Schedule
The concert:
The sound of a rickety piano, the drip of a melting block of ice, the hiss of steam and the canon of rain flooding the stage, all waves together with the sonic deluge of a 16-member choir.
The dance:
The art of Tai Chi Chuan is one of the spiritual and choreographic foundations of the performance. It is the pure, sharp juxtaposition and balancing of flow, calm, and opposing qualities. A state of consciousness of continuous presence in movement.
The theatre:
Back in the early 1980s, we created a performance inspired by 131 surviving fragments of sentences by Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 600 BC. When I started thinking about our present 'jubilee, epoch-summing' lecture, I realised that I had been talking to Heraclitus for 30 years, continuously. I have been writing my own sentences, directing my performances, which now seem to be fragments of an imaginary dialogue spanning decades. Slowly I had to admit that this performance could have no other motive than a stream of conversation with Heraclides - in Arthurian - summing up what I had already experienced, but now consciously lived.
Interference:
In this way, the performance can seem like a single movement, a single sound, a single image in constant transformation.
The drop canon
Man is a drop, humanity is a sea.
Two drops together are only one drop.
A drop of touch.
A drop can be a drop only in isolation, only in itself.
A drop in the sea ceases to be a drop,
then only the sea exists.
Separation ceases.
The stream of thought
Thought is like a river. I squat on its banks and sometimes I dive in. In the palm of my hand, water is thought. Then I pour it back. I wonder who has drawn this water before, and who will draw it now? They are my friends. My thoughts are not my own. Others are thinking the same thing. I know because I have read my own thoughts in books written centuries, millennia ago. They are my friends. Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Shakespeare, Hamvas, Weöres, Pilinszky, Eco, Mann and many others. I look at the water in my palm and think. The thought cannot be preserved. I pour it back into the river for others to dip in. The water does not stop. It is in motion. Sometimes it evaporates, but it returns. Thoughts have always circulated and sometimes get caught up in you. They formulate themselves.
Gábor Goda
Müpa Budapest
Müpa Budapest is one of Hungary's best-known cultural brands and one of the most modern cultural institutions, bringing together different artistic disciplines in a unique way: it hosts classical, contemporary, light, jazz and world music, opera, new circus, dance, literature and film.
