AKCENT 2012 / PanoDrama: Word for Word

Concept and creative producer: LENGYEL Anna

Performers: BÁNKI Gergely, FEUER Yvette, HÁRS Anna, ORSÓS Róbert, ÖRDÖG Tamás, SCHERMANN Márta, SZAMOSI Zsófia, URBANOVITS Krisztina

Dramaturgy: BÍRÓ Dénes, GARAI Judit, HÁRS Anna, MERÉNYI Anna

Video: BÍRÓ Dénes, KORÁN Gabriella

Sound: REMBECZKI János

Lighting designer: VIDA Zoltán
 

About PanoDrama

“Outstanding names in the (independent) theatre are Schilling and Krétakör, Mundruczó, Béla Pintér, Viktor Bodó (Sputnik) and among the up and coming HOPPart, Péter Kárpáti and the Secret Company, some works of Maladype and PanoDrama is becoming a new member of the club.”
György Szabó, former managing director of Trafó, House of Contemporary Arts in his farewell interview
 
PanoDrama is an organisation founded by the dramaturg and producer Anna Lengyel, originally devoted to the better trafficking of new drama and emerging theatre artists between countries on the one hand and developing new plays and documentary pieces on the other.
    In order to find great new plays and make them avalaible for future productions PanoDrama conducts extensive research in many European countries, as well as from New York through Tel Aviv to Sydney, commissions translations, produces staged readings and productions of exclusively new drama and publishes them in an informative booklet on the given theatre culture and contemporary drama Playtexts in Context. PanoDrama also promotes Hungarian theatre abroad and conceives and produces international collaborations with free groups and artists.
    In 2009 PanoDrama conceived and produced a three-month playwrighting workshop for beginners and launched its first documentary theatre project - also the first in Hungary - to be followed by others, always based on verbatim interviews and research, always related to acute social issues and always involving a theatre-in-education programme with those concerned.

Social-political theatre
    In an effort to fulfill theatre’s primary role of “holding a mirror to nature”, promoting discussion and furthering social change, PanoDrama launched an ambitious project whose first year focuses on prejudices and racism against Roma in 2010.
     The first project was a three-day public event (March 8-10) bearing the title “Fighting racism with Elfriede Jelinek” and included related rehearsed readings, workshops, lectures, discussions and a theater-in-education workshop and presentation about racism against Roma with Romany and white youths.
    A full production of Elfriede Jelinek’s award-winning Rod, Crook and Staff discussing the racist murders of Roma in Burgenland followed in April directed by the renowned filmmaker Robert Pejo, whose award-winning Dallas Pashamende presented another face of Roma misery. A parallel TIE programme includes school visits and workshops with young Roma and non-Roma.
    The concluding production Word for Word is a documentary theatre about the racist Roma murders in Hungary in 2008-2009. Combining verbatim methods of the Royal Court with documentary research strategies of the Rimini Protokoll, this has been the first verbatim theatre in Hungary based upon over sixty hours in-depth interviews with victims, families, neighbours, as well as police and court protocols and 21 questions asked of the man on the street – all of which create the backbone of the play, to which some blog texts are added.