PANDUR’S BOOK OF DREAMS

by Darko Lukic, 1997

In 1989, when Tomaz Pandur’s author’s opus of great performances opened with Scheherezade, staged in Theatre Mladinsko in Ljubljana, critics coined a new term: Pandurtheater became a generally acceptable distinguishing label for his work. Regardless of whether this model of theatrical spectacle, the syncretic, erudite theatre with luxurious visual structure and intricate, complex construction has been praised and glorified (as has most often been the case), or exposed to negative criticism coming from the ranks of conservative theoreticians with preference for psychological realism or blind reverence of theatrical interpretations of dramatic texts, it remains an indisputable fact that Tomaz Pandur threw the glove to both theoreticians and critics when he was only twenty years of age, and that a theatrical style was named after him on the whole territory of the former Yugoslav state.

Scheherezade came like a film story about success. Tomaz Pandur had already staged other productions by that time, and some, like Kafka — Curriculum Vitae, received considerable attention in the media, but Scheherezade was his first really significant professional project which he took to the most prestigious theatrical festival in former Yugoslavia, the MES in Sarajevo, where it was presented in competition with the most distinguished and the most established theatre artists in the country; it won all the first prizes, laurel wreaths, it received the best reviews and was greeted with euphoric affection of the audience. The production then toured other festivals and evoked the same response everywhere it went. Its director, however, immediately set to work on his next project. Goethe’s Faust was an even greater success, followed by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dante’s La Divina Commedia, Carmen, Russian Mission (based on the motifs by Dostoevsky), and Babylon as the final work — all of them as impressive and spectacular as their titles suggest. Pandur's perseverance in consistent realization of his directorial script, development of his method, and growing international acclaim (visiting performances in Mexico City, Caracas, Salzburg, Milan, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Brussels, Dresden, Graz, foreign co-productions, and an increasingly international group of artistic associates) were additional proof that Pandurtheater was a specific theatrical category in its own right.

In his role as director, Tomaz Pandur systematically built his productions as if they were the ivory tower of his private theatrical dream. As artistic director he created a major theatrical destination on the map of Europe from an anonymous and irrelevant bourgeois repertory theatre, skillfully bringing together directors, writers, scenographers, choreographers, costume designers, and actors from totally different environments, different generations, with different aesthetic concepts and styles. In addition to a very successful management and development of this new impressive theatre, he continued working on his own projects which were gradually with certainty developing into one great polyptych, a fresco of the encyclopedia of the dreams from which the phenomenon of Pandurtheater is made up. For seven years he was the head and the creative force of the theatre company. The seven-year span is a natural, a priori determined life cycle. There are seven days in a week; the sevenfold numerological structure of time periods has its foundation in the very act of Divine creation and reflects the mathematical perfection of the World in all other micro spheres of existence. The constants of his style and language hold a specific place in this peculiar, systematically conceived unity; it is precisely for this reason that the encyclopedia seems to be the only proper frame of reference within which this impressive cycle can be discussed.

Speaking about the directorial opus of Tomaz Pandur one invariably has to refer to the seven-fold polyptych of his performances: Scheherezade, Faust, Hamlet, Carmen, La Divina Commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) Russian Mission and Babylon. All seven performances may be discussed as a unity, but we have to look separately at some of the fundamental elements of Pandur’s directorial code in order to understand the significance of the unity of his entire work, and of each individual performance. Hoping to answer all the questions, or to cover a whole range of motives here would be an impossible task to achieve: my exposition will therefore be limited to the most typical and the most essential — everything that defines Tomaz Pandur’s as a director with a highly authentic, unique personal script.

Dreams is the principal key word. All seven performances give the impression that they should be read as a book of dreams. The next key word is numerological structure, for I am not aware of any other directors anywhere in the world, with the exception of Tomaz Pandur and Gabrielle Vacis, to have based their construction of a dramaturgical libretto in a theatre performance on numerological structure and on numerological encoding. Thirdly, the symbolism and references in Tomaz Pandur’s stage productions, as well as his use of the ritualistic and magical on the stage, can only be grasped as a shrewdly planned and consistent, systematic structure in the context of culture and civilization.

We should know that the Dream is a path whose knowledge is liberating, even though it may appear to be only a chimera leading us on.  from “The Wind of Dreams”, a Tibetan book of dreams

Chimera and dream images constitute a frequent and regular element of Pandur’s moving pictures, in which symbolism functions as dramaturgy.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF DREAMS

ANGELS — Pandur’s, melancholic

Notwithstanding its unmistakable symbolism or personal presence in the fine arts or poetry, where it appears as a reflection of beatitude and beauty of the promised garden of paradise, the Angel in the books of dreams of ancient civilizations signifies a messenger of a misfortune. Angels in Pandur’s productions take on the most different forms, depending on the background of culture and civilization and on the extent of interdependence of conditional reality and phantasmagory. Both terms are only provisional, of course — not merely on account of the frequently transposed notion of reality in the theatre, but also because Pandur himself resolutely refuses to accept a clear-cut division between what is fictional and what is real. His systematic production of fiction distinguishes between formal and actual differences of the real and imaginary world, doubting both worlds so to speak — both of which are so clearly different in rational and rationalistic treatments.

Dante provided a suitable frame of reference for staging La Divina Commedia as a theatrical triptych that speaks of the eschatological world in which apparitions and entities from the hereafter form “the real”. In this realm, angels are not sudden, symbolism laden with otherworldly apparitions come to the reality of the “here-and-now”. They are a reality in their own right, a sphere enclosed in another one, where only Dante himself as the sole living mortal takes on the form of an apparition, a chimera, a ghost, and — if you will — of an angel. The situation is typical of Pandur’s work: once we have crossed over into the other world, leaving behind us the quotidian reality of the “real” world of material phenomena, the whole system of relations is altered. Angels in paradise are a naked daily occurrence, while a living mortal seems to be an odd apparition from another world. Still, how does Pandur really perceive paradise and its angels? His vision is a theatrical one, no doubt about that; it is a reflection of the metaphor of earthly reality of his own theatricality. The baroque gardens of Louis XIV with choreographed strolls and theatrically pompous music reminiscent of Lully, the slowly progressing current of time in Eden’s infinity, the floating “slow motion” of theatrical non-action (for the highest beatitude and bliss allow no place for action) where the scene is all set for the metamorphosis of the greatest love that was ever transcended into a metaphysical category — that of Dante and Beatrice. From maddening passion on Earth and the desperate search through Inferno it unfolds to the anticipation of hope in Purgatorio, to be finally transformed into a crystal-clear Victorian conversation of a blissed-out (and therefore senseless) human couple in Paradiso, in one of the most melancholy theatrical scenes I have ever witnessed on stage, in the melancholy perfection of the cold purity of Love that has been cleansed of everything human, of Love which has thus left the recesses of the human heart and become a perfect symbol, poetry itself. The power of human sadness is enhanced a hundred-fold with the presence of angels, the futility of their endless minuet, their subtle floating; angels of gold and azure, baroque and senseless angels in the scene with Dante and Beatrice.

The vision of melancholy angels freed of human passion, pain, misfortune, but also bereft of joy, resumes at the close of Russian Mission, when it is transported into heaven. In Russian Mission, the Paradise — quite unlike the crystal and baroque paradise of The Divine Comedy, the apotheosis that leads to the reconciliation of all quarrelling parties, forgiveness to all trespassers, and — consequently — the state of absolute childlike innocence that befalls prince Myshkin as the outcome of purification when he becomes the “Idiot” — that paradise is frozen in ice! A white icy expanse, where time itself has frozen in slow motion literally stops, in the form of scenic intervention, the current of time to indicate the subjective state of bliss in which time has no duration, only existence. In Russian Mission we see angels mingling with mortals whose earthly life would never, regardless of all Christian austerities, qualify them for Paradise, for the ultimate farewell of prince Myshkin, an almost theological glorification of the idea of mercy, has freed the sinners from the bonds of human weakness through the infinite grace possessed solely by Christ, and Myshkin himself is the centerpiece of Eden on whose surface the once sinful angels drift like perfect white idealizations of their own melancholy selves.

The space where he feels as safe as if in his only reality is the world of storytelling. His opus opens with the Scheherezade, the legendary storyteller from the Arabian tales of a Thousand and One Arabian Nights, whose life and existence is likewise a tale. Faust was inspired by many medieval folk tales and legends told about “the Devil’s apprentice”. Shakespeare found his Hamlet in the world of tales. Carmen originates in the storytelling world of Gypsies, and Babylon is, like the Scheherezade, a web of tales from the ancient East. Towards the end of Russian Mission, Dostoevsky is surrounded with the iconography and symbolism of old Russian folk tales, and La Divina Commedia literally inhabits the reality of storytelling. Escape, and choice of a fairytale-like structure with canon-like schematism and at the same time an absolutely open realization of images on the other end — this is the structure of dramaturgy models in which he moves safely. In his productions, Pandur basically sees the world of real life and real relationships through a fairytale structure with fundamentally filtered relationships (… once upon a time there lived a prince with a good father and a wicked mother…), through archetypes and prototypes; having created the dramaturgic structure on such models, he develops it from a frame that is firm enough to facilitate an absolute ease and freedom in spinning a dream in all directions and in every possible way. Owing to what seems to be a deep discontent with the real world, he handles it as a distant recollection, and deconstructs it into its (real) integral parts, only to restore it again according to his own will and purpose, within the framework of his absolutely new (unreal) relations.

The ancient Babylonian book of dreams lists the image of a Ghost as one of the key and most dangerous predictions of great change in the life of a dreamer; its presence may be connected to a bloody murder, or one’s own death. Wasn’t it the ghost in the tower, among other things, that changed Hamlet’s leisurely and melancholy intellectual life into a hellish mental state, and caused the misfortune and death? Ghosts are quite common and frequent in Pandur’s productions, just like Angels, for in the world of “new reality” it is the director who decides on what would become real when he creates his own reality. Spirits are legitimate, real creatures and phenomena. With the exception of Hamlet, where the dramaturgic (and literary) function of the Ghost has been predetermined by the text, and of Faust, where Mefisto himself triggers a flood of hallucinations from his world as active participants in the story, or in La Divina Commedia where Dante meets an entire encyclopedia of souls and ghosts on his journey through the eschatological history of the western civilisation — Pandur introduces ghosts into texts in which there were originally none. In Carmen, Salvador Dalí appears as a most transparent ghost of an age and its spirituality, on a bicycle that looks as if it had been designed by Picasso; all through the Scheherezade and Babylon, it is the act of crossing over into the world whose space, civilization, and spiritual dimension are distant and unknown, which materializes the ghosts of time, as well as the ghosts of culture and religions from the East, as an almost exclusive “reality” of characters.

A HORSE — you cannot get away on Pandur’s Hamlet opens with a grand scene of motionless, hesitant, inactive Hamlet by the side of a real white horse, a necessary requisite for every fairytale prince. As the scene’s inaction lingers on, somebody else, the active hero of the story, is about to mount the horse, while Hamlet is bound to remain a character who has left the option of departing slip by, out of his reach. In Babylon, six golden riders climb on oversized, albeit not real horses, and dance on their backs like possessed without moving on at all, for the horses turn out to be only models of real animals. (The same significance applies to the train which, like “horse power”, takes off into the circle at the end of Russian Mission — like a model of a real train, and Mishkin does not move anywhere, not even for an inch.) If we look at the color symbolism of horses, given in the apocalyptic “Book of Revelations” of St. John which concisely summarizes the meanings from all ancient civilizations, and take into account the comprehensive psychoanalytical explanation of the fundamentally erotic symbolism of the horse (which refers to male eroticism even in the oldest legends and myths), we find the key to proper reading and understanding of Pandur’s opus which is, above all, a deep introspection and an intimate psychoanalytic self-observation. To Pandur, theatre is first the means of psychoanalysis and therapy for both the director and the actors, and only then a web of carefully conceived and selected symbolism, closely linked with mythology. What brings us back to Pandur’s deep sadness, tinged in the mood of his most intimate confessions on stage (all intricately hidden in the labyrinths of symbolism, encoding, metaphors, and stylisations), is the fact that nobody ever departs anywhere on those horses. The ancient Arabic proverb that says “there is no horse so swift one could run away from oneself” is here embodied in theatre poetics.

The cross, which is much older than Christianity itself, is one of the fundamental symbols of human civilization at large. We find the two lines crossing one another at a right angle among the earliest tracks of the hand of Homo Sapiens on the cave walls. Sumerian cuneiform writing, hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, Phoenician script, symbols of the old Incas, Mayas, and Azteks, animist African tribes; China, Japan, the civilization of the Semitic basin, Eskimos, etc. — this, so easily drawn symbol of the metaphysics which is key to the understanding of the world, is known everywhere. The vertical and the horizontal, the four corners of the earth, the connection between life and death, the Latin numeral for ten, the multiplication mark, and another hundred or thousand explanations that all made fertile ground to have imprinted this sign since the 5th century A.D., connected with Christ’s passion, into spiritual, mystical, cultural, and occult symbolism of the whole western civilization. Through the course of history of mankind, the simplest and clearest of visual symbols has become the focal point of the most complex and the most profound symbolism, metaphysics, esoteric knowledge, mysticism and magic. How could Pandur not have used it so often, and as a rule in the most various and polysemous forms! In Pandur’s theatrical images the cross always has a precise symbolical structure and connotation that conditions the framework and the concept of the scene, although it is always absolutely different, be it in Faust, Russian Mission, La Divina Commedia, or in Carmen.

In all his performances the theme of death and death scenes on the stage are the source of Pandur’s fascination and deep mystical inspiration. In his directorial script, the motifs of the metaphysically mystical and the poetic are profoundly linked together by the symbol of death and the ever present, but changing theatrical representations of death connected with water, fire, a kiss, violence and blood, or with a slow and silent departure into eternity, from the fall into abyss to the resurrection in heaven. Pandur perceives death as something entirely different from a mere cessation of functions of the vital organs in the human body, and has inscribed this personal belief in all of his productions as one of the most characteristic constants. If he has shown, in so many places and so many times, his refusal to accept the differences and divisions between “this” and “the other” world, why should the moment of dying, as one of the most visible and most direct borderlines, be taken as an irrevocable reality? “To die, to sleep, perchance to dream… ” Shakespeare’s poetisation of death in Hamlet’s contemplation, as well as its philosophical examination, is a constant, continual obsession in each of Pandur’s solutions of death on the stage, as if the notion of death — what it is and how it appears, what remains after it, what begins with it and why — had to be submitted each time to theatrical scrutiny. Each scene of death and dying has been assigned a special place in every one of Pandur’s productions, and set up in such a way as if he himself took part in the process of dying. Yet death is also the point of rebirth at which Pandur’s theatre actually begins.

WATER — elementary substance 02

The Purgatory in La Divina Commedia is, literally, the pool of purification in which the actors swim and dive in water. In Babylon, we find the water-, milk-, or blood-filled pool occupy the focal point of the scenographic solution of acting space; a strong torrent of rain washes out and purifies the red-hot stage, changing it into mud after a biblical deluge. In Faust, actors and spectators are separated by a curtain of falling water. In Russian Mission, books have been sunk into the pool on the proscenium… With the exception of Carmen, where the scorching dryness of the Spanish zenith screaming for moisture that doesn’t come marks the absence of water as its presence, most of Pandur’s performances float on water, one of the most powerful symbols of life and death, and one of the elementary substances of which the Earth, and the life on it, is composed.

In Pandur’s theatrical expression, the image of earth as one of the most ancient symbols of life and fertility, and consequently of the fundamental symbol of femininity in all mythologies, is as omnipresent as water and fire. In Carmen, the sublimed, condensed feminine eroticism, everything takes place on earth upon whose surface signs and furrows are drawn — in the beginning of the civilisation, a furrow signified female sexual organs. In Pandur’s creations we find a single powerful symbol take on the key meaning and the function of a motif that fundamentally defines the mise-en-scene and dramaturgical encoding. In Russian Mission, the earth symbolizes the ground and the home — the ground under one’s feet in the sense of the resting place of the beloved dead, who were in fact alive in the first part of the performance, the ground out of which the grass springs. In Babylon, everything is covered with red soil out of which the civilization grew between the two great rivers, and later on the one along the Nile, the soil that brings forth green stems and fruit, the soil of the red-burnt bricks used to build palaces and towers, the soil made fertile by floods where you find the tracks of horses and winds, the soil which is literally the mother of a whole civilisation — and is also represented like one, with an exquisite directorial approach.

From the oldest myths to modern psychoanalysis, the snake is an exclusive symbol of male, phallic sexuality. Ridden with biblical connotations of Satan’s challenge, the original sin, danger, and menace, poetically represented in the legend about Cleopatra’s suicide, and connected with many magical rituals, the symbol of the snake is equally connected with life as it is with death, and is singularly charged with a wide range of different connotations and associations. In Pandur’s stage poetics it reveals a fascination with the experience of the Female as an exciting danger, seductive eroticism, a magical and ritualistic beast, a polysemous symbol and a stage signifier applied by the director in a discreet, but sagacious and precise manner, in the appropriate place.

THE NUMBER — CONTAINED IN THE FOUNDATION OF THE STRUCTURE

The numbers hold the key to all mysteries, known only to him who knows what’s in a dream and what in wakefulness, and there is no dream without its number, as there is no light in a dream, nor in a wakeful state, and no truth in anything that could not be found in the Book of Numbers. The Book of Numbers, the ancient Egyptian papirus on numerology

A superficial, fleeting look at Pandur’s opus suffices to find that numerological relations and the numerological principles applied cannot be accidental; they represent a well-studied and judiciously selected system originating from the esoteric knowledge of mystical symbolism of numbers which forms the basis of his directorial approach.

In all civilizations, 7 was considered a holy number — in ancient Egypt, India, Mesopotamia — and it carried an especially occult and magical meaning in Islam. In the context of the western Judeo-Christian civilization which has absorbed hellenic influences (and through them the entire East), this number has become an integral element of the art and culture — the seven days of creation, the seven phases of the Moon, the seven cycles in a human life, the seven gods on the Olympus, the seven deadly sins, the seven Christian virtues, the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven holy sacraments, the seven liberal arts in the classic system of the antique and medieval science, the seven sorrows of Virgin Mary, and the seven seas and seven mountains as a metaphor for a symbolic journey in all the stories and legends of the West. The most recent anthropological, medical, psychological and sociological research confirms that the seven-day or the seven-year cycle in the life of human kind really is the natural sequence of periods in a man’s life and endeavour. Moreover, it represents the most optimal period of focused activity in a specific area which has to be followed by a new cycle, as the previous one inevitably declines.

Bearing in mind that Scheherezade and Babylon, the first and the last production, are both based on the text by the same author, writer and poet Ivo Svetina, and that both deal with oriental myths and legends, the cycle symbolically closes very much like the image of a snake biting its tail. There is no place for coincidence within this numerological structure.

The circle forms the Occult Apex, the place of creation and disappearance, the point of the beginning and the end offering the possibility of a new beginning and an absolute finality, completion of the seven-fold cycle.

3 is the key number for Pandur, and will be given additional consideration as part of the cultural and civilisational context of his opus.

The topics may be classified as follows:

Carmen with its Gypsy metaphors and its content joins both cultures, the East and West, and does not exclusively belong to either one or the other because it contains the distinctive qualities of both.

Time-wise, the productions make up a triad:

For an understanding of the system of Triads in Pandur's concept of work, his philosophy and belief in theatrical mysticism, one has to be familiar with the so-called "linking elements". As a rule, Pandur connects the two opposing dualities by introducing a linking device which connects them to the third element — and the static function of the 2 thus progresses to the dynamic nature of 3. The cultural and territorial duality of the East (Scheherezade, Babylon, and the oriental Carmen) and the West (Faust, Hamlet, La Divina Commedia) is linked to Russian mission which acts as a spatial connection between Europe and Asia, and the spiritual, cultural and civilisational communication of the Asian East and the European West. From the aspect of the content, the irreconcilable duality of God and Devil is overcome by adding the third view, that of Man. Good and the Evil are transcended by Art, Rationalism and Phantasma meet in the third angle of Magic, the civilisation gap of the New World caught between Religion and Atheism is bridged by Agnosticism and Esoteric science. No wonder, if Pandur is fascinated by the power of the perfect number 3. In India, it signifies the triplicity of supreme gods ruling the world, in the Christian world it symbolizes the Holy Trinity, in Greece we have three brothers of the Olympian ruler of the heaven, the sea, and the underworld, who carry attributes of triple meaning in their hands; apparently, this number is associated with God and the symbol of the Divine Perfection and the Perfection of the World — it contains the origin, the middle portion, and the end. It represents the perfect balance of a triangle — from dramaturgical, mathematical, occult and mystical point of view, and marks the entire Pandur's work, singling him out as one of the rare European directors with the sense for the esoteric. And now, let us take a closer look at the context of civilization and culture and the place it occupies in Tomaæ Pandur’s directorial opus.

 Thus we reach the thematic circle of questions posed by the director. How is reality related to fiction? What does the interrelationship between the artist, the world, and the art consist in? Where does the dividing line connecting the subconscious, dreams, and artistic creation run? What situation does contemporary man find himself in when relating to his own spiritual heritage and the correspondence of civilizational strata?

Such a cycle of questions logically points to the choice of the greatest authors of all. The greatness and the significance of these geniuses makes one engage in a battle with an invincible opponent; however, the director does not act like a barbarian wishing to fight and slay his enemy. (Besides, they are not his enemies but spiritual allies.). This aristocratic approach to the duel values more the reputation of a skillful fighter, who should prove himself as the one who performs “un bel colpo di fioretto”, than the victory or the blood of the opponent, since a duel, in the noblest sense of the word, involves the question of personal honour and respect, the opponent being just the end justifying the means. If Goethe is a true “teacher of all modern souls” (Taine), if he is the last universal genius of Europe, Privy Councillor, and a member of the Masonic Lodge Anna Amalia based on the principles of Euro-liberalism — inspired by Shakespeare and the Bible — is it not logical then that finding himself at a crossroads considering what possible ways to take, the director turns to Hamlet and La Divina Commedia? Although Faust may be a dream about the world, a cosmic drama, a cosmogon of the contemporary European conception of the world, the director needs Hamlet to answer the questions relating to the issues which leave such inheritance to the contemporary heritage, to the fundamentally disoriented generation. Peter Brook is undoubtedly right in claiming that as far as Shakespeare is concerned the easiest way to discover something new is to read his plays without prejudice. Therefore, Pandur takes just a few motifs from the story of Hamlet: the intellectual and spiritual superiority of the prince, his conceited disgust for what is actually happening, and for the banality of the event itself, so brutal when compared to his sophisticated reasoning; his erotic duet is sung within the emotional triangle of Hamlet, Ophelia and Horatio to which the director adds a weariness of his own generation having waited for the answer to the question “To be or not to be?” for two millennia. And what a challenge for the director can then Dante's fascinating world beyond death be, the world we all (including the director and both great poets, Virgil and Dante) are taken through by Scipio Jr. Here too, the director will free himself from the brilliant Dante — as he has done with Goethe and Shakespeare — using him just as an inspiration to guide him along the ways of his own stage investigations.

An agent for the CBS company had long been asking Fellini to make a film of “The Divine Comedy”, claiming that since Fellini was one of the greatest Italians, he “is obliged to explain Dante to the Americans”. One of the greatest connoisseurs of Dante, professor Jacqueline Risset, said to Fellini, “Only you can do it!” The master, however, never decided to do it, excusing himself with “not being capable of doing it”, since he felt intimidated by the “terrible forms which surround us, the meaning, sense, and intention of which we cannot recollect any longer. This is both the hell as well as the eternal bliss of a complete unawareness at the same time, since we ourselves are turning into various things — into a blossom, the sea, the eyes of a woman, a bird in the sky — we are everything created, the secret rose, the center of paradise...” The very thing that stopped Fellini instigated Pandur. So Hell, a loco selvaggio, Paradise, the center of bliss — bridged by the enchantment of the stage — Beatrice Portinari, “Beato, anima bella, chi ti vede” in Dante’s own elevated verses, and Scipio Jr., all tell the story, taking us through the eschatological labyrinth of pictures. Theater is the key with which Pandur tries to break the sign code of the world and open the door to the labyrinth of questions. This is the basic code in which the universe is reflected — including the script of Scheherezade as well as the choreography of Walpurgis Night and Scipio’s comments — and which, like the Mousetrap, releases Hamlet by explaining him through the language of theater.

 Although it is difficult to attach a formula to Pandur's directorial approach, the most accurate definition of it seems to be that it is the creation of unreality evoked by a reconstruction of the elements of reality. Not distortion of the elements of reality, just their re-arrangement — the elimination of real links and the establishment of unreal relationships among them, creating a new, re-shaped reality, that functions in an unreal way, as a new (sur)reality. The method has a great deal in common with Dalí. Is there anything in the pictures of Salvador Dalí which does not exist in iself in the reality of the real world? No! The clock, the elephant, the house - such as they exist in reality - are painted in an almost hyper-realistic manner. But do such relationships contain any of these elements? The flying and climbing elephants have unusually long legs, casting optically impossible shadows; the clock dripping like a melting ice-cream, or hanging on a tree as a pancake, or else curving over the edges of a table; houses hanging among the clouds? This method is translated into the real world, the system of relationships being completely phantasmagoric. If (in his own time) Picasso made a bull out of a bicycle, today Pandur responds back by making a bull out of his bicycle again, putting bulls horns where Picasso saw the reversed handlebar.

The most fascinating feature of this directorial procedure is the aforementioned symbolic strength of the triangle and the tripartition of the primal elements, water, fire and air (above the earth and in it). No Pandur’s performance lacks fire, water (in whatever form), and air, which is visualized by way of evaporation. All his figures are exposed to fire, or water or are hovering in the air, the consistency of the symbolic puzzle revealing the fundamental features of his directorial procedure. Beauty and Death, yet another of the darknesses constantly alarming Pandur and leading him from Scheherezade to Babylon, from Faust to Hamlet and Carmen until, like in the case of Ana Karenina’s suicide, everything collapses under the wheels of a train. All his crucial figures function within triangles: Hamlet/Ophelia/Horatio; Faust/Margareta/Mephisto; Faust/Christ/Prometheus; Dante/Beatrice/Virgil; Dante/Virgil/Scipio Jr.; Carmen/Don José/Escamillo; Rogozhin/Nastasya Filippovna/Myshkin; Nin/Shamurammata/Adad... They work as a triad brought into action by a duality which complements it to Perfection — the Holy Trinity, a double triad of David's star, the triad of the perfect equillibrium.

The statically defined dualities of God and Man, Man and Woman — move out of the eternal datum only with the help of a symbolic triad, a total all-embracing contextualization of Hermaphrodite, due to which the latter is naturally sterile. This does not matter though, since perfection does not need reproduction, or else it would lose its perfection. Duality is the ideal condition for watching and understanding, so the triangle is translated from clearness and namelessness into symbolic mysticism, since duality does not admit pausing or overpowering. The Aristotelian inexorability of the principle tertium non datur suffices for logic as well as science. In art, however, it is this third factor which alters every creation and every expression.

The next characteristic in Pandur's procedure is his obsession with myth and symbol. Great myths and crucial symbols represent ciphers, containing and involving the mystic experience of the Universe — the signs which Pandur constantly tries to decipher on stage, convinced that by doing so he will be able to decipher the hidden magical formulae which are beyond the reach of mortals.

RECOGNIZABLE INFLUENCES — THE BROTHERHOOD OF IMAGES

There is no artist in the world worth a thorough consideration in a book who would not include in his poetics the heritage of experiences and achievements of his best contemporaries and predecessors; as there is no serious doctor, who would for the sake of his love for autochtonism, intentionally overlook or even re-invent penicillin, the x-ray apparatus, or the laser scalpel — only because somebody else has invented them before him. The only advantage the arts have derived from the so-called post-modernism (supposing we have conditionally accepted its existence) is that it has, with a wooden stake, fatally wounded modernism, that vampiric romanticism cherishing the cult of absolute originality and independence, and barbarically suffocating all heritage and tradition.

Pandur's theatrical language clearly suggests the use of the devices of the Totaltheater, which he does with a detached openness towards all other known devices of stage representation. In Scheherezade he tests the scenic inventions of the Beijing opera, kathakali, at times even kabuki, as well as cothurns and masques, the heritage of the ancient Greek theater on which European theatrical experience is based. In Hamlet a Mousetrap is staged in the tradition of the Spanish Golden Epoch. In Paradiso a luxurious Lully's minuet adapted for the theater animates the performance, and an almost authentic reproduction of the ballet from the time of Louis XIV is introduced; in Inferno the experience of the European theater of the Middle Ages, ranging from the masonic concept of the stage space and the movement of groups around the stage to the technical solution of the late Middle Ages used for personnages, as well as spectacular receptions of important persons at the markets and in front of the palaces, are introduced. There are also the ballet (baroque and white ballet), ritual dance, tango and flamenco, as well as Nijinski, Martha Graham, and the language of music, which while used in individual performances, are all an essential aspect of Carmen. Pantomime and acrobatics, such para-theatrical forms as the antique arena and circus, the video-clip technology summarizing the experience of theater and film, design and installation, happenings and fashion shows, even bullfights — all appear in a play, being the constants in the director's handwriting. The director, feeling claustrophobic within the given theatrical medium, applies all the above-mentioned devices of other media, in order to describe his experience of the theater, as a tendency towards the totality of the world, which he tries to understand or at least experience through stage representation itself as a kind of mystic experience.

 Let us now consider the issue of Pandur's personal understanding of theater. If the aforementioned symbols represent the basis of the Universe, they also reflect the basic features of man being a part of this universe; its very special part, no doubt. Pandur therefore tries to find the mystic experience of the universe deep inside himself, while trying to free himself from all the layers of his civilizational travel ration with the help of artistic endeavor. If the World is the cumulation of all worlds, man being burdened with the weight of the experience of the human history being part of them, then it is only natural that he tries to understand the universe by himself, from himself, and through himself. For Pandur, theater is the key to that understanding, as for other authors it may be the key to something else. Nevertheless, following his mystic-religious understanding of the theater, Pandur experiences it as a house of God containing the transcendence itself, as well as the place where he can dream freely. Given the conviction that all the mystic experience of the world is gathered and buried somewhere deep in the self, and that dreams throw light on the unconscious too, artistic narcissism is only a natural, and the only possible way of dealing with the world through the self. The demystification of all great myths and the account of a myth according to one's own concept, experience, and needs, demands a bold indifference towards prejudice and dogma, and even towards the notorious facts of reality. An indifference to everything but one's own dreams, which prove to be a good servant and a rude master at the same time. Pandur's theater, then, is a guide through the images of dreams, the encyclopedia of dreams in which individual dream images are merely particles of the one whole.