To Empty The Words
Endre Szkŕrosi
19/08/2002
The Background of a Linguistic Code
Once upon a time I regularly did concerts with groups which always were formed of artist friends of mine. As for this kind of activity, working with Konnektor I used to call it concert-theatre, because action and sight were as important as music or words were. Usually we built up grandious stage designs - full of spatial, visual and gestural inventions - as huge as the given space allowed it in Budapest, in Szeged, Bologna, Nové Zámky, Glasgow, London, Amsterdam etc. Then with Towering Inferno (London) in which I have been a guest-artist, there were built even more extended stage designs with dozens of projections, and a precise engineering of sublime performance was shown in exciting spaces in London, in Edinburgh or Budapest, Vienna, Fribourg, Berlin, Melbourne and so on. In Hungary, since the middle of the ’90s (with Katalin Ladik, Zsolt Kovács, Zsolt S?rés and others) we have worked on stage as Spiritus Noister; and our stage designs and performances were - as the epoch was slowly, but irresistibly changing - less grandious, but sometimes more brutal. Perhaps because of the vacuum which appeared more and more hopelessly and more and more ridiculously. So, in a way, the idea and the practice of a monumental minimalism were mature. At one of these concerts (made with 9 musicians, poets and artists, 3 of them formed a female choir, it was amazingly desperate), when the horrifying crescendo for half an hour was broken down with a rapid resolution - it always seemed to be the last time -, I ritually crushed a clock: that was the end planned The band got off, and I, lead by an unknown force, remained on stage for a few minutes, began to cry, to trap and jump, forming 3 words which, outside my consciousness, had been searching their right space, and now found it in me. And that was the end, unforeseen, after the end.
For now, although we keep on working with Spiritus Noister, just those 3 words have remained: expressing in a way - or showing as a blueprint - the dark and fatal conditions among which I felt myself when I looked relaxedly and deeply in myself. Those 3 words have remained present as facts or as an accomplished experience, even if I don’t think I feel the same experience now. (Well, I may feel the same, but not the same same.) Maybe the crisis has changed and become obvious. So let’s look for another one. But.
In artistic expression you never lose the feelings and intuitions once you had them. They became facts of your life and you go on working on them and with them. That concert and all the experiences of that period have been absorbed by the virtual artistic dimensions of those 3 words. I made several visual versions of them, as if they had formed a poem, I inserted them in various soundworks, despite of that they didn’t become empty. They keep on making me working, and I try to empty them. I began to work on them in the framework of a mega-minimal concert theatre piece, based on a lonely solo voice and on the gesturality of a gradually built up marching. My friend Zsolt Kovács made a minimalist sound-composition for it, that is the third part of the structure. Obsessive vocal and physical gestures may help to expire and get sublime the sorrow you don’t really know and you can’t really feel: you can just meet it, unforeseen, when you are in a metaphysically blessed status: on-stage or off-stage, wherever - just for a moment in the hand of God.
 
ultimo aggiornamento:
lunedě 22 luglio 2002 10.46.46 |
