Hunting Feast and B-Sector - with Jelinek against racism

“Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”

Luis Buñuel

I never liked political theatre. But what I would like even less is not talking about what’s going on in Hungary today. That we perform Chekhov and Feydeau as if murderous racism weren’t back on the streets and as if we weren’t forced to read slogans from the thirties on the walls and in some papers.

It is the whys and wherefores that we are searching for in these three days. But one thing is certain: Hungary never faced its fascist past. Just like Austria hasn’t until very recently. And since Hungarian dramatists don’t yet seem to want to write about what is happening around them, it is with Elfriede Jelinek that we try to find the cause and start discussing possible solutions.

Anna Lengyel, founder of PanoDrama

 Sponsored by: Kulturforum Österreich, OSI

Trailer Hunting Feast and B-Sector

Facing the Past, Dealing with the Present with Hope for the Future

8 March 2010 Monday

19h-0h30 Elfriede Jelinek: Sportsplay

Einar Schleef’s legendary performance recorded from the Vienna Burgtheater about the fascism of sports.

9  March 2010 Tuesday

Open University Lecture Series:  The Pathology of Hating What’s Different

20h 30 Eszter Fischer, psychologist: Enough of calling them Jews jolly names! - Let’s face our past and learn from it like Germany does

22h Elfriede Jelinek: Rechnitz

rehearsed reading directed by Csaba Polgár

with Andor Lukáts, Zsolt Máthé, Judit Pogány, Csilla Radnay, Kálmán Somody, Nóra Dia Takács

180 forced labour worker Jews were humiliated and slaughtered by Countess Battyhány and her company in 1944 at her castle in Rechnitz in the framework of a jolly hunting party.

The Hungarian countess was never tried for this monstrous deed, nor were her fellow-partiers. The mass grave still hasn’t been found.

10 March 2010 Wednesday

18h Roma/Non-Roma - where does the hatred come from? 

 ten-day workshop led by the TIE teacher and actor Yvette Feuer

The actor and TIE teacher Yvette Feuer has been working with  for almost a year including all age groups from small children to young adults. PanoDrama commissioned her to do a ten-day workshop with young Romanies from Barcs, Pécs, Hétes and Kaposvár  and young people of all colours from Budapest in the theme of hatred and discrimination against the Roma.

20h Elfriede Jelinek: Rod, Staff and Crook

rehearsed reading

Preceding the April premiere of PanoDrama we organize a workshop and present its result this evening about the four Hungarian Roma murdered by a racist in Burgenland.

With: Eszter Csákányi, Ágnes Kaszás, Péter Scherer, Marianna Szalay, Ádám Tompa

Workshop led by: Róbert Pejó and Anna Lengyel

Chaos by Mika Myllyaho- a workshop at the Nordwind Festival Berlin

Workshop Presentation im HAU 1st October 2009

coproduction with the Nordwind Festival 

workshop led by Martina Marti and Anna Lengyel

With: 

Judica Albrecht, Johanna Falckner, Katharina Hauck, Nicola Hecker, Simone Henn, Nicole Janze, Claudia Schwartz, Verena Specht-Ronique, Claudia Steiger

PanoDrama's concept of workshopping this wonderful dark comedy for three with nine women has proved a hit in Hungary, so now we have repeated the exercise with a group of German actresses in the framework of Nordwind Festival. The one-week workshop was co-led by the Swiss translator/director Martina Marti, who has been living and working in Finland for years and PanoDrama's founder Anna Lengyel. The most interesting lesson we learned was how similarly Finnish and Hungarian people seem to approach a Myllyaho-play, taking their cue from the situations and the characters which the Finnish playwright is so famous for, while the initial German approach seemed to regard these texts more as only that, wanting to work against the situation, but then quickly got the hang of the playwright's special sense of humour. 

The presentation was fairly full in the foyer of HAU1 and the audience enjoyed the evening clearly. 

Nordwind Festival focuses on Nordic theatre and as such has a Finnish focus in common with PanoDrama. A Smeds-evening shed light on the brilliant director and playwright Miss Lengyel worked with while still at Krétakör.

Panic by Mika Myllyaho - staged reading at the National Theatre

Mika Myllaho: Panic

staged reading

A PanoDrama production at the National Theatre 

March 11th 2009

Hungarian translation: Nóra Falk

Max         Marcell Miklós

Leo           Tamás Szabó Kimmel

Joni         Zalán Makranczi

Dramaturg and producer   Anna Lengyel

Directed by Roland Rába

Sponsored by Finnagora

One of the most exciting European countries for new drama today is Finland. The Helsinki Theatre Academy has a playwriting program which is responsible for bringing out the most gifted playwrights (and directors) with very different voices from Kristian Smeds through Juha Jokela to Mika Myllyaho on the male side, as well as some of the most brilliant women writers in modern theatre from Sirkku Peltola to Anna Krogerus. Laura Ruohonen, perhaps the most successful Finnish playwright internationally is now head of the playwriting programme.

Founding director of PanoDrama Anna Lengyel has had an intense working relationship with Finnish theatres and authors for over three years and promotes the plays of Nordic Drama Corner as their Hungarian partner.

A staged reading of PanoDrama with the Hungarian Dramaturgs' Guild at the Hungarian Theatre Festival POSzT in 2008 was Juha Jokela's Mobile Horror translated for that occasion. 

The spring of 2009 was devoted to the brilliant comic playwright and director Mika Myllyaho. The first event was a staged reading of Panic. A play about three men in their thirties at the verge of a nervous breakdown is a hilarious comedy of our days, one that runs with full houses of medium theatres all over Finland. 

The Hungarian reading was preceded by a more detailed rehearsal period stretching through a month, but only about three times a week three hours. The actors and the director were all involved in productions of the theatre and had rehearsals and performances in the mornings and the evenings.

The result was a half-staged production, which proved to be such a hit as no one expected it to be. The National Theatre is contemplating producing the full production next year. PanoDrama will in this case waive its right for a first production, but in case the National choses not to produce the show, PanoDrama will.

After the Fall rehearsed readings from the best of the playwriting workshop

After the Fall -
only in Hungary: playwriting workshop  for young talents in the framework of the Goethe Institute's project

30 January 2009 - National Theatre Budapest

Concept and workshop leader: Merényi (Lengyel) Anna

With: Bánfalvi Eszter, László Attila, Mertz Tibor, Miklós Marcell, Péterfy Bori, Szalay Mariann

Directing help: Rába Roland

Workshop leader: Márton László, playwright, novelist

In the first half of the evening we heard a selection from the works of Ferencz Csuszner, Márk Péter Vargha and Alice Müller - all debutants who wrote their first play for this workshop, just like Bettina Almássy, whose entire  I am Drowning about an Olympic champion swimmer from the DDR, who slowly and unbeknownst to her, is drugged into becoming a man, was read in the second half of the evening. In between Anna Lengyel interviewed the winners, as well as the playwright László Márton, whom she had asked to be her co-leader in this three-month workshop conceived to discover new talent among the youngest of a country, which has no plywriting program at any of its universities.

The first week of work started in November after 14 of the 32 applicants were selected to participate. The list included the German actress Alice Müller (one of the winners), who has only been living in Hungary for two years, as well as two girls just preparing for their high school graduation, two computer programmers, who were also among the winners, Péter Nádai, the only playwright who has been published before and Márk Péter Vargha, who had never read a play before he applied. Everyone had to apply with a text, which could be a scene, poetry, a novel or even a drama synopsis. During the first week László Márton gave short lectures about different aspects of the writer's job and the applicants kept writing and re-writing, based on what was discussed in the workshop. Two short stories' plots were further developed by the whole group, these became Heartlessness by Vargha and What's Left Behind by Ferencz Csuszner, a writer from Transylvania.  A strong team was formed during the brainstorming and the intense work together despite the different backgrounds and ages ranging from 17 to 35 among the students.  

Which is why despite the fact that only seven texts were selected by the two course-leaders for the second week in December based on the first full act of each play to be submitted, all 14 stayed together to continue the work. The novelty of the December week, as well as a novelty of any writers' workshop in Hungary were the actors, who according to Lengyel's concept joined the group for the afternoon sessions.  This was a new experience for both parties concerned: the writers could hear their lines from the mouths of professional actors and see if the dialogue works and the character is consistent or rich enough, which question was always asked of the performers. On the other hand they had also never worked with a play just being born. Debates about the texts gained a different quality with the theatre people: it was their validity on stage, their logic in that of the theatre which counted. The evening sessions were kept for the literary work with Márton and Lengyel.

The third and final week preceded the reading on the 30th of January. Roland Rába joined the group as an actor, but also as the directing mind and five winners were announced. Péter Nádai's Lonely cedar was not part of the programme, because the writer didn't want an excerpt to be read, but we heard excerpts from Alice Müller's yet incomplete brilliant absurd Elvira and Petunia, perhaps the favourite of the actors who are interested in further developing the work, as well as Márk Péter Vargha's Heartlessness, a story of a brave new world where coming of age is marked by an operation where one loses one's heart and redundant feelings and of a boy, whose heart always grows back, as well as Ferencz Csuszner's What's Left Behind about a Hungarian family in Communist Romania, who take their sick little daughter to the West, leaving their seven-year old son behind. 

It was extremely difficult to declare one winner, but or the purpose of the evening where we promised a full play to be read (with some cuts of course), we voted for Bettina Almássy's I am Drowning.  Almássy is an actress, director and now a playwright, so her most exciting feature perhaps was the way her play was constructed by a clearly very theatrical mind in a fairly unorthodox way.

Lengyel plans to continue working with these authors, but also more importantly devising playwriting workshops to discover young talent, so badly needed on Hungarian stages.