Eltaj Murad

Yesterday, all of a sudden, I remembered that I promised my daughter that I will take her to the dance show called “Sárkánymese” (Hungarian: Dragon’s Tale). I quickly checked the theater’s website to buy the tickets. To my surprise it was going on exactly that afternoon. I called the ticket office and reserved the tickets. Finalized my works at home. Went to the kindergarten to fetch the kid who has just got up from a good sleep. I told her we are going to see that fairy tale. She was really happy and I felt a big urge to tell the nurses where she is heading to. She dressed up and we went directly to the theater. After some waiting we finally sat down for the show. I didn’t know what to expect. Smoke! Dragon heads! Explosive grandeur of music and sound effects! I was excited. The kids in the show were all excited! However, it was a trick, just an episode from the full show to grab children’s interest of what is going to happen much later on. The show restarted with a calmer beginning and Hungarian folk dances. I felt as ecstatic as all the kids in the show. It had a big humour, joy, playfulness in it that I wonder if other parents didn’t feel as happy as I did. I had tears of joy. I became one of the children. I forgot all the labels of adulthood gravitas, or what I am out of this theater.  It was exactly what theater should be and had been in ancient Greece: a place where you can reach catharsis, an emotional release and cleansing.

Adult theater pieces unfortunately are rarely that playful, interactive, exciting or moving. Modern theater is definitely part of the culture that we created with the hands of capitalism. That dull culture that is all about: “I earned some money, so I will pay for some pleasure called theater to be cultured or kill my time.” Most of us doubt that we can create the culture ourselves. We doubt that we are artists. We think that “genius” is a label given to only certain people, where the opposite is true: genius used to mean a guardian spirit that watches over you, existing together with you. Ancient greeks didn’t have “culture”. They were the culture. They didn’t have arts. They were the arts. The life itself was the creation of arts, every second of it. It seems to me, there is a long way for us to reach the stage where we can call ourselves a civilization. Because at such stage of the so-called “progress” that all talk about, if we are stuck with our routines, hardly having time to observe and examine life and having to stress with all that inflation and political idolatry, I doubt that Socrates could survive even for a year in this madness. He would be jailed or taken to psychiatric hospital.

This year marks the 7th year since I started my journey learning singing. Or rather re-learning. Singing is innate, so however we sing later on, good or bad will be a mirror of all the conditioning we went through all our lives. Like a chocolate with a centre, that is going through different stages until it’s not exactly how it looked earlier, we gather and cover the core with all kinds of beautiful, nasty, horrid or strange habits that manifest through our voice. Our face, our bodies are easy to judge quickly. We might show impression in the first three seconds and later fade out in front of others. And here comes the voice. It will impress and keep impressing with tones, velocity, melodic or parodical patterns and all exquisite qualities during a conversation or seminar. It’s easy to make a mask, put a makeup and be beautiful. What about voice? It is unmaskable. It is a quality of you that you think is yours and the way your hear it, until you record yourself and hear a different thing. Until someone comments how beautiful or ugly it sounds. In a way, our voice is already a mask. The word “persona” means “to sound through” (per sonare). That goes back to actors in Roman theater who would wear masks and pronounce terrifying sounds throughout the music, often bringing the audience into a catharsis. That was the role of the Roman theater. The theater and music was not intended to be entertaining as it is today. It meant to release the accumulated energy, and bring us into tears. Joyful or sad, in the end when we cry and we clean our souls. And this is the moment of beautiful void, when we are empty, to receive again and to give something out of this nothing.

“We come into the world crying. And when we die, others cry for us. In between the two we must cry and cry, to wash ourselves in tears, to purify ourselves.” says Makhmalbaf in his film “Salaam Cinema”. I want to be pure. And to reach that purity, my intuition says, I have to first clean my voice, so I see its raw beauty.