The teacher’s desk is a symbol of autocracy. Its mere presence implies that someone is a more important member of the community, someone requires more space in the room. The desk is necessary so the teacher can lay his significant books out before us, his bag, his things. The desk makes it possible for a teacher to rest her elbows on it, to repose on it a head heavy with worry. The desk is where the teacher works, while at the other, smaller desks students work. Everyone works. It is okay amidst all this to jump on the teacher’s desk?

When the teacher stands and speaks and students sit and listens, we have an undemocratic situation. It can be fruitful all the same since, if the presenter is sufficiently interesting, prepared, and has relevant things to say, the listener can learn a lot, insofar as he’s ready to take it in. But what if he isn’t ready yet? He isn’t ready – because he’s incapable of concentration, because he doesn’t understand the connections, because the whole thing bores him, and so on.

There are however also cases when the recipient is not ready because she did not give the speaker permission, and the speaker did not ask for permission to speechify.

I have a daughter who turns six this year, so she has to go to school. I visit state schools and find to my astonishment that the basis of teaching today is the same as 35 years ago, when I went to school. We wrote 1980 then, and state socialism was in its prime. At the time my parents had a stable workplace, and they assumed that they would retire from there, that they would have pensions at all, and that they would die in the house in which I was born. Today I know for sure that neither I nor my daughter will have a pension, that neither I nor she will work at any workplace for 40 years, and that I won’t die in the place she was born.

Everything has changed except school, whose foundation is still that subjects are at the heart of teaching; that these subjects can be taught and learned independently of each other, as the students too work independently of each other; that there is no link between them in the teaching-upbringing framework; the teacher’s knowledge cannot be questioned; the student’s task is to repeat the teacher’s pronouncements word for word; knowledge is based on facts; students are at the bottom of the school hierarchy, wedged in just below their parents, tied up by grades, in constant competition and stress, mute and silent as the grave. Down but not out, we might say. He who survives this will become someone. Or not. There are lucky kids whose parents are rich and can avoid state schools. There are also some who nab a good teacher. Perhaps the parents or a good group of friends can make up for what the school missed out. Perhaps too the student we’re talking about is a genius, and what the school does is entirely irrelevant, he’s talented enough to blast through concrete. A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor, as they say. The only problem is that the majority of students will arrive into a world in which everything is changing, and it’s impossible to prevail with the knowledge acquired in school. Because what’s the most important expectation of an 18 year-old? That she be an adult, and make decisions like for instance what she wants to do with her life, where she wants to study, work, where she’d like to live, with whom and from what, that she be capable of cooperation, understand when spoken to, that she be open, ready to learn, and not collapse after the first failure, which in all likelihood is inescapable for her.

What’s this again? That she be cooperative? Yet no-one ever asked that of her. She sat on a bench and crammed, then later either could regurgitate the fact-heap or couldn’t. She was always alone, except for recess. That she be adaptable? Opportunism and cowering have been beaten into her, but what about adaptation? To understand a situation, weigh up its advantages and drawbacks, find the benefit in it and the task; to build up a suitable role and step into it. How could the unfortunate know all this, if she could never practice internal reflection and advocacy in an institutional setting? We tell children to play until the age of six, then forget it and start marching to adulthood. By the time she turns 18 we have successfully extinguished a student’s playfulness, her natural need for collaboration. We extinguish the skills, and instead fill her head with a heap of uselessness, then expect her to stand her place. How? The democratic school’s first and most important assertion is that the child is the focus in school. Not that she is for the school but that the school is for her. Every pupil is different, which is precisely why it’s a question: how can we keep this multifarious group of people together? The first of the teacher’s competences is community development. Personalities should not be disconnected but fitted together. And not by compelling discipline with rigid rules and punishments. Discipline can be useful in war, but it’s worthless in the learning process. The student learns even if she happens to be howling like a banshee because she is experiencing something. For instance: are they paying attention to her or not? Will she get what she wants, and if so, at what price; if not, why not? If a teacher wants his students to actually learn something, he attends in the first instance to community.

Community is not only the totality of the people in it but a higher-quality form of life. When a teacher complains of spending a lot of time on children, individually too, and still not feeling they’ve made progress, he forgets that not only teachers but students too teach, or more precisely can teach, each other. The interaction between students is just as important as the relationship with the teacher. The students see, feel, and understand each other. With the right kind of help they can shape their own world, in which they place themselves and each other. It’s frequently said that students by themselves can create their own communities. Cliques yes – but they can only create their community with appropriate external help. Because creating, sustaining, and operating a community requires expertise we must acquire. Insofar as a teacher understands this and is prepared for the task, she can become a partner to the students, and vice versa: a cooperative community comes into existence which by itself generates as much experiences as equals any subject. Only an infinitesimal proportion of current schooling institutions can be called communities, because in order to be able to speak about communities at all the actors would have to become active participants, legislators, and exercisers of their rights. The Hungarian public education system does not know students’ rights, indeed is built specifically on disenfranchisement, since a priori it expects accommodation from students, and never conducts needs assessments: it orders and revokes. School is a community when a student can have a say in the issues of the institution; if he cannot, there is no community. If however there is no community, that is the student is not a stakeholder in the school’s issues and through this the process of teaching, then it’s entirely immaterial what is taught, and teaching will not be systemically effective. In order for a school to be effective, it must operate in a communal way.

And community is sustainable when it is democratic because only its democratic – that is, inclusive and transparent – forms make participants invested in the long-term maintenance of the system. My assertion therefore is that if we do not make the student invested in learning, if we don’t make him a partner in the learning process, if we don’t let him become an active shaper of the school he spends a third of the day in, then he will never grow up, and it is totally insensible to expect anything of him, since he doesn’t even understand why he should learn at all.

One of the most effective tool for the development of the community is theatre. The dramatic situation is a condensed, stylised form of a life situation, which provides an opportunity for us to examine in a laboratorial, safe environment how we’d manage in various conflicts. So drama is good not only for getting to know important literary texts but also for recognising the utility of particular pieces of knowledge. Knowledge which is useless is valueless. Drama causes us to recognise the necessity of certain kinds of knowledge, and their mode of use. The democratic teaching mechanism also gives the student the right to decide, with due circumspection, reflection, and communal experience, what she does and does not need. Theatre is dangerous territory, because it questions not only the student’s role but the teacher’s too, and turns them inside out, makes them translucent. It takes a real teacher to stick it out in democratically-founded teaching. If he sticks it out, however, he can happily go be a politician; he won’t play dictatorship in a democratic mask.

In a democracy it is primarily social need that imbues the state with purpose. Insofar as the community feels the standard of service provided by the state is deteriorating, it impels the government through its representatives to change present practice. If people don’t feel what provisions they get from school are useless, either everything is all right or nothing is all right.

Formation of Krétakör

In 1995 I founded one of Hungary’s most successful independent theatres, the Krétakör (‘Chalk Circle’) Theatre. It was in that year that the show titled The Big Game (A nagy játék) was first performed, and the theatrical company’s appellation was born too. The name alludes to Bertol Brecht’s play, Caucasian Chalk Circle, and within it the biblical story of Solomon, in which the site of justice is a chalk circle drawn on the ground. Chalk is the symbol of transience and of renascence: if we draw the circle, we start something, and when we have finished, we wipe away the chalk dust behind us. But the circle is also the forum in which artist and audience meet. The most important question for the Krétakör Theatre was what theatre is good for. What is the effect of theatre, as a branch of art, on the community which it looks to as its audience? This is why it matters to whom, what, and why we perform. Theatre is immediate encounter, the art of interaction. One unrepeatable moment before an audience of unrepeatable make-up. We must not flee from the responsibility in this; our task is to understand its principles and to further develop creative methods. It’s no coincidence that Krétakör’s motto too is from Brecht’s play: ‘What there is should belong to those who are good for it.’

Krétakör’s periods

Since Krétakör’s 1995 formation several people have written of its operation; they have segmented its work and activities into periods in recording and analysing them (Schilling 2002; Vágó 2005; Jászay 2013).

Tamás Jászay for instance presents the theatre’s operation in his PhD thesis according to a seven-year periodisation. The first chapter can be placed between 1995–2001, the second 2002–2008. While in the first chapter it was always separately contracted artists who performed in the shows, the second seven years were characterised by a permanent company which never had a permanent place.

On Krétakör’s ten-year anniversary Róbert Vágo summarised the work of the theatre company thus: “Árpád Schilling’s experiment – an independent vigilante group; an open, self-sufficient, ambitious artistic community; an intellectual workshop – has reached its 10th anniversary. Almost 20 distinct theatrical productions; more than 100 domestic and international laurels and certificates recognising their labours; dozens of international festival-attendances; their success in these furthering Hungarian culture; a pioneering role in a new direction; pre-eminent results in the revitalisation of contemporary art… Only a few of the decisive outlines of Krétakör’s ten-year history. Of this unprecedented success story in Hungarian theatre culture. Of the success story of a THEATRE without its own theatre.” (Vágó 2005: 32).

By the summer of 2008 the Krékatör Theatre, under the direction of manager Máté Gáspár, had become the foremost independent company, and its international renown vied with the Katona József Theatre’s. Every season we held three premieres; Kornél Mondruczó and Sándor Zsótér directed with us too. We held 200-300 performances a season, a significant part of which were composed by foreign guest appearances. In this period Krétakör was the Hungarian theatre which most toured abroad.

From 2008 the artistic operation took an entirely new direction: the Krétakör Theatre lost the theatre from its name, and as Krétakör continued its work as a production office. This is when Márton Gulyás became project and later theatre manager. From 2008 the team was occupied not with working out a theatrical repertoire but creating projects. At the centre of the artistic work stood the raising of topical political and social questions with new, valid theatrical (and media art) form. After the change in 2008 we laid down clear principles in our mission statement, which could be understood as the organisation’s cultural conception: Krétakör is a contemporary artistic centre and production office, which deploys lessons from the social sciences in order to produce community events involving creative play.

• Creative – relates to social issues, problems in a novel, creative way; relays learning to participants, awakens their activity and impels them to decision-making.
• Communal – sees partners, participants as collaborators; considers strengthening civil self-determination and supporting grassroots initiatives its role.
• Play – describes the event to be created as a kind of play; that is considers practical experience-based learning the only constructive education and socialisation method.
   

Social engagement, theatrical education

The theatrical education of young generations is a critical part of Krétakör’s mission and has been of primary importance for years. Joint projects with the Káva Cultural Workshop (Káva Kulturális Műhely) have helped us get closer to the Theatre in Education (TIE) method. Theatrical education is an inexhaustible pantry, since every youth who takes part in a performance/activity approaches the problems raised by the creators from newer and newer perspectives. “These path-findings are closely related to Schilling’s old conception of useful theatre, which raises socially relevant questions, and demands not merely nods or rejection but genuine participation and mature commentary from viewers. The superficial observer might assume that Schilling or Krétakör have staged a kind of coup in the groves of theatrical education, but something else is the case. On the one hand Krétakör noticed and lifted into the spotlight the insufficiently-appreciated art form and its by now long internationally-recognised domestic practitioners, consciously using its own brand name to familiarise with the field of theatrical education those too who have hitherto for one reason or another been left out of it; and on the other hand has not been shy of learning as much as possible from the art form’s best, all the while accepting the possibility of dead ends and failures. And finally: according to Schilling this, the union of theatre and education, the harmonisation of what remain in many minds two mutually exclusive directions, can or will be the coming years’ most exciting theatrical offering.” (Jászay 2015)

hamlet.ws

In 2007 we premiered an adaptation of Hamlet with three actors destined for school environments. The performance took further the concept of Hamlet³, a play likewise performed with three actors in the Viennese Burgtheater two years previously. Productions staged in the classroom for the benefit of a secondary school cohort are always followed by discussion. The performance represented a breakthrough in the educational efforts of domestic performance artists; many shows were staged in schools subsequently, a festival inspired by the Krétakör production was created; and the Classroom Theatre Review (Tantermi Szinházi Szemle) supporting productions of this kind was launched with the support of András Polgár. At first we we performed our shows with scenery. Later we looked for settings whose atmosphere suited the play. By 2007 neither scenery nor special setting played a role in the creative process. The theatre which expresses itself clearly is capable of transforming any space into its own image. And in this too it treats as partners its spectators, whom it regards playmates. We keep the production, with nearly 200 performances to date, in the repertoire to this day, and play it in schools for students.

Judit Csáki wrote the following assessment of the piece: “Namely, many of the elements traditionally taken for necessities in theatre are missing – no set, costume, stage, curtain, props and much more – but what there is deviates too from the usual form. Before the performance for instance actors in ‘plainclothes’ (this of course now deserves at least one question mark, here you go: ?) guide the audience around the particularities of the high school hall, warn of the heat, the length of the play, answer questions, say hi to acquaintances – in other words step down from the pedestal, that is the stage. And then they speak the text. They play it – bring it to life. They create characters, and relationships between them. They sit among us and maintain a relationship with us throughout; not only the – habitual or possible, let’s say, in a studio space – eye contact, but something else, and more even than that. They exchange roles – everyone plays everyone – and although the casting pattern is apparently random or arbitrary, it isn’t, since every spontaneity, every piece of pub chatter, every intimation of ease has been staged here; even preparation for unexpected and unforeseeable situations (this for instance built on the fitness and talent of the actors). Árpád Schilling and the actors – József Gyabronka, Zsolt Nagy, and Roland Raba – place before us a close and palpable reading of Hamlet: as if they had cut the story from today/the present-day; at most mutasis mutandis prince, sword, king, Denmark. Ádám Nádasdy’s inquisitive, burrowing-behind-the-classical-obscurity, interpretative, intelligent, and illuminating translation is an equal creative partner in the production: it transmits the drama (I’m thinking not of the work but the drama which is its subject) in a language similar to how adolescents might speak in Pótkulcs, if they had never shaken off the nursery. This performance was made for adolescents; the actors perform it in secondary schools, and an unrestricted, though very attentive and laborious discussion follows the events witnessed. This is not primarily a people’s education gesture reminiscent of the Communist era but a selfish, that is theatrical interest-led purposeful activity. He who is educated in theatre with this Hamlet will not have trouble with Peer Gynt’s three and a half hours, on the contrary. He who learns to love theatre with this Hamlet knows what is most important in it: authenticity. And he knows that what that necessitates is not a mask, set decoration, or distance from the spectator but good actors and clear goals. Krétakör has wandered back to the beginnings of doing theatre – to before Shakespeare. When nothing else was needed for theatre except people to act and the audience. Plays came into the picture later. And the audience stays with them on this path; I remember well the students’ guffaw and chortle-relieved nervousness in the first minutes (when months ago I saw the piece with the real target audience); then attention heightened by recognition, then relief, liberation. This last creates an active audience which works just as hard as the actors for the performance’s success, only with different instruments.” (Csáki 2007)

Accessible video recordings:
On the anniversary hamlet.ws performance
Hamlet.ws trailer

Obstacle Race (Akadályverseny)

Obstacle Race was a theatrical education programme born from a collaboration between the Káva Cultural Workshop and Krétakör. Back in 2008 we decided that the two organisations would realise innovative experiments in which we’d try to combine the tools of constructive pedagogy and contemporary theatre. The Káva Cultural Workshop creates and runs primarily TIE (Theatre In Education) and DIE (Drama In Education) activities for various age groups. At the centre of the activities stands raising problems relevant to a given group, whose exploration and processing forms the common task of actors-drama teachers and participants. (Role)play, written and improvised scenes, and a series of conversations lead to the activity’s end, when participants can “take home” not a ready answer but innumerable questions and others’ opinions, so later they engage, perhaps even outside the activity structure, with the problem raised. That the activity be sufficiently inspirational and useful – that’s the shared responsibility of participants.

We developed in this project an education programme which places students before model conflict situations, offering them the opportunity for engaged participation.

We asserted in the course of the activity that human pitfalls carry within them the possibility of liberation. In 2009 we posed the question of how school today can become a shared issue, how its operation can become important for the students too. In many regards the activity diverged from a traditional theatrical education activity. The theatrical and dramatic-pedagological parts, proceeding by way of a shared dramaturgy, were realised in the students’ own environment, the school’s spaces. The almost two hour-long fictional story’s setting was the school itself, whose classrooms, hallways, even director’s office all hosted scenes. The students had mostly to represent themselves, but at particular dramaturgical points could step into the role of teachers or parents, thus experiencing the validity of distinct viewpoints. We treated the adolescents (target audience is 16–18 year-olds) as autonomous personalities possessed of distinct experiences, for whom we need to create opportunities to put their values to the test in a safe environment and to shape them, to become healthy, socially-thoughtful people. Freedom was at the heart of the programme, as was the complex system of negotiations and compromises. As in theatre educational programmes in general, ours too articulated no final statement, since the methodology is built on continuously sustaining uncertainty, on constant questioning and collaboration.

The course of the activity was as follows: “In the preparation phase the drama teachers-actors get to the know the class, and the first-hand experience gets built into the activity, which as a result is always different, specific to place. The game uses and repurposes the school’s spaces; the teenagers, by being brought into the situation throughout, are active shapers of the story; and the school’s actual teachers too get the opportunity to step into a role. The process closes with a spell of shared reflection, and since its results are recorded by academic research and documentary film, the follow-ups and impact assessments are guaranteed too.”

With this project Krétakör took forward the artistic programme publicised in The Escape Artist’s Apology (A szabadulóművész apológiája), whose central premise is to produce works of art that could promote the formation of a reflective, democratic society in Hungary.

Link: Obstacle Race recording

New Spectator (Új Néző)

The aim of the community development programme – born in 2010 of a collaboration between the Káva Cultural Workshop and the anBlokk Association – was that theatrical education, with the help of tools from forum theatre and contemporary art, serve as a forum to enable dialogue between the Roma and non-Roma, that is minority and majority, inhabitants of two North-Eastern Hungarian settlements (Ároktő and Szomolya). We sought to evolve dramatic situations which members of the community could comment on freely, indeed shape, and through which they could disclose their everyday experiences. According to our observations in these villages, despite the latent or be it overt tensions, a serious need for consultation presents itself, for which a contemporary artistic project can afford a more appropriate structure than a political event. The project made it possible for all participants to personally experience the strength of shared cultural experience and constructive cooperation in maintaining and developing a community. In the story staged in the first village a young couple who moved to Ároktő found themselves faced with the village’s typical, lifelike problems. Every night the actors stepped in front of the spectators as actors and moderators. Through the subjects thrown up on given nights (e.g. Is it better to buy a house or a car? What should we do with our spiralling debts?) the viewers themselves could give advice to the young couple, and the actors built their reasoning into theatrical scenes. Adolescents in the village worked out through a separate project how they imagine Ároktő’s future. The youths summarised in 12 points what Ároktő’s youth would like.

What would Ároktő’s youths like?

1. That there be solidarity, helping hands that care for our spirit, and trust!
2. Discussion of our opinions! Better appreciation of ourselves!
3. More active youth participation in the village’s life!
4. Acceptance of each other regardless of nationality and providence, for the sake of peaceful coexistence!
5. More understanding for individual perspectives!
6. Common commitment in direction of more active communal-cultural life!
7. More trust in our dreams!
8. Initiatives to preserve traditions!
9. Greater openness towards the wider world, more mobility!
10. Further augmenting the successes of our sport life!
11. Varied and unique recreational opportunities!
12. Let’s move not just our minds, but our hands too in the interest of achieving the goals above!

In Szomolya we shot a short fiction film with four local youths, whose story they wrote themselves, whose characters they played. Viewers of the film could get to know the calvary of a non-Roma young man from Szomolya who, at the cost of great grief, finally acknowledges his Roma love. In the programme intended for adults in Szomolya we built more boldly on forum theatre technique. We staged simpler situations which the ‘amateur actor’, that is spectator, could enter into more easily. The zenith of the event series was when a street encounter situation (the white resident doesn’t greet the dark-skinned one) turned into a two hour-long quarrel. Several spectators entered the scene to substantiate their arguments through the concrete situation. In winding up our work in Szomolya, as in Ároktő, we screened a piece cut from reactions on the theatre nights.

“The programme of Krétakör and Káva – while (quite logically) amalgamating some directions in theatre aesthetics, theatre education, DIE, TIE, sociology and community development – like the experiments of the 20th century theatre innovators, for instance Grotowski, does away with numerous conventions, and proves the unworkability of numerous, in today’s Hungarian theatrical structure unquestionable, all but axiomatic rules. By now the project surpasses the theatre medium – essentially unaltered since the fall of Communism – in all regards, completely breaking free of any restrictions but adhering strictly to the initial principles.

What does the New Spectator Theatre prove, or the path the company has travelled? Broadly, from the perspective of society: that theatre can be used to address a community; it is capable of speech which attends to emerges from it. That it’s capable of introducing and exhibiting a group’s problems, of evoking communication in relation to a performance – with the desire to process it, to find a solution – about everything that people wouldn’t do alone or in a narrow environment, wouldn’t say, although it’s needed, indeed indispensable, for coexistence, for development, and for human relationships. That it’s capable of withholding judgment while speaking even of such sensitive topics as the Hungarian-Roma conflict, spurring participants not to engage with it merely at the level of a cover-up.

It’s worth examining item by item in what regard the initiate represents innovation from the theatre’s side. Firstly: it isn’t people who make the pilgrimage to the theatre, but the theatre which goes to the people; moreover not from the indeed rather widely pursued commercial motivation of trial and regular gigs, but rather the principled position that the first step is taken by the artist and not the spectators, since they aren’t for the theatre but vice versa. Importantly, this is not disparagement of the bricks-and-mortar theatre, but an articulation of the desire that the theatre(-building) belong principally to its audiences; everything within should be about them, and not the people working there. The foundation of all this – of the arrival, the event, the spectator-theatre relationship – is not the artist and the fulfilment of art (cf. worshipping at the temple of Thalia) but curiosity about the other. The artist opens a round table, suggests a subject, and manages-coordinates the work, all the while without wishing to seem more intelligent nor greater than the spectator. There is no purple-misted pretentiousness, and certainly no message (cf. the theatre must show an example), only an induced conversation in the language of theatre, which the coordinator helps interpret (but whose interpreter he is not!), so that the dialogue rolls on in everyday language, which the theatre then translates back into theatrical language, and so on. That is a system of communication requiring continuous feedback coming into existence, in which the sender and receiver roles are constantly exchanged.” (THEATRE FOR USE . Nyulassy, Ugrai, Zsedényi)

Link: New Spectator project page

MOBILE (MOBIL)

The next theatre education game performed in a school context, after Obstacle Race, was the MOBILE theatrical education programme, this time devised solely by Krétakör. This too was a kind of reality game, which offered the opportunity for participating secondary school students to create a reflective relationship with their own reality. The game took place in in imaginary school: a student makes a secret video recording of her teacher with her phone, and uploads it to a video sharing site without her consent. The game examined the act’s consequences: what does all this mean for the culprit, the victim, the classmates, the teachers, and the school. Since MOBILE was an interactive theatrical game, during the programme actors and participants together performed the story, which consisted of previously prepared, precisely circumscribed situations, which the actors triggered: they got into character, and spoke and behaved according to the given character or situation. Students had to figure out from the acting what opportunity the given situation offered them for joining in. In the case of MOBILE we found that the initial uncertainty and shrinking back melts away in the course of practically every game, and in almost all groups, since the activity allows every community to join the action at its own pace and rhythm.

The imaginary world offers protection to both students and teachers, so under the auspices of fiction MOBILE's participants dared to think much more freely, and articulate far more openly, about everyday dilemmas. MOBILE opened space, and created a little time, for there to be talk even about problems that are hard to articulate out loud, or are stifled for lack of time for discussion: where are the limits to the teacher-student relationship, should smartphones be used in school, how can students express their aversion to teachers? In the game a wafter-thin veil separates reality from fiction (we are in a school, we are sitting at benches, before us is the blackboard, the bell rings). Nevertheless it’s precisely the transparent layer that helps us shed light on how the school works today, and within it the people.

“The path Krétakör has started on – the socially goal-oriented mapping of theatre’s societal possibilities. That is: to showcase how theatrical tools can help us nurture mindful, conscious citizens capable of forming and expressing opinions and making decisions. In this newest golden age of the apolitical, that is of servile obedience: to revive reflection, argument; to illuminate smaller and larger relationships; and to assess and shoulder the consequences of stance-taking. That is: theatre is a dangerous thing. (Judit Csáki 2012)

Link: Mobile - project page

The Priestess (A papnő)

Also founded in the practice of theatre education was the show titled The Priestess, which we first performed in the Trafó in 2011 as the last part of the Crisis Trilogy. Its participants were young Transylvanians living in the vicinity of Sepsiszentgyörgy, who we selected with the assistance of the local Osonó Theatre Workshop. We chose the kids from high schools in the city and neighbouring towns, from the Dévai Szent Ferenc Foundation’s house in Tusnád, and from those mentored by the Caritas programme working in the Roma slums at the borders of the settlement under the Örkő mountain. The camp was run by members of Osonó and Krétakör together, but also present were two official actors in the show, Lilla Sárosdi and Sándor Terhes, who performed alongside twenty kids selected in the course of the camp. The story of the trilogy’s third part: Lilla Gát, once a celebrated Budapest actress, currently works as a committed theatre teacher in a Hungarian village far from the capital. Those in her environment keep an anxious eye on her peculiar pedagogical methods. Her undertaking fails: first fellow teachers, later residents of the village, then her students, finally her own son turns on her; thus she is forced to leave the village and return to the capital.

“The Priestess involves a prolonged theatre pedagogical activity: we see situations of variable colour – talkative, betraying much of the environment also recorded in the projected photo-show – which participants occasionally pause to offer reflections on the stories. It becomes clear that the prepared text is merely a frame to be filled with real substance by the participants: the roles created by the Transylvanian kids who performed in the show stand very close to their real selves, but are obviously not perfectly identical to them. And at this point the creators offer spectators too opportunities for involvement: one boy in the cast stands up confidently, and looks out at us to ask the questions we too are concerned with – “What do these children represent? What are these children for?” (Jászay, 2011.)

Links: photos from the camp and The Priestess project page

TAG (educational programme)

Learn, Act, Think! (TAG – Tanulj Alkoss, Gondolkozz!) In the 2012/2013 school year, in collaboration with several high schools from Ferencváros (a district of Budapest), we created a shared teacher-student game under the direction of Bálint Juhász. The programme was simultaneously a communication development workshop aimed at students and linked to the school syllabus, and for the pedagogues involved a course in which they examined teaching problems that had occurred in their experience with the help of a theatre-pedagogical toolkit. As an outgrowth of the collective work we created a theatre educational game titled Autonomy, which participating teachers and students later led for the benefit of other teachers and students. The game called attention to the challenges accompanying a community’s desire for autonomy through the story of a school.

Link: TAG project page

Freeschool (Szabadiskola)

Freeschool is an artistic and public life programme developed by Krétakör for the secondary school (14 to 18 year-old) audience. Freeschool’s programme encourages participation in community life, social awareness, opinion-formation, and innovative forms of self-expression. In the course of the programme students also had to organise a political action raising public issues. The first freeschool group began in autumn 2013 with the coordination of Bálint Juhász. Across several months, through weekend activities outside of class hours, they could each reason about, debate, and ponder a concrete social problem (e.g. the Snowden case, prejudices, the place of national values), and could even meet and talk with experts in the subjects. The class also became part of Krétakör’s show The party (A párt).

The second freeschool cohort was launched owing to the support of the Goethe Institute. In this now international programme almost 50 students from Budapest, Miskolc, and Berlin took part.

The three groups focused on different subjects. In the Budapest group only students who had already had some experience of public issues, or in relation to advocacy, took part – for instance members of school committees or of activist groups. With the technical leadership of Máté Tóth Ridovics, the Budapest group tackled housing poverty, in the course of which they created a poster campaign in Budapest’s streets.

In Miskolc the members of the group led by György Mészáros were youths to whom it doesn’t even occur that it might be possible for them to influence questions concerning them. Here the aim was to instil in them the desire and awareness to do so. The questions examined with them: what exclusionary situations are there in society, or what practices are associated with the different power statuses, and how do they experience this on an everyday basis? The students suggested several subjects from the exclusions of everyday life to segregation within the school. But there was also discussion of Miskolc’s slum-clearing programme, in the course of which we spoke with families living there, and sociologists and activists specialising in the issue. In relation to the topic of the depopulation of villages we visited affected locations, and the students conducted interviews with residents and experts. The programme of the German group was led by two members from the Theater an der Parkaue youth theatre and the Interrobang company, selected in cooperation with the Goethe Foundation; it examined how German pupils opine about current German political parties. They created a public performance in which they showcased absurd parties, and tackled how a young person today finds their place in a democracy in which parties must be voted on.

As a conclusion to the three month-long project, an interactive conference titled Youths. Society. Participation (Fiatalok. Társadalom. Részvétel) was organised in December 2014. Alongside the students involved, teachers, theatre education specialists, representatives of civil organisations, and journalists also took part. Student groups presented their projects in assorted ways. The two-day event closed with an argument-theatre performance, which broached acute questions relating to the present Hungarian public educational system.

Link: Freeschool page

Bibloigraphy
Judit Csáki 2007."Mintha egy sör mellett" - Krétakör - hamlet.ws (theatre) Magyar Narancs 35.
Judit Csáki 2012. Az élet is derűs iskola lesz. Krétakör: Mobil. Magyar Narancs 32.
Tamás Jászay 2011. Családi (Kréta)kör. Revizor online.
Tamás Jászay 2013. Körülírások (Chapters from the history of Krétakör Theatre 1995–2011) PhD thesis (manuscript)
Tamás Jászay 2015. Egy másik Magyarország — About Krétakör, politics, Freeschool (March 2015) 
Árpád Schilling 2002. The history of Krétakör – notes.
Róbert Vágó: „Színházat!”  The history of Krétakör 1995–2005.

Internet material:
Krétakör
Krétakör Szabadiskola (facebook)
#budapesticsoport (facebook)