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Danced Entries from Tolnai’s Dictionary
(XX. Thealter Festival, Szeged, Old Synagogue 2010. 07.18.)
We are taken by “the exotic charm of another system of thought” as Foucault put it in his Preface to The Order of Things. If not the system of Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia something quite close to its impossible thus ‘other’ discourse could be observed by the audience visiting Tolnai’s Dance Dictionary presented by the GoBe Company on the third day of the 20th Thealter Festival in the Old Synagogue of Szeged.
The GoBe Company from Budapest (led by the young ballet dancer-choreographer Rita Góbi born in the partly Hungarian territory of ex-Yugoslavia the ‘Vajdaság’) abolished the usual world-order, the site where different and similar things normally meet. However as the unusual and impossibly varied things were placed in each other’s vicinity eventually the space got filled – and unlike in the ‘Chinese Encyclopedia’ - where “what is impossible is not the propinquity of the things listed, but the very site on which their propinquity would be possible” - the creators of this piece found the common ground.
A new common space and order got established on several planes. On the one hand the encyclopedia’s alphabetical order, on the other the stage itself created the common ground on which the surreal entities performed by the dancers could co-exist. Apart from the lexicon and the stage, their co-existance had also been enabled by the operations of a Master of Ceremonies – a stately figure manipulating the stage in a majestic robe. The Master reanimated the characters of a dead world (silent and still hence dead), and commanded them with his stick and word. While in a sence he determined the birth of a new order as matters proceeded he got caught up in the turmoil and had become a figure among the rest. However the most important and decisive factor, which connected beings and things swirling on stage was the Tolnai spirit. Not that of Ottó Tolnai, the person, but that of the texture of his poetry; his language, which in this case was mediated through another language: dance, movement and gymnastics. (Gymnastic inasmuch as the performers did several extreme tricks remindig the audience of circus-artists.)
Thus the performers lifted the entries most important to them from the Tolnai World Encyclopedia (the name of the famous Hungarian encyclopedia is identical to the name of the poet) and transposed these into dance. Only once did words prevail: when the Master of Ceremonies recited a Tolnai poem (Poem from Veszprém from the volume Laurel from the Balkans). Between things and words a third entity appeared: movement, hence in addition to the relation between word and thing, the relations between word and movement and thing and movement were explored; and as concerning the first, concerning the latter two relations aswell, our experience was that there is no perfect translation, no perfect equation between the one and the other.
Attempting to go beyond the encyclopedic interpretation of the performance, that is to say the aspect of portraying entries from an encyclopedia, one needs to work out how ’the presented world - Tolnai’s universe - operates. During this stage the characters: the girrafe from Eszék ( the character, the ’thing’ referred to in the title) , the flamingo, the minority poet from Yugoslavia start to take up their particular places. These entities get located and thus gain their meaning to a certain degree from movement, but more importantly through the help of words. However as meaning itself is problematized in the piece, we always have more than one way to interpret what we see. For instance, multiple interpretation is called for by such elements as ’the dance macabre of flies’ or ’the ballroom with mirrors’. Nevertheless it is clear that we are dealing with some kind of search for one’s own place, and this entails not only placement in Foucault’s fictive space but in geographical space, aswell.
One way to start unraveling the piece is to analyze the relations between Balkan and Europe, and the national minority dilemma: being torn between one’s place of birth and ’the motherland’ of the nation - and thus approach issues of space and location. Another aspect would be to contrast leaving behind one place and searching for and creating a new one, this reading is propelled by the conditions of war mentioned in the text. The war reference encourages me to think of the opening picture of the performance - a silent, motionless image, which slowly gets reanimated - as corpses sorrounded by flies, mentioned in Tolnai’s poem later on in the show. However as the flyer states: ’people are creative and determined to reconstruct their possessions again and again no matter how many times these fall prey to destruction”. We can understand the next part of the performance as the process of such re-population and reconstruction. The next image to investigate is that of the ballroom with mirrors; to understand this we need to go back to the figures of the giraffe, the minority poet and the flamingo once again. Concerning their relations the following should be noted: the giraffe was the only animal in the Zoo of Eszék for which the authorities could not find adequate placement when the Zoo had been evacuated on account of the war. For this reason the lonely giraffe is now probably starnded somewhere between Europe and the Balkans. The lonely displacement of the giraffe could be connected to the motive of the endangered flamingo. ( The famous flamingo topos of Tolnai’s universe has also been visually presented in the performance – a statute like bird character was standing on a huge postament in the background of the stage, however very visibly, centrally placed.) The flamingo on the verge of extinction could be identified with the minority poet of ’Small-Yugoslavia’: both need to be bred not to become extinct. If there is no other way, then perhaps multiplied by mirrors. Thus another reading of the performance is borne: the stage is turned into such a hall of mirrors, however the looking glass in this case does not mirror the Same, but ’the Other’. So the minority poet of small Yugoslavia does not get to strengthen his own identity (by multiplication), quite on the contrary his identitiy gets shattered, his confidence lost.
Góbi Rita and the co-creators attempted to bring to life the entries of the dictionary mainly through movement – ballet, folk, classical dance – but the costumes added some extra visual clues (flamingo). The performance portayed a specific interpretation of Tolnai’s world, a geographical location amidst its destruction and struggles was shown and documented. The desire for documentation must be noted: on one side of the stage – facing the angelic musicians - a photographer in angel-like clothes took pictures during the entire performance, his action transformed fiction into reality (into artefact), and thus saved it from evanescence. Thus the different things in each others proximity, the special world on the operating-table of the stage has been saved for recollection: its creation, existance and destruction cannot be denied anymore. The photos of the angel serve as evidence, no matter how different the planes and perspectives from which the various things come a common ground can be found for them. However to find it a radical new way of thinking, a radical new order is necessary.
Review by: Orsolya Bencsik
Translated by: Katalin Turai
