News: Professors to speak in Hungary and Romania

Professors Linda Welker and Michael Page present in Hungary and Romania

Michael and I will be giving a presentation about Divine Reverberations--the dramatic performance based on interviews and other historical materials of Hungarian Reformed Christians who were imprisoned or otherwise persecuted for their faith under the communist dictatorship.

We will shows slides of the production, as well as historical slides used within the production. Michael and I will both perform illustrative extracts from Divine Reverberations

The title of our presentation is "Enacting Resistance to Tyranny In and Through Divine Reverberations."

In this talk, we will share about

1. the process of putting together this kind of performance. How to use ethnography and performance techniques to evoke the lives of these real people.

2. the interpretive task of staging ethnography--the hermeneutic challenges and heuristic value of doing so.

3. the ethics of performing "lives" of others.

4. the vast field of socio-cultural and community-based stories that may be gleaned through this method and the value of the cultural understanding(s) that may be achieved by doing so.

5. how, in the actions and "performances" of their everyday lives, these Hungarian Reformed Christians resisted the tyranny that was thrust upon them.

6. how the performance of their stories is itself an act of resistance.

7. the reactions of audience members to the stories enacted in the performance.

I imagine that your university audience could be faculty and students interested in performance/theatre or drama as literary text. Historians, cultural scholars, and sociologists/anthropologists might also be invited. I see this as appealing to people interested in textual/cultural study and representation, as well as to people of faith who may be buoyed by the testimonies in Divine Reverberations.

A presentation sponsored by the Hermeneutics Department at Gaspar Karospoli University in Budapest
A presentation sponsored by the Theatre Department at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
A presentation in Târgu Mures, Romania organized by Philothea, a university student association. The proposed venue is an old church in the town that used to be the congregation of Fulop Denes( a person portrayed in DR).

A Meeting with Istvan Szabo, the current Reformed Bishop of Budapest

In addition we will be:

*meeting with the dean of the School of Theatre and Television (where András teaches) at the University of Babes-Bolyai in Cluj;

*attending a rehearsal of András' play Disciples at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj, a play which also deals with the communist years;

Michael will meet with Gábor Tompa, the director of the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj who was working in theatre during the communist years also;

Linda will meet with and interview a woman who lives in Cluj who married a prisoner who was in the same prison village where András was as a child, and so became a prisoner herself and gave birth to her first two children in the prison village.

We plan to leave some time for serendipity. We leave on May 23rd and will be back in GR on June 6th.

~Linda Welker