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(a concert at the Hungarian Contemporary Drama Festival)
The Kodaly Method is a common belief, an international legend, the basis of the 20th century Hungarian music education. Musical writing, reading, musical awakening of self-awareness, educating teachers, musicians and the audience in one unique way. The solfa letters mentioned as a joke, a record quantity of music teachers and amateur choirs. The Kodaly Method is out of fashion these days. Joining Agens, some young singers, conductors and musicians founded a band called Agens and the Kodaly Method last year. They target to prove that there are several different routes in music even without myths and pathos. They gave a short concert on the Long Night of Museums, but they will only present their musical material in full now in order to guide their audience into the world of the obscene folk songs mostly collected by Bartok and Kodaly or rescued from the Middle Ages.
Cast:
Ágens, Philipp György, Dezső Sára, Szakács Ildikó, Cser Ádám vocals
Philipp György electronics
Bartek Zsolt winds
Bubnó Marci vocals, drums
Ticket information:
MERLIN Theatre
H-1052 Budapest,
Gerlóczy u. 4.
kovacs.andrea@merlinszinhaz.hu
Ágens
Company
Opening
FATUM
– mysterium
12-13th
December 2009, 8pm
www.agens.hu
Ágens,
György Philipp, Zsuzsanna Madák, Gergely Fogarasi, Éva Simán, Balázs Károlyi,
Edit Szűcs, Krisztián Gergye, Judit Philipp
„I have
come to you, my Lord,
I have brought myself here to behold your
beauties.
I know you, and I know your
name”
Egyptian
Book of the Dead
5-6 May 2007, 20.00 pm
MU Theatre
Address: 1117
Tickets and information: +36 1 466 4627
Ticket price: 1500 HUF, student and pros: 1200 HUF
23 February 2007,
19:00 pm
MODEM,
Modern and
Address: 4026,
Only a limited number of tickets are available. Please, book your ticket in advance.
Written
and directed by: Ágens
Choreographer:
Gergye Krisztián
Voice:
Ágens - tenor, soprano, alto
György
Philipp - alto, baritone
József
Csapó - Johnny - tenor, counter-tenor
Béla Laborfalvy Soós - bass
Musicians:
Xénia
Stollár viola da gamba
Zsuzsanna Madai flute
László Tömösközi vibraphone, percussion
Costume designer:
Móni Béres
Lighting designer:
Krisztián
Gergye
Mask:
Balázs
Károlyi
Hair stylist:
Julcsi Bodor
Cothurnus:
Anikó Horváth
Sound:
Ferenc Boudny
Light:
Ferenc Payer
A warm hug for
Krisztián Gergye and Móni Négyesi.
Sponsors:
The Cultural Committee of the Budapest General Assembly, Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Workshop Foundation, Theatre MU
Exclusive promoters of the
performance:
‘Plastic, fantastic, bombastic’ is the ironic story of Duke Bluebeard's
Castle without Bartók and with reverse casting.
‘The key question lies in whether recalling our memories means reliving
or rewriting them. Does it mean entering the same quality of time or is it
merely about walking round the outer surface of what has happened? Does the
triad of past, present and future exist or is there continuous present tense
instead? Do we grab the opportunity of a metamorphosis that can start in any
moment of time?’ Ágens – www.agens.hu
’Ágens – that is what they call her, that is her name and we learnt it
over the past years. A woman with her hyponatural voice with God knows how many
octaves in it, wandering in the kingdom of opera led by her moods. Or maybe not
her moods. Her driving force is much rather what she has to say. In this world
where concepts are highly suspicious, where it is not common to have a message,
what is much more about giving
things shape, well, someone who does not give a damn about habits and
expectations and tailors high-standard artistic performances to suit her own
rules is an unreliable figure. She is lead by her own rules, we could say, but
you can only do this if you have your own rules. A self-tailored world with your
own standards.
Ágens cannot be forced into the shapes and figures that we already
know.’
Erzsi Sándor, Radio Petőfi, 03 November
2006.
Ágens’s latest
performance entitled ‘plastic-fantastic-bombastic’ presents a special battle, a
fight, a dialog between the world of simple and bloodlessly beautiful ideas and
the most fallible, lust-provoking and brutal (feminine) earthliness. Then these
elevating and unreachably wonderful ideas (white male figures, male principles)
also get confused, paddling, coming alive full of desire. Using relatively
simple tools, the performance deals with such fundamental philosophical
questions about our existence as the approachability of our past, the
transformation of love into a story, the reception and graspability of beauty
and the agelessness of Eros in us on a high level of abstraction and in an
expressly artistic manner. This duality seems to be inherent in Ágens as well. A
kind of aerial purity and outspoken aggression.’ Zsuzsa Nagy– Lege
Artist Medicinae
’Ágens’s new
production entitled ’plastic-fantastic-bombastic’ shows us that the endless flow
of time unstoppably rolling on can not only be interrupted but also reversed.
Moreover, it should be inevitably turned back in order for us to learn how to
remember; so that we learn to see ourselves, our long forgotten and future
selves. From a contemporary opera diva, Ágens has matured into a performing
artist by now, deeply interested in the landscape of time and sensitively
responding to its smallest vibrations. Her answers are not general recipes
fitting all ages and moods. Disarming honesty and enthralling subjectivity is a
more effective weapon since it also demands a reaction from the audience.’
Tamás Jászay
photo: Péter Hapák
Ágens + Joseph Tasnádi + The Byzantine Male Ensemble “St.Ephraim”:
:
Ulixes
intrapersonal opera
10-11 April, 4 May 2007, 20:00 pm
MU Theatre
Address: 1117
Tickets and information: +36 1 466 4627
Ágens
Interactive
video-stage:
Joseph Tasnádi
Singers:
Ágens
Kornél Mogyoró percussion
Dancer:
Móni
Choreographer,
lighting plan:
Krisztián
Gergye
Costume designer:
Móni
Mask:
Balázs
Sound:
Ferenc
Light:
Ferenc Payer
Exclusive promoters of the
performance:
“I dreamt that I read a huge book with beautifully shaped letters, in a strange language. Suddenly I became one with the text: the word, the sentence became a visual and audio sign. It became a sound. I knew that the image was an idea, and the idea was me: an experience of space and image, full of perceptions. I read the sound-letters with growing hunger; they pulled me in and pushed me into a visual world of space. I saw and heard the ideas behind the words and sentences at the same time; there were words and their images all around, below and above me. The same things were to be heard and seen. Then the image turned into a text which I no longer understood and perceived. The letters blurred, the connection broke off, and I did not see it any longer.”
Ulixes. The experience of time as a moment, a monologue of time. The changing of roles, the inner experience of time and the mind.
We all crave to be out of time. You too! Real stories come alive in our minds, with story complementing, surreal effects. The most important is what you experience of time and how you do it. Ulixes deals with the possibilities of different roles within one person, using the language of music and images. It is an opera of consciousness stating the question: are you inside Time? Or are you out of it?
I made my piece Purcell Picnolepsy in co-operation with artist József Tasnádi who is concerned with interactive art. He developed an electronic system in which sound interacts with image. He defines the sign, the means of contact while its time and quality is defined by the voice.
In the art scene, it is the voice (music) that opens up space, gives meaning and order to the images and is in contact with them. Different voices affect the image in different ways, the image is active.
’Instead of mentioning inner time in connection with ’Ulixes’, I think you could rather say that Ágens views time as her own. Her great invention – be it intentional or not – is that she reverses subservience and crossing her limits, she becomes the one who ’commands’ time. She discovers the cracks in the linear flow of time and she also finds the appropriate instruments to do this. The stage (even the auditorium and the café outside) represent different time-planes, through which Ágens can move freely; she can travel from one to the other, unlike her characters stuck in one particular age. In the same way, her voice is also ’travelling’ between different tones, pitches, unarticulated growls and biting melodies. She is ultimate protagonist – existing beyond time, compared to the other characters.’
(Virág Vida: Privatised Time – Színház, January 2006.)
'Following Ágens’s work on stage in the past years, her not too
frequent but rather inspiring performances have induced a growing impression in
me. Ágens is a unique Protean character, who can be unmistakably the same and puzzlingly different in one single moment – and
this is not only true to her works in general but can happen within one single
performance as well. Throughout her public metamorphoses hardly graspable with
words she still seems to be led by one single “goal”: to prove that the truth of
receptive positions carved in stone is in fact merely written on
water….
She is not an occasional trespasser: Ágens keeps loosening and untying the bonds limiting and paralyzing the artist and the audience eager for excitement. Or she simply tears them apart as she did in her recent work entitled Ulixes.'
Tamás Jászay in kontextus.hu, 2006
