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istinitiia od druge? Ta ludička poétika piesa, koji sebe ne shvata ozbiljno, vrio je udaljena od bilo kakve pretenzije i lime još bliža punoj originalnosti. ■ La Croix, 1 7. decembar 1 994. Isabelle Ginot.
ANATOMY OF THE BEAST It was seven years after its first performance that I first saw the Pekinese Duck. They were giving it in the Paris suburb of Villejuif at a modest festival focused on trying to move theatrical developments from the centre of the city to its edge, very much like our own dilletante efforts. The streets there are named after Lenin and Marx, the hall itself brings back recollections of the »hommes of culture«, now a thing of the past. A few months later the Anatomy of the Beast was running in high season at the Théâtre de la Ville before the most spoiled of audiences for a least a month. Along the bridge joining the two performances József Nagy put up tents where amateur shows of civilian fire brigade associations were held, in the once popular fashion of the turn of the century. The good people of Kanjiža are the heroes of all Nagy's adventures. Self-taught painters and writers, actresses with lack of discrimination for the real and imaginary, who - after the adventures in Labich's works - had been left, unhappy, to self-destruction. To Nagy, termination of the boundary between the real and the miraculous, the present and the past, is carried out in thoughts ana bodily movements, breathing life into memories of ghosts that still inhabit the space of the long gone Pannonian sea. In Comedia Tempio there is the good spirit of Géza Csath, a poet and local psychoanalyst, murderer of his wife. In Death of Emperor the common folk turn, like in the works of Kiš, into mad dictators as had truly happened in our time in Nagy's old homeland. Orpheus' Ladder revives the images of Nietsche's encounter with Hungarian firemen. Anatomi of the Beast is based on biography of Oscar Vojnovich, writer and adventurer, who ventured to discover distant worlds. Nagy leaves us In front of the railway stop, in flatland; the last stop, where train arrivals or departures are scarce. As Géza Csath In delirious Nagy's imagery applies Freud's theory to the good people of the Vojvodina
plain, Vojnovich journeys to a small place of Kanjiža. there Is no way to leave anywhere, Nagy says. The rails, cut at the railroad stops, represent Indonesia, Russia, Africa, the Middle East and the paradox of the traveller - writer who commits suicide in a distant port, connected to Kanjiža with the railway like an umbilical cord. On another level the performance is focused on Vojnovich passion for game hunting. Watching the hunters and the wild beasts he perceives how the differences between them blurr up. This, again, is the point of the famous Nagy's erasure of boundaries. The world of the Anatomy of the Beast is masculine, military, martial; it is the world where the blood of the beasts and hunters is equally exchanged and power and madness collide into one. Wojzeck depicts images of destructive derangement, discreetely dedicated to the world of small, intimate towns, vanishing in barbaric origies; to Vukovar, Sarajevo, and the Hamlets of Vojvodina. Nagy's interpretation blocks out words and resembles sequencing in some silent moving picture taking place within the narrow confines of a desolate cabaret, where traces of destruction are all that remains. Marie is already dead at the very beginning, like in tragedies. She is being carried around like a puppet for whose love and body the raging males tear at each other's throat. In the background an old radio squeaks with music. To begin relating to the formal aspect of Nagy's works one should take movement, always originating from struggle, as a point of departure. Suicidal characters of solitary human beings, madmen, who generate whole series of disasters as well as kindnesses, are always central to all his performances. There is always-someone desparately severed from the others, leading them into the abyss as if they were blind. Movements are a mixture of fighting skills and butch, acrobatic students, and the never illustrative pantomime. In search of images pointing to the possible origin of motion old photographs from long forgotten albums would be discovered. We have not lived this life, yet we have, like the scenes from Kafka, dreamt it once. ■ Ivica Buljan