Theater

The support system for culture is quite special in Hungary. There are few private investors in this field, so most cultural institutions and theater companies do not operate on a commercial basis but are significantly dependent on public apanase. Those who are closer to the resource allocation office(r)s do not have financial problems, but those whose network of contacts is not “good” enough (or the subject of their productions may have some form of criticism about the current government) do not acquire sufficient resources. This kind of underfunding often requires very special solutions -from institutions and companies that do not have friends in high places- even for the sake of their mere survival.

In the theatrical world, of course, the company saves money where it can, so only the minimum amount of money is available for the set as well. In order to be able to create a set of acceptable quality from this minimum amount of funding, extremely cost-effective solutions are needed.

Hungarian people can be driven by this necessity to incredible creative achievements. Because of this scarcity, the idea was born of what it would be like if we tried to recycle the materials of the unused scenery that was gathering dust in the warehouse of the given theater. Thus, in the case of several assignments, we disassembled the older sets into their smallest possible building elements, then “tailored  them” to the desired size and repainted them as needed.
This is how I “forge” need into virtue!

With this method, completely new elements and sets can be “conjured” from the old, used materials. And besides all this, it can save a significant portion of the construction material price of the set, it can even reduce the storage costs for that company (because they don’t have to pay for extra space to store the new set, as it usually fits in the place of the old set); and last but not least, this type of recycling is also a significant “innovation” from an environmental point of view when creating a set, because less new materials are needed, there is less trash, less storage costs, and so on.
This solution is therefore very effective, but at the same time -in addition to the usual set design and execution qualities- it also requires a very high degree of creativity (“imaginative faculty”) from the designer and executor!