 Hi everybody. Hi. Hello and welcome to those of you joining us in person as well as virtually via HowlRound TV. My name is Ramona Ostrowski and I'm the producer here at HowlRound. For anyone who doesn't know, HowlRound Theater Commons is a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide and we amplify progressive, disruptive ideas about the art form and facilitate connections between diverse practitioners. And we're based here in Emerson in Boston in the Office of the Arts. So we are so grateful to have Critic Naomi Herzog and Philip Arnaud, director of the Center for International Theater Development, here for this lecture and conversation. So I'll bring Philip up in just a minute to tell us a little bit more about how this came to be. But first I just want to say a big thank you to the Trust for Mutual Understanding for supporting this event, to Josh Polster for allowing us to open up and live stream what was going to be a guest lecture in a class and to our colleagues in the performing arts department and the staff of this space for all their support. And now I'm happy to introduce Philip Arnaud. But I've been working, there we go, I've been working in Eastern Europe. I went to Poland in 1975 at the invitation of a Polish director, Jerzy Grotowski, who you will meet in your journey across the eons and the globe of theater. And I've really never stopped working there. I work in Russia. I work in Poland. I work in Hungary. In 2010, I was asked, I was in Budapest in April, and was asked to come to a festival of independent theater that was going to happen that September. I had done a lot of work there three years before, and they said, Philip, we really want you to see where this independent field has gone, has grown. And I said, yes, I was delighted that I would speak. I got on the airplane heading for Moscow the day that Fidez, the party that's been now ruling with an iron fist in Hungary ever since. Ten years ago, I saw the beginning, really what was the beginning of a authoritarian right-wing rule that now is in a lot more places than Hungary. To give you just a few quick little snapshots, the festival I was going to go to was canceled within three months. The government pulled the money out. In the summer, all of a sudden, directors of theaters in the provinces were being replaced by party hacks. Then they became a tax on the director of the National Theater. This is 2010, Robert El-Fodi, because he was not only gay, he was Jewish. And they were arguing on the parliament, on the floor of the parliament, that we shouldn't have a Jew lead the National Theater of Hungary. We certainly should not have. They called him Roberta on the floor of the parliament. The first meal I had, I decided to go anyway. The festival was canceled, but I wanted to see what the hell was happening in a country that I had spent a lot of time, two decades before this. And I sat down with a man who some of you, one or two of you may know, Janos Soss. Soss is a theater director, a film director. Steven Spielberg hired him to do the show, the Hungarian section of the show, a film. And I brought him to ART here, and he probably directed six or seven productions. He ran the actor's lab. He was spending a lot of time between Boston, Cambridge, and Budapest. My first dinner with him, first day in Budapest in the fall of 2010, he said, Phillip, you've got to help me lead this country. I can't live here. And he opened up his computer and showed me a website that looked like a college yearbook. And in Hungarian at top, it said 200 Jews, homosexuals, and liberals in the arts. There was a picture of him, a bio. He had kids. I think that was his address. And I saw nothing, but there were very few bright spots that I could find, this spiral of censorship of the margins of the theater being attacked. But I kept on. What we do at CITD is pretty simple. After doing it for 25 years, I can say we show up, we witness, we help tell the story and help artists take the next steps for collaboration. We've continued to do that. I was there in March, two weeks after the election. The bad guys that were elected in April of 2010 were re-elected in April of 2018. Budapest was in a bubble. They did not think that the Fidesz government was going to, there was going to be some erosion. But everybody woke up the day after the election finding that it was worse than it was before and that it was the countryside that put Fidesz over the top. And I was there in May, not March. And felt like the summer was going to be a tough summer because they'd be able to make things happen in the quiet of summer and that it would be important to find an authentic voice, somebody who's living that reality, to come and to share that with us here in this country, with the artists in this country. The last count, I think, CITD has brought something like 57 American theater professionals to Budapest for festivals, for co-productions. Noemi, who I've known for the last decade, she was a your age and a young undergraduate student when I first met her and she's now a senior editor at the major theater magazine in Hungary. She seemed to me to be a wonderful choice to come and to tell the story of what's going on now. This is the last day she's flying back to Budapest tonight. She's been here 11 days and in the 11 days that she's been here, there have been at least three major events that will affect, that are affecting every theater artist, literary artist. The government, three days ago, announced a new subsidy methodology. Two friends of mine that I value their take on what's going on said to me in phone conversations a week before Noemi got here. They said, Philip, something different is now going on. The government had been attacking the fringes. They've been attacking the weaker artists, the weaker institutions. They're now going after the major institutions to take control and they're now going after the individual leaderships. It's really a dark time. And the way to keep a little bit of sunlight, a little bit of light in that dark time, the way I can do it is to keep the doors open, to keep helping to tell the story and to know that, I'm going to leave you with one quick set of numbers about what's happening in the American theater. In 2015, there were 86 openings in theater leadership in America, the top artistic directors, 86 changes. Since that time, 69 of those positions have been filled. 32 of those positions are now filled with women. The number of women now leading American theaters has doubled in the last three years because there were 16 before that left and now there are 32. There are now 18 people of color that are leading Institute of American Theater before there were eight. And most importantly, we're seeing a generational shift. We're seeing a generational shift here that is going to take some time to pay off. But what Noemi will talk about and what Noemi brings to me is a hope that there is this new leadership emerging, new artistic leadership, new institutional leadership that's going to be fighting the good fight. So let's, with me, welcome for her last lecture on this Five City Tour. Noemi Herzog. I also work in the Hungarian Jewish Museum. So all these perspectives will appear in the presentation about Hungarian theater today. We are a monthly. We have ten issues a year. And if you perhaps, as I see you are here and you would like to follow Hungarian events and you keep an eye in Hungary. So if you are still interested after my talk, then you can actually subscribe to our newsletter, which is written for a foreign audience giving background information, partly political, cultural, political, partly theatrical. And it's following the new tendencies in Hungarian theater. And CITD, and it's free. And CITD also publishes a Russian newsletter so you can actually subscribe for both. As you, I heard study in a global drama program, which just sounds great that you all have a global perspective. This sounds really unique for me, so it might be interesting to you. Now, before everything, I would like to say that I really feel with you in these days that I didn't expect that as I arrive here so many terrorist attacks will happen and so we are so much in the same boat as it turned out with the mail bombs, with the massacre in Pittsburgh, and with the approaching time for the midterms. So I guess you all vote and this will kind of determine the future of all of us. Like, U.S. is so important that I think this kind of has an impact on every part of the world. So at this moment, I would like to just share with you my experience that I had here on U.S. theater, because we saw peace by Karen Finley and we saw Heidi Schreck. And I was kind of amazed in New York how angry these performers are. Now, this anger is, it reminded me of how angry we were in 2010. Philip has mentioned that this was the time of the election of Fidesz, the ruling government now in Hungary, and it was kind of the dictatorship reappearing in Hungary after the regime shift in 89 because we are a post-Soviet country. And, you know, it's great, I think, that you are angry and it was great to see this anger which I don't really experience anymore in Hungary. It's more like an apathy now that I experience. So to infuriate myself a little bit and to a little bit give you some kind of introduction to our political everyday lives, let me read two statements to you. And your only job is just to listen and I will ask you something afterwards. It will be very easy. First one sounds like that. We don't want to get rid of anybody, only we don't want to let anyone in here. Multicultural means the co-living of people with various civilizational backgrounds, the coexistence of the Islam, the Asian religions and Christianity. We will do everything to protect Hungary from that. So this was the first one. Now the second one. For us, people coming from the Islam world do not mean a threat. We greet them as the delegates of a high culture. Now the question is easy. What do you think? Do these statements belong to the same person or they were actually said by two different people? So if you think they were said by two different people, please raise your hands. And I guess you have already found it out that it was actually said by one person and that one person is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán and both of them were said in 2015 like a couple of weeks difference between the two declarations. The first one he said in an interview to the Daily Economics in Hungary and the other one was said at the General Assembly of the Arabic Banks in Budapest. So if certain colleagues of mine in the professional circles heard how I started this presentation, they might have told me it's not professional. I mean from a theatrical point of view it's not so professional to start a talk like that because there is a saying we hear very often in Hungary today, not politicized and it's actually let's not talk politics. But today I think even if our topic is theater, I'm sorry but I have to be less professional then but you know theater is so much interlinked with politics today in Hungary, especially political theater, that it makes sense not just to complain about things but to give you a little bit of a background what's happening today in the cultural political field. So from a distance it might seem that there is actually democracy in Hungary, why? We have elections in Hungary, we have parliamentary elections, we have local elections but this gerrymandering, this redistricting is familiar to you that it's quite the same in Hungary, these elections are free but not equal. So Fidesz has a two-third majority in the parliament but in the elections they only got half of the votes and this is how these things can happen at the same time. We have an opposition in Hungary and their opinion actually is even published in the opposition media in the remaining platforms, mostly online. But you have to know that all the state media is the mouthpiece of the government right now. It's only propaganda and all the state advertisement goes there. No one advertises in the opposition media not even multinational companies or private companies because they know that it's not a deal for them since the government wouldn't like that and competition is overruled by loyalty and patriotism today in Hungary. We have independent courts and we have a supreme court in Hungary but they are full of Fidesz people today. There are trade unions, there are NGOs and you have the loyal ones and you have the critical ones from those and the dialogue between the government and the NGOs only happens with the loyal ones of course. So there's no dialogue between two different opinions. What Philip has just said in his introduction that there has been an idea of introducing a new subsidizing system in this theatre a couple of days ago. This also happened without a dialogue with the theatrical field itself so it's all happening arbitrarily and it can actually lead to the disappearance of several important private and independent companies and maybe also some smaller public theatre venues. It may be interesting to you as US citizens that soon, if you want to but I don't think so that you want to, can listen to some Hungarian opera pieces because our national opera is touring in the US from Hungarian government's money. It actually costs four million dollars and it's more than 350 people travelling here with like 80 pieces, like eight pieces, not 80. Anyway, this tour shows that if you are loyal, if you are the loyal artistic director of a big institution, you can tour in the US from government money. So there is actually money for culture in Hungary, only it's given to the loyal and it's not interesting that who is interested in the topic actually on your part. Maybe you would be more interested in the works of Martin Boros who is actually produced by the CITD and the government. I will tell you about the subsidizing system in this part later on. So on the surface it seems that there is a never seen cultural export from Hungary but in reality this is a pseudo thing because it's not the mostly professionally interesting things that tour. And this is how actually a system which is based on no communication at all with the different voices, with the critical opinions can be called the system of national cooperation. A month ago, in the European Parliament, there was a vote. I don't know if you've heard about it, Hungary belongs to at this point of the day we are part of the European Parliament and the European Parliament declared that Hungary is at a risk of reaching the core values of the European Union and they cited like 12 concerns among which you can find the academic freedom right of minorities and migrants corruption in the first place. And there our prime minister gave a speech and he said we are only punished because we have a different opinion and that it's not okay to silence the different opinion in the EU. So yeah, I see you're smiling because it's actually something exactly what he is doing in Hungary, silencing the different opinion. So there was laughter in the European Parliament as well. Oh, sorry, yeah. So actually why is all this exotic thing interesting from a US point of view like we are a post-communist country with a completely different history but now I think you've realized that Hungary with this different history now actually belongs to this word trend of hybrid democracies and it's very nice to say it like that hybrid democracy but of course the name refers to a kind of dictatorship a modern kind of dictatorship which realizes that it shouldn't weaken itself by expressing its real nature, its violent nature if it can keep power in one hand in more sophisticated ways as well. So that's why I'm showing you this picture. This is actually not a picture from Hungary, it's a picture from a piece from Berlin by Milo Rau from last year when he created the first word parliament in the history of mankind and he invited representatives like 60 of them from all over the world. So I'm just showing to you that theater and parliament are actually interconnected in contemporary theater and this is contemporary reality in Hungary today because opposition is so much in minority in our parliament that to take action there is impossible but the place is absurd when you just exist and politicians go there every day. So the question is today I think in Hungary how to take as citizens this action back. Now we won't answer this question today I think it's just too big to answer it but I will show you certain ways how the theater in Hungary can answer this status quo. But before doing that let me tell you a few symptoms of hybrid democracy in Hungary today. First one is also the trend, the general turn away from politics which I'm sure is happening here as well. In Hungary it's partly due to a great disappointment in people we went to the streets nothing happened so we don't go to the street anymore and partly it is also due to existential dependency and also before we only had financial censorship in the country and by that I mean financial pressure for example you are a theater and you show a piece which may have certain political connotations so your subsidy is cut because as a post-Soviet country our subsidy system was created in 49 and it's basically the same since then but in 2010 there were certain changes and now we have three categories of theaters which means if you are a national theater you get normative subsidy you don't have to worry about money you get it every year and you are okay. You can belong to a special category it's still a normative subsidy and still you are okay but it's less money and then you can belong to the rest it's actually called the rest and the rest, independence belong to the rest and you don't get a normative subsidy it's quite like here but the difference is that the sphere in you exist is politicized so it may be that you are very amazing you are doing amazing work for like 20 years but you won't get your money next year it's also possible anything can happen now with financial censorship you have to think of public theaters you present your show there are certain political connotations and your subsidy may be cut and you just cannot prove the connection between the two events but as Willi has mentioned now the things are getting a little bit darker so more evident since September and there is a new flow of censorship in the country we used to have hate campaigns you might have heard about our hate campaigns against George Soros for example in billboards but in this spring these hate campaigns shifted to the sphere of culture and several artistic directors of important institutions were attacked in the press now if the press is not independent and it's the mouthpiece of the government everyone is reading these articles as the messages given by the government to you and reverberating what kind of consequences will follow these articles in September we had the first consequences there is a very important institution in Hungary it's not only the literary museum as I've written here but it's also a huge complex the theater institute belongs there several artistic venues belong there and also the literary museum, yes he was the first person who was attacked in these press campaigns and in September he was actually dismissed now sometimes the staff of the theaters are also asked about who they vote for who they support as an artistic director for their own theater and the theater of the opera in Budapest the staff was actually asked who they support and more than half of them supported your currency and only 9% of them supported Atilla Kisbe who standard wasn't even public by that time now supposedly independent committee voted for Atilla Kisbe so the guy who only got 9% to get the theater so you see that this is a different way of censorship happening now there is a journal which is actually a pro-government journal on economics in Hungary which published an essay which was slightly criticizing the Fidesz politics the next day the volume disappeared from the internet the whole issue was eliminated and the whole editorial board was actually dismissed and replaced by different people so it's not a surprise that there is self-censorship flow in Hungary today and these are important institutions from the Hungarian science academy to the University of Economics to several in their appearance independent menus but they are mostly owned by Fidesz people so they started to cancel lectures and events which were possible to be read and understood as politically connected topics so if a topic was professional but it might have political connotations it was canceled from refugee issues you have to think like these topics gender issues free masons a conference on car marks these events were canceled even though they were professional events and they were not on the level of actual politics and everyday politics so let's see what kind of an answer theater gives for that status quo in Hungary today we have a tradition in Hungary this is the longest tradition in political theater that we have and that is coded theater I don't know if you know what I mean by that actually it's like presenting the classics because the texts before the regime shift in 89 were checked by institutions in Hungary so you had to hand them in and that's why we mostly used classics but on stage the actor can keep a longer pose or can do other non-verbal gestures to express political views and this is a great tradition in Hungary you can see one of the most important theaters in Budapest presenting the great dictator the great US film by Chaplin and on the wall of the theater you can see a huge poster with just saying great dictator to the public so it's evident to everyone what the message is but it's still following that well-known tradition which was more apt maybe before 89 when you still had to check the texts which you don't have to do today but actually the message is also evident so I don't know if it saves an artistic director from this missile that's why it shows that after a certain age our directors just follow those traditions that they've been socialized in and there is another example for that from another very important theater in Hungary by Andrei Sherban and on the picture you can see Robert Alfaldi, Philip has already mentioned in his speech and he's a very important actor, director in Hungary and he's also important because he has been he has been the artistic director of the National Theater and they had a history together with Sherban there, Sherban and angels in America with Robert Alfaldi there and now he is in the title role of Richard III and the first night was right before the general elections in 2018 of the piece so at the opening that scene at the end when the dictator returns and his dead figure this sinister and frightening figure just walks through the stage and he's smoking and it's very ominous it was read by and understood by the audience at that time very much as a prediction for Orban's re-election which actually happened afterwards now this is another tradition in Hungary propaganda the piece I'm showing to you is a mass event from a very emblematic square of Budapest called Hero Square and the name of the square already tells you that these are actually the piece is about the great heroes of Hungarian history but from this narrative actually certain minorities are missing they're not so heroic ones maybe the protagonists of the show even though there are so many people participating I would say are the statues just like if you've heard about in the 30s in Italy about those huge events by Alessandro Blassetti for like 20,000 people with the protagonist of Fiat 18 vehicle in this case it's also not the people not the actors who are in the focus but these are the statues and it's presented like to 4,000 people it was so cold there I was freezing and from this narrative of Hungarian history the Roma minority which is the biggest minority in Hungary today is just excluded and with the Jewish minority it's a little bit different because the government has a UL attitude to the Jewish minority today so on the one hand our prime minister declares zero tolerance towards anti-Semitism on the other hand you have these hate campaigns against George Soros and you have a memorial of the German invasion established in 2014 I think at the Liberty Square a very emblematic square in Hungary which is completely eliminating the responsibility of the Hungarian nations in the deaths of 500,000 Hungarian Jews in the Second World War so much about propaganda we have political cabaret in Hungary to the left you can see TAP theater and their artistic director Wilmos Wainey they may be familiar to you I mean maybe not him but his former friend who was Peter Halas and Peter Halas did squat theater in New York and actually it was CITD that helped him escape in the 70s to New York he is among the very few whose theaters were actually banned in the previous dictatorship in Hungary and to the right you can see our only stand-up comedist who is dealing with political topics today because this is something you don't do as a comedist today but he is an exception we also have documentary theater in Hungary today and among them the first group that specialized in verbatim theater was Panodrama verbatim theater is when you do shows based on a fixed text word by word written down by maybe you are familiar with what it means they are working with actors and this text edited but based on these interviews are given to the actors and they perform that but it's not done with non-professional actors now I'm showing you this picture about their artistic director Anna Lengyal because on this picture you can see that she is suffering from cancer right now and I'm only showing this to you as the screen is open about that as well and she is constantly posting about that on Facebook she is organizing a round table series on the topic and she is also working on a piece which will be about cancer and by that she is fighting against all the assumptions in us that we kind of feel that cancer seems to be undefeatable and she is on the contrary is saying that she will live up to 90 years. Three young artists now. The first one, the first one is actually two. It's Christof Kellehmann and Bence Gjörg-Baalinkas. You can see them on the picture or you see Christof. This one is Christof. They actually made a conceptual documentary work on a Hungarian plant or it's actually an alien speech but most of the Hungarian people considered this to be the most Hungarian plant ever even though it was transferred to Hungary from North America 300 years ago. Now what happened was that in 2014 the EU passed a regulation on the management and eradication of alien species and even though Fidesz was suggesting the same before, now they voted against the regulation. This is what these artists used, this idea and they launched planting events and later on re-enacted these in their shows trying to reframe the black locust so this alien speech as a symbol of open society and their slogan was whoever takes root in Hungarian soil can become Hungarian and I wonder if their project will take root in Hungarian soil too. Now this is a very unique, I wouldn't say it's a trend in Hungary but she represents an example for a very rare appearance for feminist theater and Veronika Szabó came to the limelight like a year ago in Hungary with her remarkable piece titled Queen Dome. She studied in Great Britain and she brought a new language to Hungary which lacks words, it's mostly music, it's movement, very powerful and she worked with partly professional, partly non-professional actors with an international background there in devised methods. It's very similar to the work of Gérôme Bell, if you are familiar with his works so it kind of confronts with the non-professional actors mostly the female viewer with our own expectations towards female roles and normative body images and that's why I think that it was mostly it was the female audience who cried afterwards. And another artist, another performer who has been mentioned already by Philipp that is Martin Borosz. But he is not the one and only person in Hungary who is dealing with participatory theater and this particular piece is very I think very important because it kind of caused the attention to homelessness in a very playful way, playful way and it's you are just laughing during the show but you realize that you get to know so much about homelessness that you as a privileged background person just didn't have before. So the audience is divided in just during the show into three groups and each group has an avatar on this picture you can see a real homeless activist person so it's partly a documentary show too and these avatars have to be saved so in each round you are asked if where do you want to spend the night for example on the street or you go to the shelter but it's not only your money which you have to take care about but it's also your life conditions so it may be that you have a lot of money at the end not a lot of but you have some some at the end but your life conditions are just shit and you died so it really gives you all you it makes you to be in the perspective of these people and you have to make all your choices from the perspective of the homeless during the show and my favorite one is coming right now because this particular piece is very complex this show is not only a documentary but the group of these people actually spend half a year in two very very poor villages at the northern part of Hungary they used social drama there and they worked with Roma people as I said the biggest minority in Hungary today they wanted to work with the Roma and the non-Roma together but the non-Roma wouldn't come and they didn't come if you work with the Roma so you see what is the situation in these villages and this was the this was the environment they had to work with the people and they only asked these people what are the everyday problems they just have to face and they used social drama to come up with certain me possible I don't say solutions but you know what can you answer in a hospital when you cannot stay there because of racial and racist reasons with your kid when you had to stay there and your kid stays there and you don't live there what do you say how do you solve this problem and they just you know did social drama workshops on these issues and from this material they created the documentary piece which they not only presented in Budapest for the privileged background audience but they also presented it in their local environment and this could as I heard somewhat change their position in their local environment but of course you don't have to think of two big changes in these cases like if we went there now it would be the same in this sense that you could only work with the Roma they couldn't work with the two groups together so this is I think a general problem today that theater can become its very own barrier as a medium it cannot fulfill its role as a social platform because it cannot reach those who have a different opinion because you will only watch it if you already share the opinion of the creators so my last example is actually offering a solution for that kind of challenge and this is because they are not only an artistic group anymore they have a background in street art but now they are an official party in Hungary a satirical party actually called the two-tailed dog party you can see their emblem there now I have to tell you that when they ran at the elections in 2018 not everybody was happy about that because the opposition was already so divided that they it was more difficult you know to to expect a regime shift if there are more parties running for presidency so they not only divided the government they also divided the opposition but why actually they decided still to run at this election they have different tools that they use and one of the most important tools of these is over identification so what I mean by that we have these pro government rallies in Hungary called peace marches done with fake civilians so the government actually wants to have the power at the same time be as sexy as the opposition can usually be so that's why they are organizing this part these rallies promoting the government but these are fake they these are not real civilians now the dogs organize their counter peace marches but these are not called counter peace marches these were called peace marches and they accepted all the allegations they had been charged with so they said yes we are funded by George Soros yes we are going in a very very nice direction and we have to reach Russia soon and everything is great and let's do these hate campaigns and by that by this tool they can make all those hidden norms you know in today's Hungary become evident and it caused the attention how theatrical and non real our democratic processes have become and other quite subversive example of how the dogs use over identification is when they went to the state TV in Hungary now you don't you don't go to the state TV if you are a politician from the opposition in Hungary you know it's propaganda but before 2018 every politician from every party of the opposition got the chance to spend five minutes no more than five minutes in state TV to present their program there now this is so absurd that during the whole year it's just propaganda but you have five minutes to do your job I think they called the the attention to this absurdity by sending in their chicken politicians so their politician dressed up as a chicken saying god god god for five minutes there and by that by the way in using the anchor to present their program instead of them and also reaching an audience which they would have never reached if they only talked into those oppositional media media which is actually not so much anymore so you see why I think they are so subversive is because they can actually it's inevitable for them to be become the part of institutionalized politics they are also working to have a real impact now this impact is part less symbolic and as a former street art movement it's mostly restricted to urban issues and restoring certain derelict places in the city for example they have a fictional street artist called Besky which is also a four-letter word in Hungarian you can see what kind of emblem he has there you can see our Prime Minister on a Thomas train now this is not only a Thomas train this is also a line a train line which kind of exemplifies the misguided allocation of the EU funds because it connects Budapest with the birth town of the Prime Minister called Felchut and this line is not used because you know there is no need for such a line really it it connects it's it runs right next to the Prime Minister's home where also huge stadium stands in front of his home for 4,000 people which is actually three times more than the population of the town itself so why does this fictional street artist paint this emblem on these walls of public institutions because later on these are or very soon they are removed from there of course because it's you know attacking the government so by this way they can induce the government and the local government to take care of our public values and if not restoring them but at least it makes them to repaint these places here you can see the former mayor of Felchut now the former plumber person is actually the former school friend as well of the Prime Minister but he's not the mayor anymore so that's why there were elections in Felchut and then for the two candidates who were running for the mayor's ship had actually the same names so the dogs were running somebody who was called in the same way as the Fidesz candidate and not only was called the same but he was called the real last Lomézer so it was really a good tool to perplex people and they were a little bit confused still Fidesz won but with a less advantage than without that and I don't know if you've heard about the Slovene artists Janes Janša if you haven't yet you will soon a couple of years ago they officially changed their names to the contemporary Prime Minister of Slovenia and this could also this also led to the perplexion of the contemporary people in Slovenia so a friend of mine just said that sometimes changing your name can just impact your environment much more than your live and the last example a very symbolic one for their participatory and active citizenship projects is the four-color painting because these cracked sidewalks just symbolizing Hungary basically corruption that the money does not go into the right venue so they kind of call the attention to that by painting these cracks in four colors and sometimes they are even asked to restore the sidewalk into its original position so it's also by the tool of over identification can show the absurdity of our everyday lives so actually I think what we can learn from the dogs because what they are doing for changing our society even if it's subversive and even if it enters institutionalized politics I think it's still symbolic as you see what they are dealing with but we can really learn from them is that sometimes when we just deal with unsolvable seemingly or really unsolvable issues like how to get action back from politicians it's just nice to start with some laughter and some imagination just to be not too much afraid of what we can do at what we cannot so thank you very much for your attention and if you have any questions then just feel free to ask them I was wondering if you felt that if the coded shows like great dictator and Richard the third had more of an opportunity to reach audiences that are of different ideology just because it has the protection of classics and the underlying message isn't always as overt because it seems like the the more avant-garde more abrasive forms could you know push opposing ideology more away while the coded can create more of a you know indirect invitation so I was wondering if one if you saw one having greater success bringing in different ideologies this is a great point actually I've heard that robert alford is directing all the coded shows he does because it's exactly his his quest his his idea that then this way he can also address an audience that has a different opinion and it's not only him like yeah there is a trend that believes that we can address a different audience with the coded shows now I don't know like it would be very interesting to make like sociological research if this is true I mean if you watch a Shakespeare piece do you really think of your own reality or you are kind of stuck out of this reality and you just think of historical events it would be very interesting I think to ask these audience members afterwards because this is something I really I personally don't know I know we build on this and and I wonder if it's true or not but this is a great point I was working in Russia for about 15 years during the Soviet times so a lot of playwrights were writing in code it wasn't just the directors so I saw a production in a tenement house and the translator sitting next to me was explaining that's not what I was seeing what I was seeing was the argument that was then going on and had risen to the top in the Politburo and I would have never gotten that they got that from what the writer was doing then later when Robbie Alfodi took over the National Theatre he brought in some wonderful new actors but he kept on purpose some of the older actors and I was talking to him one night about the acting in code so you can write in code but he said no these older actors know how to walk on stage and cross to meet you put their hand out and somehow there's this complicity with the audience that they know how to play so that you know that I'm really not wanting to put my hand out to you that you're the opposition but with this tiny little sliver of the secret that we're on together and Robbie kept the older actors there to train and to show the younger actors because he was the director of that theater nine years after the after the end of the Soviet Union one more comment which given what you're studying is sometimes we forget how really powerful the theater can be and a lot of I've seen a lot of writing about how the dialogue that led to the fall of the Soviet Union happened in theaters that was a public space where even though it was in code taboo ideas were being put forward and then right after the fall of the Soviet Union when all of those client states were privatizing everything they left the theaters alone the theaters were almost sacrosanct and I asked that question once a very smart man dragon kleich who is no longer with us and dragon operated on the theory that it was the theater that were actually the building blocks of the nationhood of Hungary because you were using the language they were celebrating the language the national theater in Bulgaria is called the Ivan Vazov theater how many of you have hear unless you're Bulgarian have ever heard of Ivan Vazov I hadn't he was the great poet so the celebration of nationhood the celebration of language makes what in this country is not a very important part of our social weaving but in that part of the world it made a lot of difference and what's happening now in Hungary a lot of us are watching with great interest and I'm afraid with not a little bit of dread and thank you for telling how important theater was between before the regime shift I think it's very important because partly what we are struggling now in terms of theater is how to how can theater regain that kind of importance in political terms that it used to have and which would be probably needed today as well but now it seems to be more difficult um so you're here telling us today about all these things going on in Hungary and all the censorship that's happening and I was wondering if you feel like because this is being broadcast online that the government could uh like I don't know threatened you in some way because you're like sharing the information that like the theaters are sharing and you're kind of broadcasting that to the world which I think is very important but I was wondering if you felt like unsafe thank you very much yeah I've been asked about that already in Washington I think you're right I mean it's a relevant question but I don't think that personally I could be in any kind of danger because my all of my work is without a state control actually this can only happen because our subsidies as a Hungarian Jewish museum you know are safe by by by that but our idea in in our editorial board is that we cannot you know think about that we have to express ourselves so we don't deal with that we just exclude this I was wondering when you spoke to a certain kind of theater that caters more towards an audience that will agree with the political beliefs that are being put on on the stage do you think that there's merit to that kind of theater too like can it invigorate people enough to take action or do you think it's more noble to do theater that will bring in audience members who disagree with your point of view actually I don't have a final answer for that I I used to think it's completely in vain to talk to your people all the time who already share what you think in a kind of propagandistic way but now when I saw Karen Finley and I saw Heidi Shrek and I saw how how much need there is for for these communities or at least the feeling that we can connect and and meet with people who share already an idea and we are not alone that maybe I was wrong maybe maybe there's there is a point in that trend too so I think I don't want to decide which has more place under the sun I think everything has a value that that is needed that has an audience what is your opinion I have no idea I don't really have a question but I just wanted to say that I think it's very brave of you to stand up and talk about this openly online and just in general because it can be I'm sure I'm obviously not in your shoes but I'm sure it can be daunting to start bringing this up when you know some of the consequences that can arise from it yeah like we don't know these consequences we just we just don't plan so yeah that great question about whether we speak to the converted we had breakfast in New York with a longtime friend of mine Alisa Solomon if you've never read her book on on Fiddler on the Roof it's not about creation of a Broadway play it's about a whole social political threads threads that ended up with that famous thing but she talked about an article that was written two or three years ago by Miller that she just sent to you to we could make that available to you which discusses this whole issue about it's a great idea speaking to the converted but then in where Alisa came down and also Jim Nicola director of New York theater workshop we had dinner with Jim was no we need to be together it's okay for it's okay for the converted to reinforce each other the last thing I will say is that there's no question in the region that livelihoods are being threatened the director Arpaid Shilling was named in a Hungarian director was named an enemy of the state he now took his wife and his family and he does not live in Hungary anymore he moved to France there's a good friend of mine in Moscow a well-known actress who would play with major directors and then would make all of her money in the summer and she spoke out at when Nemtsov was murdered she was on the bias on the dais the next day speaking out two days later the film she was going to do that summer was cancelled her role was cancelled so there are lots of ways that up to your livelihood being threatened and then there's too many stories of lives being threatened people who take risks in the theater sometimes we talk about taking an artistic risk there are people who do put their lives on the line in various parts of the world every time they get on that stage and stand up and say something which is the great strength of the theater and also what all of us are facing in these dark times thank you very very much for being here and maybe yeah there is oh okay um hey um my question is in from your perspective what is like one thing we can do after like after we leave here that would be um beneficial oh wow actually i'm here to learn from you like you are much angrier than my country is at the present moment so i guess keeping that anger and maybe what i heard from Barbara Lancy in new york and what philippe has just said right now to connect like to be with friends and to be in the community and and yeah let's not be alone and and maybe theater can also be a good tool for that i think we need each other today more than any days with it so if you have the subscription you can read the september issue i wrote and then there is already i think another one in process which is an interview with robert alfredi so i would just say an answer to that important question and how theater can be a part of it the answer is to use any means possible through all the various different interesting styles of hungarian theater that you presented to us today but to use any means necessary to get into that voting booth and vote for the midterm elections because that is what helps determine not just your fate but the fate of your society your culture and to do it and to be able to exercise an important right of democracy while you have it because it can always be taken away from you it can never take your freedoms for granted and i think we see that living in other other countries how freedom is something that's precious and we can never take it for granted and we always have to fight and as you as both of you have courageously done put yourself in front of the lines to be able to remind us of the importance of not just theater and how theater can serve as a means to protect and to strengthen our our rights our human rights and our right to express ourselves i thank you so much for for coming here and for your courage and for your understanding and insights you've brought to us here and online thank you very much and go to vote it was a great right well thank you guys all so much for being here um i think philip and noemi will be around for another few minutes if anybody has lost individual questions but we'll wrap this up today thank you guys so much have a good day