are Serbian students, local Hungarian, Romanian, German people who come to see the festival, a very mixed public, but very typical for Timisoara. Due to the size of the spaces and the budget, we can’t and honestly do not even want to address the masses. So we try to find smaller, more interesting performances to present. TESZT is capable to play a part in the Romanian, Serbian and Hungarian theatre culture as well, and it also has an important role in the life of the local community. During the eight year of its existence we managed to present regional values, we could see the work of important Romanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Croatian artists and we are still trying to broaden this circle. Regarding the future, I am thinking about the importance of coproduction, which would allows us not only to present, to make some things visible, but it would create the environment for new values to be created in a theatrical language and about issues which are currently absent from our region. This festival is measurable on a human scale, which is a good thing because it does not have a very large range, and this is why we still have our freedom. Because there is no stake for anyone to monopolize it for some ideology, or to chip on our work.
AP: It’s like you were saying that TESZT could stay independent due to its so called indifference. This tells a lot about the state of (Romanian) theatre, right? So, according to this, the freedom of art is based on the idea that, regardless of what and how it speaks or does about certain topics, it is actually irrelevant on the large scale of important things. We can easily see this as a very depressing perspective, but also as some kind of criticism: the theatre is mobilizing only a few, only a quite small segment of society. And this, no matter how hard we try to sugarcoat it, is rather true. When we started talking we were representing two very different points of view, and by this I think we managed to get to the core of the festival’s multiple, yet potentially productive, paradoxes. To be more precise, in order for it to be really efficient TESZT has to have impact on both directions in the same time: the professional area and the inhabitants of its hosting city. I honestly think that these two are equally important, and that for an optimal functioning of this project, the two have to grow together in the same direction.
GZ: The fact that there is a festival, which has the ability to present real values, is important for everyone - public, artists, critics or basically anyone. But in order for it to become more than that, an interesting perspective, it’s not enough if only us, the organizers of this event, have an opinion, have something to say. Instead we need to be in this together, it needs open-mindedness, it needs attention, it needs presence. Obviously it is very hard to put in words why it is so important to pay attention to such an event if the communication between us is minimal. But there are several artists, critics, students, spectators who are here with us from the very beginning, and this is very important for us, because thanks to their feedback we can get a much more detailed image about what is good or bad about the festival, what are its flaws and strong points, and in which direction should we continue our journey together…