pulzArt 9: Lightness and depth in theater performances

Under the umbrella of misinformation and naivety, truly comical situations are born – the show “PARTY” by the independent theater company Incipient Bucharest conquered the hearts of the audience with its light and funny style while tackling quite serious social issues. How can it be, for example, that even with the most balanced and perfected electoral model in the democratic world, initial good intentions are so misguided that we always end up choosing the lesser of two evils?

What happens to the “Sunflower” when the sun doesn’t shine for a long time? Tamási Áron Theatre’s play “Sunflower” was an integral part of the 9th pulzArt program – not only because of the yellow set. Intertwined but parallel micro-lights, dysfunctional adult relationships seen through the eyes of a child, real lack of attention and empathy and their directly traumatic effect – serious topics, but the audience laughed to tears at the show full of frothy humour and situation comedy. Thanks to the excellent chemistry between director Radu Afrim and the actors of the Sfântu Gheorghe company, the audience of the 9th pulzArt edition saw another exceptional piece of theater.

Oproiu Nicolette’s “Silent darkness”, based on the text of Kiss Tibor Noé’s novel “Beláthatatlan táj” (Indefinite Landscape), led us into the microcosm of human destinies in a special space, the Pálffy Hall of the Tamási Áron Theatre. It was as if the pulzArt audience discovered a secret chamber of the stream of consciousness of personal experiences in this experimental performance, which included verse, dance, performance and song. At the audience meeting that followed, literary critic György Evelin discussed with the protagonist and the writer the inner struggles, the liberating power of writing, the links between the novel and the monodrama, and the sensitizing role of literature.