Barbarians

Zsigmond Móricz, one of the greatest writers of Hungarian rural life, came closest to Hungarian peasant culture during his ethnographic collecting trips in Szatmár. He regarded the lives of the people he encountered there as his truest school.
“I carried within me an inexhaustible wealth of things to say, and in twenty-five or thirty years the satchel I filled there and then, with greedy hunger, from every kind of material in the life of the people, never ran empty,” he recalled.
Móricz knew the fate of the Hungarian peasantry with rare depth and felt it as his own, not only because his own roots led back to that world, but because throughout his life he returned to it again and again: to draw strength, to gather, to preserve, and at times to admonish.
He was among the first to show how one may, and indeed must, turn with love towards the culture of the peasantry, the social world that preserved Hungary’s national traditions with the greatest fidelity.
The poison-mixing women of Tiszazug, Gábriel from the Transylvanian world of Fairy Garden, the figures of the short story Barbarians, and the peasants of Móricz’s beloved Szatmár collections all come to life in the visually rich and thought-provoking works of choreographers Zsuzsa Zs. Vincze and Zoltán Zsuráfszky.