>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
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>> Kenneth Nyirady: This event is sponsored by the European division which is one of four area study divisions in the library. We are responsible for recommending from and providing reference for most of the countries of Europe except Great Britain and Ireland which is covered by the main reading room, Spain and Portugal which is covered by the Hispanic division, and the European part of Turkey which is covered by the Africa and  Middle Eastern division. Our collection of Hungarica is the largest outside of Hungary and numbers about a quarter of a million volumes, 250,000 volumes of Hungarian or Hungary-related material. If you'd like to know more, you can go to the European division website which is two clicks off of the homepage. Go to Researchers and then the European division. Andras Visky was born in Targu-Mures, [Inaudible], Romania. He is a poet, playwright, and essayist, and resident dramaturg at Cluj-Napoca Hungarian Theater in Romania where he holds the position of Associate Artistic Director. He holds a Doctorate of Liberal Arts from the University of Theater and Film in Budapest. And since 1994, his lecture at the [Inaudible] University in [Inaudible] in the Department of Theater and Television. He is one of the cofounders and the former Executive Director of [Inaudible] Publishing. His plays have been staged in various countries of Europe and the United States. His work will now reach an English-speaking audience with his latest book, "Barrack Dramaturgy," published by Intellect Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. It contains an anthology of his well-known plays as well as  a critical analysis of his theory of considering the theater as a space for exploring feelings of cultural and personal captivity. This collection makes use of scripts and  director's notes as well as interviews and creative teams behind the productions and reveals an insider's view of Mr. Visky's artistic vision. And we have a small display of his books outside all of this room that you can view as you leave. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Andras Visky.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Andras Visky: Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. Thank you, Ken, Erica, Natalia. I plan today to speak mostly about this book, about this "Barrack Dramaturgy," which was created by me many, many years ago. So I would like to begin by telling you that for me, the theater is a tool for creating tools. I used to say that the theater is not a place for me for entertainment. It's a place for serious gatherings. That doesn't mean that I don't like when my audience would laugh during the show, but I think that this is not the purpose. First of all, let's see how I got to this idea of considering the theater a real event for everybody who takes part in the show. I never divide the space of the theater into the space of the show and the space of the audience. I think that these two are emerging to get our penetrating into each other. My first memory as a child was when I was one-year-old, that I'm a prisoner. After '56 -- I think that most of you   are familiar with the Hungarian revolution in '56. In Romania more than 30,000 potential opposers of the regime were sentenced in prison. My father was sentenced for 22 years. So I don't have even a personal memory of my father before his imprisonment. Then we were removed in a prison camp. My mother, an Austrian, grown up in Budapest, Hungary, not knowing one word in Romanian language, and we spent more than four years. My father served almost 7 years in the prison. We didn't know about each other. We didn't know about him, where he was, is he alive or not.  We were totally separated. I am the seventh in my family, so my mother with seven  very active and very hungry kids, ended up in this prison camp which had become later on a very famous village for the Romanian intelligentsia, because very interesting people were sentenced together with us to live there. This is the family here. That man, [Inaudible], was a student. He was a student during the Hungarian revolution. He was a student in Timisoara and now he is a page of the Romanian history because he was the one who formulated the [inaudible] of the Romanian students influenced by the Hungarian revolution in Romania. So after prison, he was sentenced again, not to go home but to stay in this prison camp which is probably familiar to you because of the novels of Solzhenitsyn or Shalam Wolf [phonetic], right? So you can see how a barrack would look. It's behind us. I am down there, the fairly depressed youngest child. Here is a famous photo. It is the winter in our prison camp. The printers were unbelievably strong. There is a wind which is called [inaudible] coming from Russia and brings a lot of snow. For instance, I remember when the snow covered up totally our barrack, but it  happened very often during the - It was a plain field, no trees, only these barracks, and we got covered up totally by the snow. I thought for years that this was only the image of my imagination. And then I found from photography how the people are working on their roof. It's like a Chagall painting. The people floating above their homes and being a part of a mythology. So what am speaking about now is that, for me, it's hardly separable -- the reality from the mythology. I think that the imagination-- sometimes it's a much stronger reality than the reality, which is hiding from us. It's very hard to grasp the reality. Actually, this is the main reason we are doing theater, not to create an illusion but to create a counter reality in order to understand better our own reality. 
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The man there -- I really love this picture. His name is Paul Goma, a famous Romanian author who, after the prison, came to our camp. Now, this is a map of the camp, done by that student who is behind us in the camp, a very famous map. I have the original one but there is a version in a museum in Romania, the Museum of the Communist Terror in Romania in [Inaudible]. You can find our name also there. Let me show it to you. 
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[ Laughter ]
This is the family Visky. But there are other very famous names also. For instance, in the same village lived the wife of the former prime minister of Romania, Maria Antonescu. I remember her very well. Former members of government, and you won't believe probably that I don't know how but I'm researching now, I'm working on a novel of the  village. It lands there a piano also, in this village. Probably it's like a part of this  theatricality of the place, or I was together there with the first Romanian woman pilot, Nadia Russo [phonetic], a very well-known name now. So let's come back to the cover. So I think that this experience of being a prisoner first for myself, than being released during the dictatorship, so it was a semi-freedom than afterwards, until '89 -- brought me to this idea that the captivity is a universal experience of the humanity. I have a definition of the captivity. Now, be attentive. My definition of captivity is that captivity is a state of being in which we are dislocated from our bodies. So we are dislocated from our bodies. What does it mean? That the prisoner is never present in himself. He is not there. He is always [inaudible]. So a prisoner always creates his or her own double, like [Inaudible] would say, great French artist. I relate to that double which is an expression of freedom for me but I am a prisoner. So what is the theatrical space for me? It's a where we freely shoot ourselves in order to be set free by the event, what happens there. What does it mean to set free? Don't think about something big. A special understanding of yourself. A new understanding your identity or your own personal story or regarding your relationships, etc. etc. So I think that the 20th century created this kind of universal aspect of the human being to create huge factories to exterminate people. For instance, gulag -- What does it mean, gulag? Gulag is an acronym which means that chief quarter of camps -- that would be Russian meaning of this -- corrective camps. This is a euphemism for extermination camp, because when someone wants to correct you in a prison, I mean, we were political prisoners, right? We were there because of our convictions about freedom, about the rights of a person. Then a corrective camp means extermination camp, right? But at the same time, don't think that for a child to be a prisoner in a gulag camp was sad. I tried to be happy. My older  siblings, they kept teaching me to recognize my father on small black and white photos. And I couldn't recognize him all the time and that's sort of a big trauma for me, how to recognize your father. That's not possible. So my poetry, my writings are focused on this idea of being dislocated and we are addicted to freedom. That would be probably the definition of a human being. So the lack of freedom creates big traumas for us. If we shut in ourselves in a theater, that means that there is no hierarchy between actors and audience. So I don't write stories for the stage. I try to write snapshots with big open spaces and empty spaces in order to offer for the audience to enter in the story, to offer for them to recognize themselves in the play. So what happens in a cell? The freedom is highly fictionalized. The space is always tight. If you move, you bump into somebody. If you move, you create a conflict. So the level of the story within a cell should be much, much higher than in normal life. And what happens in a cell? Obsessive rituals which you cannot control. You have to follow them. These are not happy rituals but these rituals help you to survive. So I show to you how the barrack looked like. I remember, for instance, a group of Franciscan monks who served in the prison, I don't know, more than 10 years, than they were removed to our camp. And one of them, he made -- actually, it was a Romanian man -- he was a priest actually. He made a small chapel in his barrack. 
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And I remember going there in this chapel, entering this chapel and the lights that dim space and watching these people like singing and elevating their souls. And I remember very well one man who was the main singer. When he came out when the service ended, he always kissed the ground. And that was, for me, not understandable. How would you kiss the ground of your detention? What is this space about? I think that's why I ended up in the theater, because of this theatricality of the loneliness. And I remember, once everybody left the barrack and I stayed there and I kissed the ground. And I feel even today, the ground, it was very cold. It was not nice at all. And then again, I couldn't understand why.  What's that now? So I discovered reality. I discovered an inner reality which is as bleak as the outer reality. You can disappear in this inner reality also. So I began to write plays. That was my main focus, to follow different situations of imprisonment, dependencies, which is in the same way an imprisonment. So let me show it to you -- images. This is a play which was produced in Chicago in two different versions, and it's called "Juliet." It's not called "Romeo and Juliet," only "Juliet."  Because in my play, Romeo is in prison, and Juliet, my mother, is with us. So it's a re-writing of Shakespeare in a way, because my mother went to a vast experience in the camp. They take her away from us and we were expecting to remain alone, which was one of the most tragic outcomes for the children in all kinds of dictatorships, I think, because they put you in different orphanages. So you get cut off from every personal relationship, from everybody. And they have taken my mother. But after a few days, she came back to us. So I wrote a play about the disappearance of my mother and the resurrection of my mother. How Juliet is resurrecting in not the best moment in her grave. Her name is Julia -- the name of my mother. So that's why it's Juliet in the play. This is another one, a part of a trilogy. I will speak more about this a little bit. It's called "Born for Never." Ten actors are on the stage but only one. But only one -- this one in this solitary confinement who is the author - only he is real on the stage. Everybody's coming out from his imagination. You can see the space. It's like a skin, but the writing, it's not readable on that skin. So what the performance is doing reveals the story of these people, reveals this writing during the show. I'm happy with this. It went very well at the Festival d'Avignon, toured in Europe and many, many places. I tried to combine the stories of the Holocaust with the stories of the gulag. Because in the prison, one of my father's cellmates was a man, a Holocaust survivor, with then was sentenced again. So he was a professional prisoner. And I dedicated to him this writing actually. And when he went in this cell, for instance to talk to my father, he always touched the bed, like the mezuzah, to enter the space. And that story for me was unbelievable. This is the way to transform a cell in your private freedom in order to follow that ritual, which brings you back in time and brings you back in a different space. This is the way to deny the cell. And I was very glad to hear this story so I wrote a play dedicated to him. In this image, you can see  I created a character. He is a handicapped man, and everybody has to carry him around. And interesting, it creates a sort of humor in the piece also because they tend to forget him. And then they are going back and they are holding and they are bringing with them. Because I saw many people in the prison camp, very old people for instance, who could not provide their food. That was the daily project, to provide your food. I asked once my mother, "What did you do when we hadn't anything to eat?" And she told me, "I told you stories and I sang to you," which is genius. Yeah, which is beautiful. So this play, it's called "I Killed My Mother."  My titles, you  can see, are very gentle and very inviting for everybody, yeah? This is the La MaMa version in New York, which was a joy for me, very well received, [Inaudible] and Julie [Inaudible]. The other thing which I would  mention here to you but because this is important actually for me, that I'm very interested in this idea of open dramaturgy when I'm doing a theater piece. That means that I don't decide the number of characters in the play. I offer a text, a texture rather than a text, and I offer, if it's possible, total freedom for the company, for the director.  Because in the theater, a text never saves you, because we can destroy even a genius Shakespeare text. Sometimes Hamlet is boring too, right? Not the text saves you, but your courage to get in that story and to consider your own. 
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This is a play which is running now back home in Hungarian language now. "Juliet" is running now, both in Romanian language and Hungarian language in three different places. The title of this play is the following -- be very strong now - It's "Porn." It's P-O-R-N. And it's about political pornography. What is it mean, political pornography? That there are periods in the history when the politicians want to own our body, want to own our intimate life.
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What happened to us in '86? I became officially a political dissident. And we noticed the moment when they bugged our apartment. We were a very young couple, with my wife. And we asked ourselves now how to make love. What is [inaudible] and intimacy of your own life? After '89, I got from the Romanian Minister of Internal Affairs my secret files, 1300 pages. And I took these files and I exhibited all of them. So when the audience enters the space of this show, they go through my files. We have also photos  taken by the secret police. Very dear for me in a way because we are the street, talking to my wife. And after two kids, she got pregnant again and she lost her baby when she was six months old, but she couldn't abort. And in the hospital, they didn't want to intervene, and we counted backwards the days, because she was very close to dying   in a septic shock. So this is what the play is about. Born is the code name of this character followed by the secret police. My friends are telling me that why you are giving so hopeless titles for your play. Please stop doing that. I think I told this yesterday. I remember after the show directed by Natalia, I told this yesterday that I don't want to be a merchant of a cheap hope, because I don't say around this very easy-going way to resolve our problems. So if somebody is not coming to see my play  because of the title, that's still fine. I am fighting successfully against success. This is a play which I loved a lot. It was produced by the Hungarian National Theater in Transylvania. The previous one was commissioned by the Hungarian National Theater in Budapest to write that play, and it was performed in various versions. This play is called "Alcoholics." I read an interview with a woman, an addicted woman, who told her story in a newspaper. And the story, it was fascinating. She's not alcoholic anymore, but she's telling the way how she went through this extremely hard experience. This is an image of that production. As you can see again, it's the same dramaturgy, only the main character is a real person and the others are coming out from her imagination. And this is humorous and funny and painful at the same time. It's a garbage dump there. And finally, I think this play, it's called "Caravaggio Terminal." It's about Caravaggio. I don't know how many of you are familiar with this early Baroque, late  Renaissance painter. He became a very close friend of mine. He was a genius and one of the biggest painters in this 17th century. He died in 1610 at a very early age. I fell in love with him because he could never integrate in the system. He got commissions, being genius, but then the system got him, went against him. So he had to leave Rome. He went to [Inaudible], and he wanted always to come back to Rome. I was very interested in the way how he preserves his freedom. He got the highest commissions in Rome. If you're going to Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo Church, you can see his paintings [inaudible]. I tried to follow his way of being free, being radical in his messages. Just one trunk remained after him at Porto Ercole. And in spite of getting the highest commissions in his time, nothing remained after him. He gave away all his money all the time. So he never became an established artist. Sometimes my kids are telling me that that is the time for you to become an established artist. 
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[ Laughter ]
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Okay, so now to summarize a little bit and I will finish here. What does it mean to be removed from your space of freedom? It means the trauma which creates, for instance, a very special amnesia for you. Or it creates -- it's called also anomia. Nomos means weird or [inaudible]. So you are an outcast when rapes your freedom, right? What does it mean, this? That means that you forgot to read the language, now metaphorically speaking. We lose the meanings of our words. What happened after the Second World War? The major authors of the Western culture are speaking about the impossibility to use again the same language. Where to go now? What is the meaning of this consensus for everybody, right? Thou shall not kill? After, for instance, Auschwitz when killing kids, killing mothers in a professional way. One of my favorite authors, who was awarded with a Nobel Prize, Imre Kertesz, in2002, I knew him personally, and I even rewrote one of his novels in three different versions for the stage. For a one-man show, 10 actors, and again for 10 actors. In his acceptance speech delivered in Stockholm, he speaks about this -- that for him the hardest part of his life after coming home from a prison camp was to reconstruct the language, to create new meanings. Who is from this point of view, my master in the history of the Western theater is Samuel Becket. Samuel Becket, the former disciple of James Joyce. You know, a novel of James Joyce, it's as rich as the creation, "Ulysses." And Samuel Becket wanted to follow the same path. After [inaudible] that path got close to him. It was an abyss, not a road. And then he [inaudible] it's a very famous phrase. It was a mystical turn he names like this, a  mystical turn in his life, when he says that subtracting rather than adding.  So he created the very poor language, almost a known language. He created of poetry of the depraved. So he created the space of the theater, loop dramaturgy. What does it mean, this loop dramaturgy? The endlessness.  He's going around all the time, "Waiting for Godot," "Endgame", his genius radio plays, "Footfalls," etc, etc. He is going always around, always around and tries to expend the time, because he doesn't fear the possibility to go further. Sometimes in the theater this is what I am doing. Don't go further. Slow down. Be more radical with yourself. And if somebody in the audience would get bored, this is also part of the event. I don't want to torture you now in the theater, but sometimes it happens. 
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[ Laughter ]
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Because the basic question is always for a playwright, "What happened to us? What happened to me?" So the drama, the play is a literary text created with no language and we can understand it because of the actors, only because of the actors. If they don't offer totally their lives for us, we won't understandably the play. I think that we cannot understand Hamlet either, or the very funny Moliere. So sometimes I direct but very rarely, and my actors are asking, "What is your main stage direction." You need to die on the stage. Then when we are applauding you, you need to respect and to smile to us. Thank you very much.
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[ Applause ]
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>> Kenneth Nyirady: I think we have time for a few questions. 
>> By any definition, you and your family were fortunate by the Communist regime - emotionally, physically, whatever. And comes 1989, and the door of the prison opens. Why did you decide to stay in the locale of the vulture? Why were you not living in Switzerland or Denmark or where ever?
>> Andras Visky: I lived in the United States, working as a visiting professor here.  I got many offers to stay with my family, but I realized that I don't want to construct a different identity for myself. I have my own stories. I have to tell these stories. And I think that after '89, both in Romania and Hungary and that region, it was a big challenge to work on an idea of the freedom or social justice, especially as a playwright. I'm considered the first who wrote plays about the communist past. And it was a big surprise for me that nobody wanted to speak about that past. So I think that my career or my journey cannot be described with these geographical regions, Switzerland or this heaven of banks, whatever. I don't know. I can't see floating banks around me. I think that it's much for me as a writer, much important to go back in time and to create pages or images which tell to my audience that the most fragile aspects of the human life is the freedom. And time to time, we are ready to give up our freedom. To invest our freedom in somebody, to hit him instead of hitting ourselves by giving up our freedom. And also, it's important for a writer to be surrounded, I think, if you don't switch your language by those who are speaking the same language. To follow how the language, the evolution of the language, the evolution of the meanings, how language is being changed after '89, for instance, in our region. 
>> How can the political changes effect you as person that has [inaudible].
>> Andras Visky: For me, '89 was a big, big, and happy event. I was vice president of the county, for instance. But I realized after a while that I had to resign to not to destroy totally this county. I had to offer the space for somebody else. You know how it affected? For us young professionals, intellectuals, university professors, it was the time to construct things from zero. Ken mentioned the publishing house. I'm not doing it anymore. I worked on creating out of the blue a theater department as a part of our University. [Inaudible] University is a huge university. We have almost 60,000 students. I was very challenged because of these opportunities, and then I began to travel everywhere in the world. But I realized that in most of the big democratic countries, everything is almost done. I don't want to enter in something new.
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>> And your writings? How has it affected your writings?
>> Andras Visky: Probably a lot. I don't know because you don't have to counter, test for this. Just let me tell you one aspect. It took a long time to kill the inner censorship in your mind, to don't censor yourself. You know, because a censorship, it's both a political aspect but it becomes a part of your identity. So you need to be very courageous to go against this. 
>> It seems like those who celebrate freedom are those who have been in captivity. I sense in your works a longing to go back to captivity because of the treasures and the wonder and the joy of experiencing the freedom that came afterwards. And even in that. My big question -- is it possible to find freedom without captivity?
>> Andras Visky: I think that the captivity, it's not a simple political term. It could be a very personal term. But this is common sense, that the freedom is not a given thing, but I think that the captivity is a given thing. The structure of -- sorry for that, but I'm not very optimistic regarding the human being in general. Because I got to see things, a lot of things around me, people dying on the street, in that prison camp also. Mothers and were unbelievable, especially the winters.  I still dream is this winter?  I have the sound of the -- For me, the snowing is not that romantic. I could see my mother, how she tries to hide herself to not be watched, how she cries. Now, what's next? I think that the captivity - Well, I don't you now to become prisoners today. I cannot help you. The captivity in many ways makes you mature. I was a child, but I noticed much, much more than many others. But in the same time, you know, also for me the captivity is a special experience of the body that sometimes I feel that I remained in many ways a prisoner, not having the trust sometimes in people around me. That level of trust you need to continue your life. 
>> [Inaudible] and does this dramaturgy apply to all of your plays?
>> Andras Visky: I don't know. Read the book, because there are, I don't know how many, seven, eight critical essays about what I'm doing now. But you know, barrack dramaturgy, I consider the theater being a prison. We entered the prison and we get out from the prison. For instance, in one of my plays, we shot the audience behind the Iron Curtain. And it was very meaningful for them because the Iron Curtain is a metaphor of the Eastern Bloc, and the concreteness of the iron. People were very disturbed because of that. Historically speaking, you know? Because you are a director, historically speaking, you know the black box is the tomb, is the [inaudible] tomb. You remember the main [inaudible], 8th, 9th century when the theater again, after 1000 years of silence. We hadn't had theater for 1000 years. When I say this, I'm speaking of   professional theater. You know, after the Greek. The historians say that it was 1000 years without theater. And then in the 8th, 9th century, it emerged from the Catholic liturgy in the West. I'm speaking about the Western countries. So I am telling you this, that the architecture of the back box goes back to the empty tomb. So what are the actors doing? They entered the empty tomb. They are dying as persons. We see them as characters and they are coming out from the empty tomb. It's the same. I barrack dramaturgy for me, that's why it is important because it's very personal, and at the same time historically speaking you have a foundation for it.
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>> Kenneth Nyirady: No more questions?
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[ Applause ]
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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.