Nonverbal exam performance directed by Zoltán Balázs at Târgu Mureș

On 13 January, the graduating actor class of the Târgu Mureş University of Arts debuted with August, a performance based on Bruno Schulz' short stories, directed by Zoltán Balázs. The artistic director of Maladype Theatre - who was invited to direct at the university by Erzsébet B. Fülöp - prepared the performance August based on short stories entitled Cinnamon Shops by Bruno Schultz.

Zoltán Balázs is a regular guest at the Romanian theatre life: in 2005, he directed The Return of Odysseus at the Csiky Gergely Hungarian State Theatre. In 2011, Maladype performed the well-renowned performance, Egg(s)hell at the SIBFEST International Theatre Festival, and one year later they introduced Platonov, too. In Spring, 2012, in the coproduction of Radu Stanca National Theatre and Maladype Theare, The Master and Margarita received critical and audience acclaim. In 2017, Zoltán Balázs was awarded Best Director at the ATELIER International Theatre Festival with his staging of How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients. The audience could also see him performing in 2016, as Viktor Kravcsenko in I Chose Freedom performed at Târgu Mureş.

About the exam performance the director told Târgu Mureş Radio that it is important that students conceive their desires, their purposes and experiences, that they are present, they are not just playing, and they let happen what they are there for.

The creators about the performance:

Bruno Schultz, master of colourful phantasmagories, tales and sensations, builds up his work from worthless junk. Behind these junks, our lives flow, and the only essence is given by the change of masks and forms. Although Schultz is a contemporary of German expressionists, Musil and Kafka, instead of universal fear he rather builds a house from his own childhood memories. The author of the magical-realistic Cinnamon Shops wrote about the final days of the Monarchy in a galician small town, in which his own father, Jakub, in the shape of the merchant and philosopher-magician, sees the end of an old age through the eyes of Józef, the child. Childhood “would be the realization of a messianic age, an age of genius which was promised to us in mythologies” - he wrote. Against the aggressivity of the preceding chaos Józef defends himself by letting it into his own house and finding a place for it in the space of existing. “What a naivity it is to think that we can form our own fate in life’s thousand smallness. My only desire is to lull the watchfullness of fate and, without any noise, become invisible on the side of good luck.”

AUGUST

nonverbal performance based on Bruno Schultz’ short stories

Director: Zoltán Balázs

Performed by:

Brigitta Dőry, Brigitta Erőss, Róbert Fekete, Simon Jáger, Ivett Andrea Lukács, Gáspár Mesés, J. Viktor Szabó, Míra Szilágyi, Lilla Zsenák

Lead teacher: Erzsébet B. Fülöp

Director’s assistant: Ildikó Zoltán (director student, 3rd year)

Production assistant: Zsuzsa Juraszek (student of tetrology, 1st year)

Opening night: 13 January, 2017. 7 p.m.

Venue: Studio Theatre, Targu Mures, Köteles Sámuel u. 6