Entral-Astern-Urope's Birds of Paradise
Thealter- Szeged Review of Alternative Theaters

'... It was perhaps Krisztián Gergye's production with Ágens, the Tenebrae, that went the furthest in exploring the limits of the body. While Ágens, crawling in her pitch-black queen-of-the-night gown, airs her arias through the space-microport fixed on her head, pours her dissonant screams into the space, behind her, in the half-light, three figures, seeming stark naked, take forms recalling Bosch, Mapplethorp, Max Ernst figures. Sometimes the eye cannot follow, loses the beginning and the end, as if we were viewing a Rorschach-test made up of drawings of human bodies. The background to all this is the softly winding sacral decoration of the Szeged Old Synagogue.

The tumbling, snaky flood of silk enumerates the sins in Latin, moaning. All of a sudden, the naked beings grasp it, try to tear it to pieces, as when vultures pinch and tear an animal's flesh. The black demon gasps for breath, it is impossible to decide whether she enjoys it, or suffers from it, or both. The mirror motive known from horror stories also appears. Not as the poor object of vanity, but as the maddening motive of the creepy double-ganger phenomenon. One of the naked girl figures is strolling along one of the bordering lines of the quadrangular space, like on a tightrope. Her posture forms a perfect symmetry. In front of her, at her feet, by the two sides of the line, facing each other, twining, flirting with each other, are the long thin boy and the smaller body of the girl. It is the small differences, which are frightening, the mirror image and the person mirrored are not the same.

It is an unworldly vision that we see. The sorceress whispering in Latin is floating in some kind of intermediate space, as she speaks to us, addresses us, sends a message. She is the medium of a one-time or future world, beneath or above us. Tenebrae, darkness. The nightmares of our collective unconscious, the descent to hell of our lost consciousness, memory traces, which we forget immediately after waking.'