Sometimes I do not go to theatres. I am not a theatre goer. They speak loud and curse in the theatre, the so called actors are provocative and I feel myself awkward uncomfortably. The theatre of today is against the viewers. And so on. Many times, they are about the fast-told clichés, with which many of us excuse ourselves, if we have to tell our opinion about the contemporary theatre. This present report does not want to judge with critical cynicism, instead of it, with some careful phrases I try to share the experience of being in the base of the troupe of Maladype on Mikszáth Square.

I took off my coat in the hall of the flat theatre, which opens from a familiar balcony walkway, where with an unfamiliar personal tone they ask my name: I have got used to the fact, that eye-contact is not the strong side of our everyday life. In the performing hall Simone de Beauvoir shows me my place. I have smelled the musty pages, which I let open by themselves on a page: “If I write a book, which I base on my own story, I can re-create myself”.

When I straighten up I can look around again in the white walled room, which will be re-created with newer guests through some minutes, to be a theatrical place. Now I take into consideration the seemingly irrelevant objects, I try to find some connections between them, but it has no use to hurry ahead, I look at the actors instead, who are relaxing on the ground. Where does the floor begin, where does the stage do it? Does any of them stop anywhere, and goes on the other one?

We are waiting. The actors in a few minutes put on their usual choreography, they are sitting next to each other, their looks concentrate on a far-away point, which they can illustrate with the repetitive rhythm of synchronic movements and the fragmented pictures of thoughts that are connected to them, with their symbolic references. Together-alone, avoiding-imitating.

The improvised performative gestures stop sometimes the artistic performance, which make me remember a charismatic punk musician, for example PJ Harvey or Patty Smith, with her shouting, riff broken feminist songs.

Between the movements, which are looking for the freedom of childhood, the ironic motifs of beauty of the social expectations of feminism, which of course, we want to laugh at, chase away, but many times they widen the latitude of self-determination.

Actresses are standing in front of me, who fill their eyes with themselves now. The author ego talks about the experiences traumas in informal tone, as women, about traumas as actors, about the double poles of the roles, in which self-irony many times laughs at the hopeless vulnerability of artistic fate: I have to understand that they perform to me for their lives, to the acceptors, to the viewers. I, who make a decision: I, who make a judgement; I, who have the power beyond the artist. I, who cannot sit all the time passively between the viewers.

What can be sacrifice for art? What kind of possibilities do artists have nowadays? Can I free myself up from the grips of expectations? I ask it from myself, who is balancing on both sides at the same time now.

“I have lost place there, that I have never told no.” I have already got the answer at the beginning of the performance. Out-let, out-let – to get out, you need an exit. You can watch the performance here.

DS–Beáta, Rebelevent blog, 2016

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)