Repertoire / Playbill
The Meaning of Life
or Passing Away Time in 60 Minutes
Do you really think I’m going to tell you in the first sentence?
How about a little effort?
Isn’t this the point of it all?
To focuse intensely on something, betting your life on it, doing it a hundred times and over again, to achieve a goal that has lost all significance?
Interrogator: Snooze.
Respondent: Sisyphos.
Then they change parts.
What does it mean to usefully spend the time that is passing right now, even during the time it takes me to say “right now?” Is it possible to formulate any answers to this question? And if it is, will these answers not cancel out one another? In theater, as in everyday life, you will miss everything if you want it all.
The structure of what transpires on the stage reflects the coercion to choose between alternatives that permeates life: Only the keen focus of the audience as it zooms in on a selected detail can make sense of the chaos whirling between the beginning and the end. The fabric of the whole is made up of personal confessions by the actors, from which each member of the audience may in turn “create” his or her own version of the performance.
The piece takes its inspiration from Bill Viola’s video work Nantes Triptych.
Job creating fraud busted
István M. hired blind individuals with whom he shared some of the state subsidies disbursed to employers giving jobs to the handicapped. At the plant, the blind picked through buttons in the belief that they sorted out the ones fit for sale. Once they had separated the good ones from the scrap, the entrepreneur mixed up all the buttons, and it started over again.
Comments
- But how did he get busted? Did one of the blind notice and say, “Geeze, this scrap one has already passed through my hands?” Obviously, only a scrap can be spotted like that.
- You know God is doing the same thing to us, right?
- Separate us, you mean? Grain from the chaff? Sinners to the left, the innocent to the right?
- Hell, no! We are not the buttons. We are the blind.
Update
Laid-off blind workers and their sympathizers protest for the acquittal of István M. and the restart of the button sorting plant.
| Directed by: | Réka Szabó |
| Text, dramaturgy: | Krisztián Peer |
| Performers & co-creators: | Gergely Bánki, Dóra Furulyás, Rita Góbi, István Gőz, Hunor G. Szabó, Albert Márkos, Márta Szabó, Réka Szabó, Dániel Szász, Zsófia Tamara Vadas |
| Music: | Albert Márkos, Hunor G. Szabó |
| Lights and space: | Attila Szirtes |
| Sound: | Zsolt Korai |
| Special thanks: | Dóra Furulyás, Tímea Oláh |
| Sponsors: | Balassi Institute, Florian Workshop - Moving House Fundation, Association for Hungarian Alternative and Independent Theatres, L1 Independent Dancers’ Partnership, NKA, OKM, szinhaz.hu, tancelet.hu |
| Media sponsor: | FidelioEst, Funzine |
Photo: Norbert Balázs
Upcoming performances
5pm, Sunday September 12, 2010
Merlin Theatre: V. ker. Gerlóczy u. 4.
Ticket prices: 2.000 Ft, Student prices: 2.000 Ft - Tickets