I. Introduction
In the following pages I shall attempt to focus, from a philosophical standpoint, on the choreographic world of the artistic director of the Magyar Állami Népi Együttes (Hungarian State Folk Ensemble), Gábor Mihályi, by placing it within a phenomenological/hermeneutic framework. What does this mean, and what are its implications?
- I shall throughout rely on my own experience – or on the absence of such experience – and thus insist on the validity of the first person singular far more than on supposedly ‘scientific’ (objectively posited) truth.
- Given that hermeneutics (and consequently the hermeneutics of ‘non-verbal understanding’ as well) approaches its ‘object’ by becoming conscious of (and dismantling) our given, unexamined prejudices, and can only enter into an open ‘dialogical relationship’ with it if, in the dialectic of question and answer, it gives preference to the question, no one can expect of me confident, ex cathedra pronouncements – at most open surfaces that lend themselves to, and provoke, debate.
- Since my perspective does not focus on a series of aesthetic objects, closed works of art following one another in chronological order, but on a living, dynamic, (dance-)movement in progress – on a non-verbal poetic ‘world’ (the choreographic world of Gábor Mihályi) – we can gain access to its luminous presence only by understanding the horizons of past and future that arise in and from it; it carries its own time within itself and has no existence outside it. Any ‘past’ that may be revealed can arise only from our respective present and not the other way around. As Heidegger wrote almost a century ago now, six years short of one: “The situation of interpretation, as the appropriation of the past by means of understanding, is always the situation of some living present. The past opens itself only in accordance with the degree of resoluteness and strength with which a given present disposes over the power to disclose.” I agree with this and shall therefore abide by it.
- The problematic of ‘presence’ is perhaps the greatest burden of our age. We live in a time in which it is increasingly difficult to resist the seduction of ‘virtual realities’ and the various narcotic addictions – it takes a person of considerable strength to succeed. In his essay “A ‘teremtő képzelet’ sorsa korunkban” (lit. The Fate of the ‘Creative Imagination’ in Our Time) János Pilinszky writes: “One fine day we awoke to find that what happens on stage is in fact present nowhere at all. We want to be present at any price, and yet above all it is precisely our presence that we have annihilated.” In another piece he formulates the problem as follows: “If I had to speak in broad lines about the Achilles’ heel of today’s theatre, I would unhesitatingly choose the ‘problematic of presence’.” In his book A jelenlét előállítása (lit. Producing Presence), Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht likewise analyses this question in a radical philosophical context and maintains that “modern (contemporary) Western culture can be described as a process of forgetting presence, and of moving away from it…” Here and now, of course, I cannot embark on a full discussion of this problematic, but I should like to make two remarks that are immediately relevant to our ‘object’. The first is this: dance (and thus folk dance as well), as the rhythmic movement – or choreographic manipulation – of the living human body, has the best possible endowments for the struggle for ‘presence’, at least where this is explicitly desired by the artistic intention. In principle this should never be in doubt in the case of any work of art – yet in practice it often is. Industrially produced artefacts in the artistic ‘factories’, mass-produced to serve and gratify the ‘common’ expectations of the audience, are hardly designed to meet the demands of ‘presence’. The second is that, in my interpretation, the elemental need for presence is at work above all in the choreographic oeuvre (‘world’) of Gábor Mihályi, and only in the light of this can his relation to tradition (to the past) be understood. (It would be a serious mistake to underestimate the problem in question – the problem of presence – for it is far more important than it may at first sight appear.)
- Since I shall speak consistently only of the choreographic world of Gábor Mihályi, and shall treat this as one and the same – without differentiation – with the artistic achievement of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble over the past fifteen years, the question is legitimate: is personal identity in itself sufficient reason not to distinguish between the creator and the artistic director? This is all the more pertinent when we know that, in the period in question, Mihályi was far from being the only creative force within the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble. In the majority of productions there are co-choreographers working alongside the director–choreographer, sometimes three to five of them. (In Hajnali Hold [Moon at Dawn], for instance, three: Rita Furik, Anita Gera and Călin Orza; in Álomidő [Dream Time], five: Călin Orza, Anita Gera, Zsolt Juhász, Gábor Katona and Richárd Kökény.) Moreover, other artists choreograph and direct independent works: Péter Gerzson Kovács, for example, created the first two pieces of the Bartók trilogy – Kincses Felvidék [Treasure of Upper Hungary, 2006] and Labirintus [Labyrinth, 2008] – while Zoltán “Batyu” Farkas staged Örök Kalotaszeg – In memoriam Varga Ferenc “Csipás” [Eternal Kalotaszeg – In Memoriam Ferenc Varga “Csipás” ] in 2005 and Mezőség – Mikrokozmosz [Mezőség – Microcosm] in 2012. All this testifies to the diversity and richness of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, yet in my view it does not contradict an overall view that treats the processes taking place there – the movements of the past fifteen years – as a unified whole. I use the name of Gábor Mihályi, in any case, as both an ‘emblematic’ and an ‘authorial’ name. By the former I mean that I regard him as the coordinator of a collective endeavour, as the head of an ensemble which, in the art of folk dance, may be regarded as a ‘flagship’, together with the responsibility that this entails; and that in his person – under his name – I embody his artistic collaborators, whether choreographers, composers or designers (not to mention the dancers themselves). The perspective – and, naturally, the corresponding ‘range of vision’ – from which I look back on the fundamental movements of these fifteen years, with the intention of offering a synthesis, seems to me to justify and legitimise this procedure. All the more so because I concretise his emblematic status in his ‘authorial name’, which is not strictly speaking a proprietary or civil name (these are first and foremost legal categories). The relevant studies of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes provide an important background for this approach.
II. The Obverse and Reverse of ‘Tradition’ on the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble Stage
“Back to the things themselves! – the founding figure of the ‘phenomenological movement’, Edmund Husserl, formulated its emblematic watchword in these terms; and the ‘disciple’, Heidegger, took up the phrase – in opposition to all freely floating constructions binding us to nothing, to random notions, to the uncritical adoption of concepts that are only seemingly well founded, and to those pseudo-questions which spread, masquerading as problems, over entire generations.”
The ‘thing itself’ awaiting interpretation/understanding in our case will be a ‘world’ being built before our very eyes – a world that is in constant danger of being rebuilt and thus remains ‘open’: a sensuous, poetic world in motion, namely the choreographic world of Gábor Mihályi, the artistic achievement of the past fifteen years. In stressing its openness I allude only to the pronounced ‘presentness’ of this world and not to the fact that the oeuvre is still unfinished and that we do not yet know precisely where (in what direction) its paths lead. In my experience, since the turn of the millennium – that is, under the artistic direction of Gábor Mihályi, in contrast to the previous fifty years – the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble has not focused on an immobile, unalterable ‘past’ (on the fixed folk-dance heritage recorded by collectors), but on its own respective present and the horizons of memory and expectation that it contains. The relation to ‘tradition’ has not changed in its formal sense, but the manner and mode of that relation – the attitude – has been transformed in the course of a paradigm shift. In Mihályi’s ‘choreographic present’ tradition is not given directly, does not lie to hand; it must be ‘sought’, and even then he cannot be sure that what he ‘finds’ is indeed tradition. The world of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble in the last fifteen years has been marked by the search for tradition, and not, as in the case of the great predecessors, by finding it and presenting it accordingly. What has changed, that today tradition must be ‘sought’, whereas the previous generation was still able to ‘find’ it and build from it? A unique dance form that was collected by ethnographers (perhaps in the very last moment before oblivion), then assembled and cultivated as ‘tradition’, has lost something of the narrative power of its ‘semantic density’ – of that aspect, in other words, which once made it identifiable and thus also identitarian, and on which several generations could subsequently rely. As I see it now, it is the ‘past’ that is slipping away from it; what remains is ever more purely ‘present’ – a smooth surface (a clean slate), offering the recipient not least vital affects and freedom in the creation of meaning and sense. It is as if a metamorphosis of folk dance were taking place before our eyes, as if it were striving to transform itself into ‘art dance’, and as if it were only a question of time before that transformation is complete. The reasons for this are manifold: our global and postmodern world, together with our present social and political context, are all ‘responsible’ – the least responsible, perhaps, being the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble’s current artistic practice, and thus Gábor Mihályi and his collaborators. If the social relation to tradition is itself undergoing transformation (becoming ever more hollow, formal, questionable), what else can a serious – committed – choreographer do than present it as such, that is, subject it to questioning? The search of which I have already spoken cannot take place in any other way than by asking about the content of tradition as it has been handed down (pre-given) and by making that content ‘questionable’. How does this occur? By presenting folk dance stripped of the meaning conferred upon it by dance scholarship and canonisation, by refusing to treat it as an unambiguous, identitarian ‘answer’ to the question of roots, and by allowing it to exist in its original, sensuous reality, devoid of predetermined meaning and answer. We might also formulate it thus: in Mihályi’s theatre it is first and foremost ‘dance’ that appears within folk dance – a kind of ‘pure dance’, danse pour la danse – and all that goes with it: the vitality, presence and affective ‘texts’ of the dancing body; transfigurative images; the elimination of linear time and of mimetic and representative space, and so forth. For him dance does not exhaust itself in – does not dissolve into – the ‘principle of expression’, in the service of intended narratives; its ‘raw’ (wild) sensuality (its immanent ‘content’) can thus come into experiential proximity. This, too, no doubt has its own ‘traditional value’, although this is not historical but rather anthropological in nature. We know very little about it; we have, at best, intuitions – just as we know little of our ‘origins’ or of the specific features of human existence. Dance guards this secret, and guards its own secret as well; verbal languages have so far proved incapable of bringing it to light, and I suspect that they will remain so. (Perhaps only poetry – ‘the mother tongue of humanity’ – might be competent here, and in this sense it may be seen as akin to dance; I believe that they were born under the same constellation.) If I had to indicate, in a single word, the athematic layer of Gábor Mihályi’s choreographies (the gravitational centre of his world), that set of questions, in other words, which is not directly thematised (made visible) in his works but nonetheless pervades them, then I would cite the problematic of “origin”. The titles of his productions, with all their enigma and perhaps precisely with their powerful magnetic charge, also point in this direction. Édeskeserű (Bittersweet), Álomidő (Dream Time), Naplegenda (Legend of the Sun), Hajnali hold (Moon at Dawn), Labirintus (Labyrinth): these are true catchwords – mysterious, non-specific – that do not concretise the theme but entice us into an unknown world, a sensuous, poetic world, one might say close to ‘sources’. It is the anticipation of this proximity to the source – as an unspoken promise – that makes both Mihályi’s titles and his productions themselves so compelling, because it alludes to the enigma of our ‘origin’.
It must be stressed at the outset that the ‘becoming questionable’ of tradition is not the same thing as its being questioned or denied. On the contrary: affirmation of tradition requires that we do not approach it in a traditional – that is, uncritical – way, and that we do not cross on the ‘traditional’ bridges – those built by the previous generation – for these may easily collapse. Historical distance does not diminish; it constantly grows, and each generation thus needs new supports in order to span an ever wider historical gulf. We might equally say that if we ourselves change, then tradition changes with us – or rather, the meaning and current content of tradition change. In essence, the past can answer only those questions that we put to it. In entering into a dialogical relationship with tradition, Gábor Mihályi poses questions to it for which no clear, reassuring answers can be had – no answers that would terminate the dialogue and the further asking of questions. Were he simply to ‘use’ tradition (and not make it questionable), relying unquestioningly on its conventional meaning (which today is almost empty, hollow, distorted), then he would carve a fetish from it, or else employ it as a kind of raw material in the service of his own message; and in so doing he would follow the great predecessors, treading the path they have already marked out. The relation in question could still be one of informative authenticity or of dramatization (in extreme cases, indeed, even a ‘kleptomaniac’ relation), but in neither instance would it be genuinely questionable. The debates in the art of folk dance have not centred on making tradition itself questionable, nor on entering into a dialogue with it – tradition has been treated as something given – but on the various forms of its use and on the problem of how the so-called ‘pure source’ can be represented. In her work A bartóki út (Bartók Path), which originated as a doctoral dissertation, Mária Zorándi offers, without intending to do so, an explanation of the most fundamental reason for this: “The influence of the Bartók oeuvre, and the application of the Bartók model, the ‘use’ of tradition in the Bartók sense, were perhaps more clearly discernible in Hungarian folk-dance art than in any other art form, and its study is therefore of particular importance to this day.” Indeed, Bartók became an unappealable authority in the ‘aesthetic’ stylisation of folk dance. More precisely: Bartók’s manner of ‘using’ folk-music tradition – and the fact that he then legitimated this practice through his oeuvre – gained exclusive dominance in the relation to the collected and ‘folk’ dance material. The logic is simple: it is ‘folk’ because it was once danced by the rural folk. Yet neither dance scholarship nor artistic practice has asked why this should be regarded as ‘tradition’, what its content might be, or whether it is indeed the same kind of tradition as that of folk music. (And there would have been much to ask.) There were heated debates, to be sure, but almost without exception the parties to the debate emerged from under Bartók’s cloak – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they took refuge beneath it – and argued over whether the folk dance in this form could itself be regarded as an aesthetic value, or whether it could attain stage-worthiness only when ‘modernised’. (It is, of course, possible to see aesthetic value in it, where such exists – today it is possible to see aesthetic value in anything – but this does not in itself imply that it once possessed such a value. In his 1972 study A folklór esztétikájához (On the Aesthetics of Folklore), Vilmos Voigt writes: “With a slight exaggeration one might say that within the framework of folklore there is no independent art of dance; dance is always connected with some custom or with entertainment, and in this way it cannot even be judged according to purely aesthetic criteria.” Here and now I cannot provide an account of the history of debates in dance scholarship, nor is it my intention to ‘judge’ between differing positions or to cast a critical eye upon the ‘results’ of the debate, whether theoretical or artistic. The ‘great theoreticians’ of folk dance, and likewise the first and second generations of ‘great choreographers’ – the so-called Hungarian school – deserve nothing but recognition, for their achievement is truly significant and world-renowned: theirs is a powerful and authentic ‘answer’, given in an exceptional historical moment. Yet, viewed through the mirror of Gábor Mihályi’s choreographies – in my interpretation – the path taken by these great predecessors (these distinguished masters) can no longer be pursued in the same way. Not because of any desire to differ at all costs, but as the necessary result of a significant change in historical circumstances, if I may put it thus. It is, of course, possible to see things differently in the world of Gábor Mihályi – why should it not be? – but ‘breaking with the past’ or ‘crossing boundaries that previously seemed inviolable’ does not depend on resounding declarations, nor can it necessarily be regarded as a conscious – intended – occurrence, especially not in the case of dance. One of the most important changes – and I have already touched upon this – lies in the fact that dance in Mihályi’s choreographies is ‘free’ to a remarkable degree (pure), that is, there is little or no construction of meaning on stage. There are no stories (no dramatic material), and the ‘semantic density’ inherent in the dance language itself is not emphasised; it can easily be disregarded. The dancers may perform ‘authentic’ material, yet its authenticity does not acquire a dominant meaning or significance. In my view the fixed, canonised (folk-)dance material lost its ‘authenticity’ at the very moment when it was lifted out of its natural (rural) environment – when its context, and thus its ‘meaning’, changed. The Hungarian State Folk Ensemble (and, with it, Mihályi) does not participate in this debate: its repertoire consists neither of ‘authentic’ nor of ‘dramatic’ productions; instead, it allows the unruly sensuous content of dance (and of folk dance) to assert itself freely, together with its embodied presence and primal reality.
III. Thematic Structure as the ‘Gravitational Centre’ or Frame of the Productions
That there is a close, intimate connection between music and mathematics – one need only think of musical notation, for example – has often been remarked upon; there is no need to rehearse these arguments here. The relation between music and dance is equally evident, clearer than daylight, and could be disputed only at the risk of appearing ridiculous. But what relation does mathematics have to dance – to the ‘walking in time to the music’ we call dance (or folk dance)? There must be some relation; if music is related to mathematics, then dance must be as well. The mathematician László Surányi writes of the former as follows: “The musical sign does not rest on the theory of representational signs; it is rather a gate through which, once we pass, a kind of space of music opens itself. It is not that there is an object outside the sign that it signifies; instead, the sign invites us into its own space of meaning. (…) The number, too, has a space of meaning; it is not a thing.” In my view this is equally true of dance, and within that, of the choreographies of Gábor Mihályi. In agreement with Surányi, I shall not concern myself in what follows with the ‘meaning’ of the productions – with what they are ‘about’ – but with the spaces of meaning that they open and that constitute their essential character. Since in Mihályi’s case the thirst for the ‘pure source’ is as clearly discernible as in that of his masters – the Bartók style intention remains in force – the question will in essence be where he seeks that source if he does not ‘find’ it where the great predecessors did. I have already touched upon this question and have answered it. In my experience he seeks it in the present – always in the hic et nunc – in a present whose truth (whose horizon) is determined by the ‘bottomless depth of the past’ accompanying it and by the unseeable expanse of the future. The themes of the productions thus open up very wide indeed – as wide as possible. So wide, indeed, that they cannot be surveyed – ‘bottomless’, ‘unseeable’ – and we can merely surmise whence we come and whither we are heading. No reassuring answer can thus be given to the question of identity: origin, where the pure sources spring and in which we stand – where could we stand, if not in our origin? – is at once very close to us and farther away than anything. Heidegger captured this experience of being – of absence – with precision: “But what is being? Being is that which is (Es ist Es selbst). To render this an object of experience and to say it is what future thinking will have to learn. ‘Being’ is neither God nor a world-ground. Being is essentially farther than all beings, and yet nearer to man than any being, be it a rock, an animal, a work of art, a machine, an angel or even God. Being is the nearest. Yet for man nearness is the farthest.”
I perceive an exceptionally strong connection between philosophy (especially its twentieth-century currents: phenomenology and hermeneutics) and dance – as bodily activity and as presence – just as I perceive an affinity between the theme of forgetfulness of being (Heidegger) and the choreographic intention within the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble to seek the ‘pure source’. For Mihályi asks after the enigmatic site of the ‘pure source’, and does not, as his predecessors did, find an identitarian tradition situated at a definite moment in the beginnings. In this way he can be at once Hungarian (Central European) and, by virtue of the non-verbal character of dance, universal. The dance language that he ‘speaks’ perfectly – or rather that he listens to perfectly – is distinctively Hungarian (Central European), yet what he ‘says’ does not exhaust itself in the cultivation of that language, in bringing it to the stage in an ‘authentic” manner, nor in placing it in the service of some up-to-date, topical theme. Indeed, in Mihályi’s choreographies (his world) ‘theme’ does not denote ‘content’ in the usual sense of the term, but rather the framework within which sense can be created (the imagination plays freely), a framework that allows the widest possible scope. As a result, explicitly theatrical gestures that are alien to dance are scarcely to be found in his productions, and there is little real need for costumes or sets. Much more important a role is played by projected images and by calligraphic signs and drawings inscribed on the dancers’ bodies. In the ‘space of meaning’ of the choreography the audience thus finds only a ‘meaning-poor’ (enigmatic, poetic) world, a world in which they must orient themselves without the security of handholds. The ‘pure source’ and its ‘springing’, our true ‘origin’, cannot become the direct theme of the productions, for it is not an object, not a thing; it can reveal itself to spectators only indirectly, in and through its very invisibility. Dreams, celestial bodies (sun and moon), legends and archaic myths, the figure of the human who has strayed into the ‘labyrinth’ – these alone can hint at who we are and at the origins of our striving and the direction in which it moves. And of course there is dance – not just any dance, but folk dance, though not as it used to appear on stage, nor as it was once shown to collectors by bent-backed old men and women. In the choreographic practice of Mihályi folk dance appears freed from its semantic density (from the current fetters of representing national identity), in its ‘innocence’, as it were, in a deconstructed rather than reconstructed quality. The dancers are not ‘characters’ – they do not recall the participants of village festivities or the figures of literary works – or if they do, then they do so by dancing as themselves (only imitating and repeating themselves) and truly being present on stage. Where else could ‘pure sources’ (origins) be discovered, if not in this present, ecstatic, circular openness of dance and in the impulsive power of the body? In the choreographic world of Gábor Mihályi the dancers are co-creators, not merely agile, well-drilled virtuoso performers. What they ‘perform’ is not the mere transmission of some idea (or feeling) between choreographer and audience, nor the preservation of tradition, nor a mode of mimetic representation; instead, they give their own vitality, their own living bodies, their own flesh-and-blood selves. Yes: they speak (dance) their ‘mother tongue’ as their own, no less so than a contemporary dancer speaks his or hers. The difference, perhaps, is that in the latter case the character of the language is more individual, whereas in the former it is essentially communal. What does not differ, what grounds the comparison and the similarity, is the sense of freedom, the sense of dance as presence. (I speak here of the sense of freedom, but not in the sense of ‘I may do anything so long as I harm no one else’. Seen from this viewpoint, I would rather have to speak of the complete absence of freedom, as Lévinas did when he wrote of the mode of being of dance: “It is a mode of being that is not consciousness, since consciousness here is deprived of its privilege of assuming responsibility, deprived of its power; nor is it unconscious, since the whole situation, down to every detail, is present in a dim light. It is a waking dream. Neither habit nor reflex nor instinct operates in this light. The peculiar automatic character of walking or dancing in time to the music is a mode of being in which nothing is unconscious, yet in which a consciousness paralysed in its freedom plays, dissolving completely in its own play.”) In my view – in my experience – folk dance in the choreographic world of Gábor Mihályi has become one of the forms of contemporary dance, without losing anything of its historical embeddedness or its communal character.
[2016]