Fuchs Lívia: A tánc forradalmárai. Vendégszereplők 1898 és 1948 között. Bajor Gizi Színészmúzeum, Budapest 2004. március 19 - május 2. (Budapest, 2004)

Kísérlet a szintézisre

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Seeing the two performances of the company, the press opined that this modern dance group set and achieved similar artistic aims to those formerly adapted by the Ballets Russes. “Their ballets have coherent plots, which are sometimes poetic, sometimes excitingly captivating, sometimes extremely amusing.” The dancers in Jooss’ one-acts enacted stories of real people - who were also presented as contemporaries of the audience - in dramatic or satirical forms, with a poetical or humorous tone. In other words, they produced dance theatre, thus Jooss was praised by the press as a director, as well. “Jooss is a poet and a choreographer... He is an artist. He is a director-artist in the Reinhardtian sense.” The audience associated the theatricality of the one-acts mainly with the literary qualities of the choreographies, since on the stage they saw stories come to life. “Their performance was more like pantomime than ballet,” was their reaction. The company’s success in 1937 perhaps surpassed that of 1934. It can probably be ascribed not to the

extended repertoire but to some kind of national pride, as at the time three Hungarians - Lilia Bauer, Lola Botka, and Gábor Kossá - were among the members of the company.

Modern dance was now as much a contemporary and theatrical form as reformed ballet, even though the two dance vocabularies and compositional methods only started to merge in the 1960’s. However, audiences in Budapest could not experience this integration, as the political changes that took place after 1948 isolated Hungarians from innovative developments in dance with merciless force. All this is an irrecoverable loss, since it meant the breaking of the organic connection that joined Hungarian audiences and artists to Europe and the various forms of modern dance and modern ballet for five decades.