Kaspar
Kaspar is the ugly, the incomprehensible, the flawed piece. Peter Handke, the writer of word theatre, is tempted by theatre without words, and like Kaspar, Handke learns and rethinks theatre. And Sára Sahin-Tóth and her colleagues work with the author's instructions for "spoken theatre" as a real theatre experiment.
"You already have a sentence,
with which you can notice
yourself. You can get noticed
yourself with the sentence in the
in the dark, so you don't keep-
you are not considered an animal. There is a
a sentence that you can use
you've already given yourself...
you can tell yourself all that,
that you can't say to others
you can tell others.
You can explain today
explain to them how the
how you're doing. There's a mon-
you've got a mon-
you can tell me the same thing
to the same sentence."
(extract from the drama translated by István Eörsi)
Schedule
Peter Handke's drama is based on the story of Kaspar Hauser, a man cut off from the human community. Kaspar grows up isolated from human society from birth, and as if waking from a coma of forgetfulness, has to start his socialisation from scratch. Kaspar has to redefine himself and the world around him with the help of the Suggestors, who guide his speech learning and socialisation process with various instructions. Speech, the most basic means of creating a shared reality, is used to push Kaspar towards the RIGHT way, as he seeks to understand the phenomena around him through the acquisition of language. However, there are bewilderingly many possibilities and contradictions - and whatever direction he turns in, he does not even begin to exist.
Sára Sahin-Tóth graduated from the theatre directing class of Tamás Ascher and Péter Forgács in 2024 as part of Freeszfe's Emergency Exit programme, and received her degree from the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In her previous productions - Péter Hajnóczy: The Bride of Jesus (Fészek Művészklub, Kupolaterem) or Calderón: The Dream of Life (Vas utca) - she has worked with her current collaborators, with whom she is now searching for the poetic simplicity of the text in theatrical form.
Trafó House of Contemporary Arts
The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest is a unique venue in Hungary, embedded in the international contemporary scene, where different genres - theatre, dance, new circus, music and visual arts - are presented in a unique and authentic way.