11.00
Holiness is, in fact, a courageous leaning into the world. Those who wish to remain pure can certainly not be holy.
András Visky
András Visky’s drama collection A test történetei [Stories of the Body] addresses the perception of the sacred and the profane through the stories of four women – Artemisia, Tereza, Éva, and Lina – living in different times and places, as well as the Renaissance painter Caravaggio. The central figures in these plays recount the borderline situations in their lives in a dimension where religious and secular categories do not exclude one another. The characters, through the brutality they experience, approach the realm of holiness while seeking the light of the soul, offering themselves to one another or to God.
At the book launch, we will talk with the Kossuth Prize-winning author about how the presence of the sacred can be captured and expressed, particularly in relation to the traumatized human body, and how this experience can be portrayed through drama and on stage. Theatre director Natália Gleason-Nagy and dramaturg Dénes Iván Szőke will discuss the compositional principles of staging the dramatic texts and the representation of bodily traumas in a laboratory-like setting.
The discussion will be moderated by Vera Prontvai, Assistant Professor at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary.