This year, Zoltán Balázs celebrates the ten-year existence of his company, Maladype. They commemorate the anniversary with events, a book about the company’s ten years and the staging of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The leader of the company squeezed a good hour and a half between two festivals to talk about his working method, the experiences and memories of the ten years.

- Let’s talk about festivals first. How did you prepare to perform abroad with the company?

- In the first place, the way our company works is quite special. Our eight pieces in the repertoire must be constantly conditioned. They need to be maintained at all times. Physically, the expectation from the actors is quite high. At the same time, you have to prepare mentally, because the stage presence is not just instinct, not just intuition. The brain, the attention, the shared attention, the parallel perception, and therefore the mental condition, need to be trained. This conditioning takes place with us all year round. Festivals are a test for us of how well something works in a foreign environment that we have worked all year long. Luckily, they call us a lot and we accept requests.

- Is there a difference between Hungarian and foreign audiences?

- Yes, absolutely. Hungarian spectators cling to the verbal part of the performances. Abroad, the importance of metacommunication at festivals intensifies. It is a different challenge for the actor to speak to audiences who do not understand what he is saying. Even though there is subtitling, things are so tense that the spectator does not have time to follow the subtitling. It’s the actor’s job to bridge that. That’s why I also expect my actors to live in the moment to capture change in themselves and in the spectator.

- By the way, how much do the Hungarian audience buy for the interactive theater?

- Pretty much. By the way, I don’t poke the spectator, there’s no aggression in interactivity, I don’t pour ketchup on them, we communicate at a given moment, in a given space, through a given topic. We are already at the eightieth performance with Leonce and Lena. Anyway, we have a large number of performances and we work with a fixed repertoire. And we have three variations for performing venues.

- Earlier it was the Bárka. Was it easy to say goodbye?

- Yes, it is very easy. I spent a long time there. While I was a member there, I lived a double life between the Bárka and my own company, Maladype, but even then I basically lived for Maladype. My team worked at a different pace than the company of Bárka. We were spinning at a different speed and we were lucky because when Krétakör ceased, the leaders of Thália invited us to the Studio. It only took a year, but I had to go down that road then. We had to build our own place. Anyway, as I see it, many great theater thinkers get there at some point in their lives to create in the intimate conditions of a “home” theater.

- Do you like this environment?

- Oh, very much! It's very good for me to come in here.

- What about Budapest?

- I love Budapest the most at night. Night covers the ugly and makes people more liberated. Paris and southern Spain are also important places, Paris is perhaps my favorite city, but I would go to Tibet or even Iran, where there are big spaces, endless spaces without people.

- Going back to your company: Saying goodbye to Bárka also meant parting from several people, only Kamilla Fátyol remained. Didn't that hurt?

- I didn't lose them. However, some of them have started families and I cannot afford family people. It is also the price of independence that you have to give up certain actors. Maladype continued on its own way, and people lent their knowledge and talent to it. Everyone had their time, shorter or longer distances. Change itself is natural in theater. Everyone is afraid of change.

- You do not?

- No, I love change. For me and for the theater I make change is everything. I expect a lot from my actors. They have to work with difficult texts, with complex texts. They are not used to it, they do not learn it. However, I challenge them. I studied abroad, I saw alternatives like Robert Wilson or Anatoly Vasilyev. They did not give answers, but taught them to ask. The constant questioning starts the process of finding answers within myself, reaching for things without a prescription - for Dante, in which nothing is guaranteed.

- Indeed, Dante: you started celebrating the anniversary of your company with Inferno. This is an important stage in your spiritual journey. Why don't you sit in Dante's place in the performance?

- Many have asked this. It’s about me, indeed, but one works with mediums. I don’t miss acting or directing anyway. I'm neither an actor nor a director. There are very few things anyway that would still interest me as an actor and I want to work with even fewer directors. Hamlet was a great gift. I was infinitely free there, even with the strict rules of the game. I boldly experimented with my body, my brain, with everything that I am. I learned a great deal through Hamlet. Now I have playmates who are also interested in the most beautiful thing, metamorphosis and dare to take risks. I finally found my partners in them.

- Is it that good now?

- Yes. I put these opportunities and tasks in their hands with a good feeling. A good example for this is Egg(s)Hell, where I don’t have a chance to help them. I trust them, but to do that I had to lay down the rules exactly, to draw the world within which they could move. They are not under supervision, I do not stress them. I can’t imagine playing in my company, I have to stay out. This is a delicate thing inside and out, I don’t want it. I can only accept from Woody Allen that he directs and plays at the same time, he is somehow authentic both inside and out.

- How much democracy is there within the company anyway? Can they use their own ideas?

- Of course, they can use it. At the same time, my concept is pretty definite. I’m already attending the first reading rehearsal that I know the piece from start to finish, I don’t want to use my actors to experiment. I want to steer, guide and help them. At the same time, you have to ruin your security yourself, and that’s where the biggest risk is. "Surprise me" and movement are important within the system. Form and content, on the other hand, are not enemies. There is a phobia of form and beauty in Hungary.

- When you found your actors, was the most important thing for you to be able to create with them like that?

- I was looking for good “material”. They cannot know this method because it is not taught to them. Good basic skills are important.

- When you look at them from the outside like that, do you feel they’re achieving what you wanted? I’m talking especially about Dante’s Inferno.

- I have important topics to account for in life. I didn’t want to be a traitor myself. There were those who started out as revolutionaries with radical thoughts in their heads, and yet they became fossils of the system they wanted to overthrow. I want to avoid this. Such an adaptation of Dante can help me. In the depths of Hell, when confronted with Lucifer, the decision is whether one becomes a traitor. I don’t want to look back at what I did frozen in ice at the age of sixty. I want to be strong, courageous and risk-seeking even then, surrounded by people who believe in the same. Theater isn’t a dead genre, but some make it dead, and that makes me terribly angry. They reduce it, they make it down, they make primitive gestures towards the spectators, even though they are not stupid.

- When you were preparing for the performance with the company, were you watching movies, pictures, listening to music, which evoked the atmosphere of hell that helped in the creative process?

- There was even a cartoon, we watched an Inferno cartoon with drawn monsters. But we also saw the movie Dante’s Peak. We also listened to Liszt, of course. Awareness is an important requirement, but processing and rewording are even more important. Dante gains a lot of impressions that make him change himself, he understands that he has to live, he has to come back after his own hell, but in the meantime something has changed radically. If Zéno does it well [Zénó Faragó, in the role of Dante - ed.], His voice will tremble there.

- The performance is very intense, it takes a lot of discipline to change everything in a matter of moments, you have to be present in the moment. How could you solve this with civil actors?

- Obviously, it was my job to keep the concept. They worked with great humility. Andi (Andrea Ladányi, in the role of Andrea Ladányi, Vergilius - ed.) said that she had never seen such a disciplined choir, even though she had worked with a lot of dancers and choristers. I had to convince them, but for that, it’s essential that I believe in what I’m doing. If they succeed, they will throw themselves in it, as they are also there to create something good, to participate in it.

- In the Dante play, you used Babits' text and Ádám Nádasdy's fresh translation at the same time, putting the snippets quoted from Babits in the mouth of Andrea Ladányi (Vergilius). Why did you choose this solution?

- Vergilius is the past, he is archaic, he is knowledge, an archaic added text is something that suits him the most . Originally, Ilona Béres would have been Vergilius, who herself embodies the authenticity that is in decline. It’s almost impossible to find someone similar to her, but unfortunately she became ill. I couldn't risk her health. Vergilius, the leader, had to be formulated by a personality who is authentic, who communicates, who believes that the power of the spoken word is enough. Andrea Ladányi is someone who can do that, she doesn't want to meet anyone’s expectations. I'm fantastically happy with her.

- Please talk about the cathartic scene when Lucifer, frozen in ice, caressing his Judas in the depths of hell!

- It’s a Pieta scene, a cruel flick, an evident code. I don’t want to explain, the interpretation has to happen in the spectator. It’s not my job to serve the stupidity. I have to irritate, poke the spectator to be angry, to feel something, to feel like arguing, to talk about it. In that scene, both characters are me, just as Dante is both characters as he even patterned all the characters about himself. The embracing and repelling, Judas and Lucifer. I (or you) are Dante, writhing between a profane and a saint. The choice is ours, it is a personal responsibility in life. The other thing is destructivism, which is incomprehensible to many. For example, when we draw a mandala in sand and then sweep it away. Many do not understand this because art, attention, and communication lack generosity.

- Hölderlin’s Empedocles was the piece that drew my attention to you, a brilliant work of art, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen on stage.

- Yet half of the critical class withdrew. They didn't want to slow down and watch. It was unacceptable to them that they thought it had no story and did not have the quiet depth that it would have needed to receive it. It was a terrible effort for the actors in Empedocles to move slowly and speak quickly meanwhile. This is terribly difficult. I’ve always been excited about the genre of motionless movement. Of course, they didn't really know what to do with it. That’s why I staged Ostrovsky's The Tempest afterwards. I did the story there, but like never before, no one before. I put it all together in a studio, with spotlights that illuminated the performance live. I used the music of Leos Janácek's opera for all this. I have always been interested in the relationship between text and music. But there was no culture for that! Not even among those who call themselves analysts.

- Are you listening to criticism anyway?

- No. The stupidity is making me terribly furious. I was also disappointed in many young people who started out as being comets, but they also lined up. There is not much real communication either. The way so many talk about theater is incomprehensible for me many times. Theater needs to be made risky and bold, experimenting. For example in the case of Dante they were outraged by limited shapes we show, but it's a geometric work! I didn't invent that.

- What else inspires you?

- I always dream and I remember all of them. I use my dreams and my memory is excellent. The actors can turn out of their world, that I always remember what I asked them to do. It also makes them feel safe, but it is difficult to conform to this coordinate system.

- Can you usually make the concepts, the dreams become reality?

- For the most part, yes. I never had to compromise. I never had to work with an actor I didn’t want to, or direct a piece I didn’t want. If something didn't quite work out, it did not depend on my will, but on my knowledge, then and there I was not yet prepared for it.

- Isn’t it tiring as a company leader that in addition to directing, you are the face, the hand, the heart, with all the good and bad consequences of that?

- It’s hard but not tiring because I have a lot of joy in it. I’m a father figure, I know, but I have friends in the company, not my service staff. That's good. There was a time when I overtook myself, pampered them, but things turned around. We now combine conscious, purposeful work with permissive, loose, light, improvisational and risky elements.

- Do both of these feel casual for you?

- Of course. At the age of twelve I lost everything, my homeland, my friends, after that I had nothing to lose. I have no respect for authority. I don't care about the canon. I'm not scared or stressed. As a teacher I rather prefer to talk, to stimulate the students to think, I want to see personalities, something.

- When did you decide you wanted to do theater?

- I didn't want to do theater. I wanted to laugh a lot, to have a good time, that was the plan, but life drove me to the theater, because there was joy and clowning in it too. Then I did the Conservatoire in Paris and learned the method there. However, I did not lose this joy; if that would be the case, it would be over.

- How would your 17-18 year old self like you now, at the age of 33?

- I didn’t lose that young self of mine, I’m the same as I was when I was six. I'm as "evil" as I was then. I’ve always wondered how to get people out of their usual frames. I still do that.

Anna Nikoletta Nagy, kultblog.hu, 2011

Translation by Zsuzsanna Juraszek