Bitef

Društvu. Zovemo je cirkus, jer je naš cilj da u pozorištu stvorimo nepredvidive trenutke u kojima se sve može dogoditi, kao u cirkusu u tišini posle dobošarskog tuša. KRETAKÖR SZINHÄZ (Chalk Circle Theatre) The Kretakör Theatre was founded by Arpad Schilling in Budapest in 1995 in the spirit of searching for new ways, and it is the very ars poetica we would like to follow also in the future. Our goal is to research theatre as a form of art and common reflection on the world we are living in. In the last five years the theatre has worked as a free-lance team without a troupe and without permanent rehearsal and performing place. The season 2000/01 is the first one when 14 contracted members belong to the company. Until June 2002 the Kretakör is hosted by the Thalia Theatre, which let its "Old Studio" where we can work and play in. Kretakör Theatre is looking for its own path to follow while preserving its independent workshop-like feature and the desire for direct communication with the wide public. Kretakör Theatre - whose members are mainly in their twenties - wishes to develop a brave alternative, uniting the energy and the courage for experiments of the "alternative" troupes with the permanent and secure functioning of established theatres. In each of our performances, we would step on a path wich takes us to an unknown end, we search for unpredictable moments, when everzthing can happen - to us and to our public. We don't want to put the public in a reverie but to earn new perceptions together with them, and we dare to be unpleasant, irritating or contradictory in order to achieve this. We try to create through permanent searching and experimenting the authentic theatrical language for this. For us, the intensive

presence of the actors, the text, the image, the live music and the movement are equally important. We are a young company but we do not wish to make theatre for only our generation: we play for everyone who is open to a living, present time theatre. The Woyzeck-performanceKretakör is of an experiment; we tested the limits of ourselves and our acting tools, we tried to discover new means of theatrical expression, theatrical language. Our aim was not the reconstruction of Buchners' fragment rather its re-creation in our own language. We preferred the discovery of the deep currents below the story, the grasping of the hidden essence of it to the narration. The performance was born out of a workshop. In its first phase we worked in a fortress in Komarom (Monostori erod, in the North-West of Hungary). In this huge, labyrinth-like edifice we made exercises inspired by the place and the play, then we elaborated some scenes with texts of Buchner and poems of Attila Jćzsef (a great Hungarian working-class poet from the first half of the 20 century.) We tried to summarize the essence of the characters and situations of the play in dense images. The next site was in Zsambek (a village near to Budapest, place of a yearly Summer Theatre Festival); here in the ruine of a gothic church, we staged thirteen scenes with the final cast. The version for a closed theatrical space was opened in Berlin, Sophiensaele in September 2001, then we've played in Bobigny; the Budapest premiere took place in the Autumn Festival on 23 October, in the Old Studio of Thalia Theatre. We call the performance workers' circus, because we think Woyzeck is a worker: he is the little man, thrown into the world, lonely and defenceless in all his fundamental relations, to God, to the Other and to the society. We call it circus because our aim is to create in the theatre unpredictable moments when everything can happen, like in the circus in the silence after the roll of the drums.