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Nadj's Dance of the Absurd
| Article
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19664 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,372 Words |
| Author
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Maya Wallach
Maya Wallach is a dance writer, critic, and photographer
currently based in Los Angeles |
Imagine Our Town set in turn-of-the-century Hungary instead of America. Josef Nadj's latest creation, Comedia Tempio reflects the same preoccupation with the unremitting pressure of everyday life as Thornton Wilder's play. But where Wilder exhorts Americans to learn to appreciate the beauty around them, Nadj considers life as a condition better treated with humor and a healthy sense of the absurd.
It is easy to see how he learned the need for laughter. Nadj was born in 1958 in a Hungarian village situated--thanks to the vagaries of political borders--in Yugoslavia. Instead of his family name, Jozsef Nagy, his passport and official papers bear the Serbian translation: Josef Nadj.
"Moving" to his "native country"--already the ironic quotation marks are impossible to avoid--to study in Budapest, Nadj still felt constrained. In 1980 Nadj settled in Paris where, he asserts, "An artist has the freedom to express himself, to choose his subject, his voice, his words without anxiety. And that is exceptional enough."
Although he had training in theater, mime, and the martial arts, in France Nadj found himself drawn to contemporary dance. His ungainly, original movements and absurdist humor won him success in his first work, Canard Pekinois, in 1987. His company, the Theatre Jel, was soon installed in the Choreography Center of Orleans in the Loire Valley, seventy miles south of Paris. Constant touring in both France and central Europe was augmented this year by a North American trip. The Theatre Jel appeared this past May in San Francisco and Seattle before moving on to Minneapolis, Jacob's Pillow, and New York City in June.
Uprooted before he ever left his home, Nadj has not only created a home for himself onstage, he has put his hometown to the stage. Comedia Tempio is a vision of his native village exposing all its painful peculiarities and--amazingly--made delightful. Peopled by townsfolk who are instantly familiar, the piece also becomes an image of our own hometown, reflecting the humor we too may have learned in order to survive.
Nadj finds universal truth--which is to say universal humor--by working with those he knows best: Hungarians. Although his two women dancers are French, the men in his company are all Hungarian. "I find actors who are able to move really well most easily in Hungary," Nadj says simply. His performers are indeed extraordinary. His musicians, who perform live, are also Hungarian, although, like Nadj, composer
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