Crossroads - Krisztián Gergye: E. SCH. EROTO

The convergence of Javanese dances and expressionist visual art in an extraordinary choreography 

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

A Devastating Experience

It was not entirely independent of my curiosity about the dancer that in 2008 we signed up for the Natural Disasters Collective's bus trip, 'Death Tours,' whose final stop among several urban stations led to the MU Theater. Rhyming with its title, the performance Pre-Actio can best be described as action-theater, which did not unfold so much before us, the audience, but rather happened to us, as participants. Setting aside the presentation of the performance's multifaceted philosophy for now, I would highlight only one moment. We shared the last forty minutes of a suicide bomber's life.

My original ticket to the Natural Disasters Collective’s ‘Death Tours’ performance
at the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, November 21, 2008.

As we mill around with many others in a dimly lit room, looking at the portraits with names scattered all under our feet, and various personal items that shock with their presence as mementos of a tragic event, digital displays on the side of a podium in the center of the room count down the ruthlessly passing time. Through table-like projectors placed flush with the floor, we can monitor a man's ritual preparation, though we cannot know exactly what he is preparing for. The crowd we are part of moves around the room just like anywhere in the city's squares and streets. In this faceless surging, it is not our eyes but rather a sort of sixth sense that signals the change: our attention is drawn to a motionless figure who looks like he is just one of us, but he is not, after all, we were just watching his ritual a moment ago. Now he stands among us, carrying a backpack, as casual as any of us, only the tension radiating from him is different, as well as the fact that, just like at the moment of birth, he is stark naked. He crawls up onto the podium, and the dance of death begins. Struggling out of the grip of fear and determination, the bare human body slowly dresses in festive attire, the first step of which is strapping on the explosives. The spasms of agony transfigure into the calm of irrevocability. The man standing in the spotlight on the podium is ready for the final movement, and we are standing right near him. In the silent moment of detonation, the room is plunged into darkness, the bomber simply vanishes, and we are left there—virtually blown up. The suicide bomber was embodied by Krisztián Gergye, and anyone who was present there will never forget the concentrated depth into which he dragged us all.

Far and Yet Close

Indonesia's unique art exerts an elemental impact on almost everyone who comes into contact with it. One could list at length the names of defining theater makers, musicians, and visual artists whose life's work was decisively influenced by Indonesian music, theater, or refined craftsmanship. Antonin Artaud's thinking was completely reshaped by the experience of a Balinese theater performance, while the actors of Eugenio Barba's company, Odin Teatret, practically felt at home on the island of Bali, where they immersed themselves in the traditions of local theater. For those more versed in popular music, it may suffice to evoke the name of Mike Oldfield here; his music, including the Tubular Bells album, is permeated by the sounds of the gamelan.

A young Hungarian man fared no differently when, in 1996, he enrolled in the Indonesian dance course of dance artist Bagus Kentus Norontako, who had arrived in Budapest from the Yogyakarta Sultanate. As a result of the course, he became a member of the Norontako Javanese Dance Group, and shortly thereafter, we could see him as a regular performer, a Javanese dancer at domestic Indonesian cultural and embassy events.

After a brief interlude spent mastering classical ballet and modern dance techniques, he won the Darmasisswa scholarship in 1998 and traveled to Yogyakarta on the island of Java for a year. As a student at the Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts), he immersed himself in the world of traditional Javanese dances. His diligence was boundless; alongside his official studies, he attended additional private institutions through his own financing, where renowned teachers introduced him to specialized dance styles such as the refined male and female styles, or the Menak style. Thanks to his talent and preparation, he was even able to perform at the sacred events of the Yogyakarta KERATON Sultan's Palace, which is considered a privilege. This young man is none other than Krisztián Gergye, who a few years later became one of the defining figures of Hungarian contemporary dance and theater arts.

A traditional Javanese Wayang Topeng (masked dance) performer.
Photo: Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures (CC BY-SA 3.0).

Javanese dances, like the dance arts of many countries around the world, can be divided into two major families: court dances and folk dances. While the latter is rather full-blooded and lively, court dance represents refinement and elegance, which is often paired with a philosophical message.

Just like the Indonesian Wayang theater (puppet shadow play), the group of masked dances, which is clearly distinguishable among the numerous types of dance, is also strongly related to the rich genre of storytelling.

Performers of topeng dance (masked dance) wear various masks to go with their ornate attire, and they perform fairy-tale or mythical stories accompanied by a gamelan orchestra. The dancers portray the forces of nature, characters from adaptions of the Indian epics—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are highly popular in the region—as well as legendary kings and heroes. The most popular story, however, is the local Panji cycle originating from the 12th century, which tells the love story of Prince Panji and Princess Chandra Kirana, who are incarnations of the male and female deities of love.

The first written record of a topeng dancer wearing a gold mask dates back to the 14th century. The most developed forms of masked dances evolved on the islands of Bali and Java, but local variations can be found in every region of the Indonesian archipelago. The masks are extremely diverse, distinguishable by gender, occupation, social status, serious or humorous characters, animals, and divine figures; different, full masks were worn by silent characters, while speakers wore half-masks. In many cases, masked dances were integrated into the courtly dance-theater performances that formed part of the aristocrats' entertainment, which were called "human wayang" under the name Wayang wong or Wayang orang, distinguishing them from puppet shadow theater.

"I am a human being, I love death, and I love life."

This line was written by an Austrian painter who died very young in 1918 at the age of 28, Egon Schiele, in his poem Self-Portrait. His ten-year recognized and successful—though not free from animosity and scandals—painting career, during which he became a leading figure of Viennese Expressionism, fed on the ruthless and unbiased examination and exposure of his complex personality. In the life-feeling of a decadent world drifting into war, closing the golden age of peace, faith in progress and in man's world-shaping ability falls into crisis. The understanding of change was sought through several paths, two of which are particularly characteristic of the era: one approach performed the meticulous and merciless dissection of the personality using scientific and philosophical tools (like Freud), while the other constituted a group of esoteric teachings offering the possibility of finding an ultimate unity leading out of reality and beyond reality (see Steiner). Contact with both directions can be found in Schiele's oeuvre, which can also be interpreted as one giant, continuous confession of the intention for self-knowledge and self-understanding.

Egon Schiele: Self portrait - male nude with spreaded arms (Public Domain)

The main events of Schiele's personal life path compellingly contribute to this self-examining attitude. His relationship with death and the female sex finds its explanation in the foundational experiences of his childhood. While constantly struggling with the lack of maternal love, at the age of 14 he loses his father, who represented a secure emotional anchor and who dies of syphilis with a broken mind.

Schiele constantly shatters rules and transgresses norms, so much so that while still practically a child, he even becomes entangled in the suspicion of an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters. Growing up, although he is able to appear in the wider world as a fashionable man-about-town, he continues to carry his internal problems with him, which are soon joined by financial difficulties. He enters into a domestic partnership with the 17-year-old Wally, one of Klimt's models, and during their life together, the woman becomes one of the core subjects of Schiele's painting.

In the painter's depictions, however, it is not the woman's personality that dominates, but much rather Schiele's unresolved relationship with the female sex, with emotions, and with the bodily relations of sexuality. While he also escapes into the experience of lovemaking, throwing himself into the pleasures of the flesh, in his pictures he distances women from himself, often freezing them into faceless, extreme, contorted poses, scrutinizing them closely while ignoring the taboos of body depiction, thereby simultaneously degrading the representatives of the opposite sex into sexual objects and demeaning his own desires and experiences. Yet out of the ugly, a kind of beauty is born, because the unique harmony of the paintings speaks—perhaps unintentionally—of the true, deep, and agonizing desires of the soul.

Egon Schiele's self portraits (Public Domain)

Schiele's landscapes and cityscapes all bear witness to man's sense of discomfort. He persistently searches for the key to understanding himself, making his own persona the subject of his painting career. Throughout an astonishing number of 170 self-portraits, he walks the paths of self-examination in various states of mind, and he does not shy away from putting on pathological grimaces and gestures either, for the sake of studying extremes.

He creates his most scandal-inducing series of pictures about the street children who frequent his studio, for which he is sentenced to prison, the works being interpreted as pedophilia. In the pictures, the children often look at us with aging, wrinkled bodies and indifferent gazes, so the paintings testify much rather to the ruthlessness of existence and passing away than to morbid inclinations. Schiele was not particularly shaken by the punishment; in fact, he conveyed the feelings that arose during his 24 days of confinement in his drawings with documentary fidelity.

Egon Schiele: Woman with Green Stockings (Public Domain)

His life together with Wally came to a short and abrupt end when, after a brief acquaintance, he decided to marry the middle-class, Protestant Edith Harms. Despite the protests of the girl's parents, the wedding was held on the very day that was the marriage date of Schiele's parents. Although Schiele perhaps hoped he could keep both women, Wally left him immediately and went abroad as a military nurse, where she died of scarlet fever two years later.

On the third day after his wedding, Schiele received military conscription orders. He was ordered to Prague, where his wife followed him as well. Thanks to his reputation and the recognition of his talent, he was not cut off from the possibility of creating even during his two years of military service.

Returning to Vienna, the hope of concentrating on his career and a harmonious family life finally flashed before him in 1918. His wife was expecting a child, but in the sixth month of her pregnancy, she was carried away by the Spanish flu epidemic raging in Europe, which did not spare Schiele either; he followed his wife and child three days later.

In his final and unfinished painting, which perhaps prefigured the desired state of harmony, the painter's questioning gaze is nevertheless fixed upon us, as if expecting the answer to the question of the meaning of life from us alone.

Crossroads

It has been 24 years since a solo dancer was awarded the prize for best dancer in Budapest at the 8th Alternative Theater Festival. For me, this performance becomes more and more vivid with every viewing, and beneath its successively peeling layers, newer and newer dimensions reveal themselves every single time. The dancer who dreamed up this unique phenomenon onto the stage and brought it to life is also Krisztián Gergye. The title contains a reference to Egon Schiele, and the dance unmistakably draws from the world of Javanese dances.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

By then, Krisztián Gergye had already embarked on the path of claiming contemporary dance and shaping his own independent identity. However, for the stage formulation of the questions burning inside him, the Javanese dance culture—which he was perhaps most in possession of—was available to him, though in its original form, it was unsuited to become the vehicle for current ideas. But Gergye was brave enough to take a step by which he liberated the movements bound by tradition and, through creative reformulation, created a peculiar contemporary dance. He puts it this way in his own ars poetica:

"...through the formal language of dance, calling forth those internal, inherently instinctive deep-beings (role-personalities) that often affect our lives, whether suppressed or with excessive dominance. The awakening of these beings is the primary condition for communication with ourselves without lies, and a possibility for understanding and accepting our ever-deepening personality layers. According to traditional Javanese philosophy, dance brings to life those 'divine' characters that, by their mere presence, are capable of mediating the meaning of human existence, the ideal human state. For observers, these beings are possibilities for relation, objects of meditation, which can have a teaching, guiding significance in a person's life. While the viewer is primarily the observer of the meditation, the dancer (the meditator), losing the dominance of their personality, must be the 'vessel' of the divine being itself.

Traditional Javanese dance provides an opportunity for the manifestation of the divine ideal figure through the suppression of human, 'civilian' emotions. The formal language of contemporary Javanese dance, however, builds upon bringing to the surface the repressed desires and secret emotions residing in our deepest selves. The unique meditation of Javanese dance is the middle path itself. How well I can place myself into it perfectly reveals my human flaws.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

The contemporary, on the other hand, points out my most extreme states of being. Living them out and experiencing them provides a possibility for relation to the harmony of the center."

This shift in emphasis regarding the role of the dancer—that is, the individual—rhymes very much with Schiele's own problematics. Just as Schiele examined his own essence as a painter, Gergye turns with the same motivation toward mapping his own personality as manifested in dance. Schiele becomes simultaneously a conceptual inspiration and an animated visual reality. Although the spectacle rhymes with the paintings, the voyage of discovery takes place within the dancer himself. Again, the words of Krisztián Gergye on this:

"For me, Schiele's pictures are self-recognitions. 'Like tilted mirrors,' secret analogies of my own inner selves. Searching within myself, I create my self-portrait through his portraits. (...)

Motionless beings. Dancing. Rigid, cramped, bony desires and gestures. Their honesty is not an accusation, not an attack. Only recognition and self-acceptance."

The Javanese masked dance blended with contemporary dance provides an excellent opportunity for the anima and animus living within us—that is, the woman living in the man and the man living in the woman—to be present on stage almost simultaneously, or rather, to manifest in an interchanging, mutually transforming way within seconds. According to Jung, alongside the conscious, dominant half that determines our gender, it is the subordinate half existing in the unconscious that selects the partner suited to us like a precise compass. In Gergye's performance, this inside-out, upside-down game is present throughout; the fronts get swapped, the front side is not the opposite, but merely the inverse of the back side, and the body present alone on stage thus personifies the two components of being that live within it.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

The male and female souls are multifaceted in themselves, both struggling for their own fulfillment. In Gergye's contorted movements, Schiele's figures look back at us, while the frontal reversal of the Javanese mask dance lends a necessary grotesqueness to the rich spectrum that manifests at times as erotically provocative, at times as referring to primary physical desires, and at times in delicate spiritual vibrations. The body is not only the carrier and expression, but can also be the prison of the soul locked inside it; the dancer's figure, turning into a living exclamation mark from time to time, expresses this condition, which, pointing to itself as a feat involving desperate effort, attempts to dismantle or perhaps sublime the physical immutability of the bone-muscle-skin body-complex.

Archival video still from Krisztián Gergye’s E. SCH. EROTO.

The dancer is simultaneously a real being and an irrational, animated painted figure upon which the brushstrokes are still present, as if he had just stepped out of the two dimensions of the canvas into that space where a beam of light, evoking the red color of both blood and lust, leads to the point where the primary instinctuality of our body gains a culturally codable "packaging." The whorish black stockings pulled onto male legs slip under the elegant clothing, and the most ethereal femininity is conjured forth. And the gestures continuously point to the head, perhaps indicating that consciousness must grapple with all of this? How far from simple this is, is illustrated by the shattering sequence of movements in which the male and female beings stare us in the face, alternating second by second, while the body becomes akin to a worn-out toy doll, every single body part of which has already been horroristically twisted out of shape.

Although E. SCH. EROTO bows its head before Schiele, it does so in a way that focuses more sharply than anything else on the questions to which even the ruthlessly passing time has brought no answers.

Krisztián Gergye's performance is an exceptional experience reaching across time and space, in which seemingly distant worlds organicize into one, joined seamlessly by the musical fabric woven from the music of Schubert, John Cage, Ágens, and Marilyn Manson as a worthy sonic backdrop to the unparalleled spectacle.