Bánk bán? Present! is a play that addresses high school students. This rather untraditional performance reshapes a compulsory reading of the high-school curriculum: Katona József’s Bánk Bán. Our school-room performance is not meant to invite the students to our own show rooms but to watch the play in their own learning environment, i.e. to be invited to their own classroom. While knocking on the doors of all the schools we are trying to spread the play in as many schools as possible. Our focus is expanding it to outside Kolozsvár as well paying special attention to the regions where the access to culture is rather limited. What are the aspects of texts, our national tragedy that could be transferred to a present day interpretation?
What do we still have in common with it other than the fact that it is a compulsory part of the Hungarian literature curriculum? How can we approach a text written in the 19th century that recounts a story from the 13th century? These were the issues we focused on when deciding to elaborate and reshape this tragedy.
In 2011 Andrej graduated with a master degree in acting from the University of Babeș-Bolyai in Cluj-Napoca. In the following year he successfully applied to the directing program at the Yale School of Drama, where in 2015, after directing his thesis show titled Don Juan (Moliére), he received his Master of Fine Arts Degree.
After his studies abroad he returned to Transylvania where he worked as a freelance director, as an assistant lecturer in the Acting Department of the Babeș-Bolyai University and as a member of Váróterem Projekt/Waitingroom Project Independent Theater Company. He directed shows in three different countries (Romania, Hungary and USA) and eight theaters in many different genres. At the moment of writing his shows are performed in five different theaters, among others Caravaggio written by András Visky (Csíky Gergely State Theater, Timișoara) and Alkésztisz adapted together with Benjámin Előd-Horváth (Váróterem Projekt, Cluj-Napoca).
