Cserje Fest – Memorial Theater Festival

Cultural management

Cserje Fest

Memorial Theater Festival in Terény, in memory of Zsuzsa Cserje /1945-2018/

The Visegrad Project

We hold the Cserje fest, a memorial festival in a small village in the neighborhood of Slovakia in Terény at Hungary. It is a multi art community event with art- eco- method. According to it's traditions it connects V4 countries with art workshops and performances for the local participants and youth. As a result it has a cultural exchange travel part for the performances through V4 partnership.

We give priority to the involvement of young people, the local young people involved in the project. The Cserje Fest memorial festival attends to continue and develop a theatrical tradition, which connects Hungary and Slovakia as a traditonal partnership and V4 countres as well. The primary long-term focus of the project would be to increase awareness and social sensitivity for the art- eco- method. The Cserje fest is an art-eco progress during it' s past 2 years. Multi-art events, where the biggest focus is on theater.The idea is to bring this method to the involved partners and build new cultural connections. Through the involvement and creativity of the artistic communities and the local audience we create art-camp activities based on collective participation: in order to build cultural exchanges and new creations.

We believe that the unique, creative essence of children and adolescents can best be enhanced by introducing them to culture through education. In such an educational process, learning would be tailored to the individual and infused by the ideal of freedom.We plan high level art performances with experts, discussions through involved theater experts of V4 countries. We plan cultural exchanges and a festival with performances, and creative art workshops for youth, students and artists to be connected. We plan to give a tour for the good artistic results in the planned V4 countries.We plan creative camps during the festival. As the project is mostly based on creative factors, we hope that the newly acquired knowledge for the youth will form an integral part of ther lives and will help them utilise new methods of thinking , connected to art and eco friendly thinking, which is a lack of knowledge in many rural aereas. We expect to give a basic motivation for the kids, locals, to be opened to other cultures, to find the connections through borders, and find the community building method of art. Supporting young talents can help them understand through art and creative education that they can have own decisions and human rights , eco reflecting view and the knowledge of culture should be part of their life. We expect to give them ideas about their possibilities and opportunities. Our organisation wth the partners could help the creative educational and cultural development of the areas of the villages in V4 countries.

We believe that through our complex multi-art festival with the eco-art camp and the travelling perfomances as a result through the V4 countries can teach the basic principles of human values, , and through the drama and circuspedagogy based process the children would be able to reach an understanding of the importance of an active social life across borders. Furthermore growing awareness of their responsibility to other human beings and eco frIendly thinking as a basic method.Through culture and creative education we can teach children and youth in an indirect way. That can have an influance in all locals in the planned small villages.Our invited artists are both actors and acrobats, also drama teachers and circuspedagogysts. That gives a wide aspect of teaching and creating art together beside the invited performances. We work with many experts on the field of art, sociology, pedagogy, architecture. We connect creative ideas. We connect different generations in our concept . Also we connect the urban and rural life, with mixing the audience and saving local traditions . We have many partners, NGO-s on the fields of solidarity issues. We are interested in sharing good practises, creative ideas, strategic plans on the field of education, society, culture and ecological fields.We will co-create performances and workshops with the local artists.This way opening up new perspectives, sharing knowledge and methods among each other, deepening mutual understanding of different art-fields and cultures.The close and personal creative cooperation can help build longer relations.

Do still exist development-teaching stories today? Do we have to focus on personal improvement, or should we rather talk about community life? Can we think about the person as part of the community then? We think that art can be a tool in an eco-thinking way and also in building small communities. All participants are responsible for an eco-friendly background during the festivals. The environmental protection and innovative use of the recycling trends in cooperation with the partner organizations based on previous agreement and should be in focus by all participants. Based on the tradition of Grotowski's ritual theatre, a community is created from the spectators’ crowd. Building a new symbolism by evoking folk traditions, eco awerenes and learnng art tools for youth through a reinterpreted theatrical rite. The development of the modern audience to become a community through common action. The project tries to connect tradition and modernity. Aims to connect generations, to combine art with community feeling. We believe that creating a modern artistic reflection with the involvement of locals, youth and artists, not only as spectators, but creative partners in the process, during a crisis period in nowaydays, can teach about the renewal and can help to become helpful communities indirectly through art. We aim to bring together traditional and innovative forms according to the different local traditions. We also believe that this can help the participants of V4 countries to understand more about each other's culture and find similarities.

Pro Jugendstil Foundation supports young artists, organises cultural, educational, charity projects since 1997 in Hungary. It is member of the EVS and the ALF Network and created projects through the networkships.Has a wide scale of Hungarian and international partners. Is the supporting organisation of the Simorág DanCircus Company .Connects different fields of art. Develops non-formal educational methods. Teach social issues through interactive, problem solving gamifiquation.Pro Jugendstil Art Foundation has been supporting art and culture primarily by providing the publicity needed to start the careers of talented young artists and creators. We help create theatrical and circus productions and venue-specific performances that carry strong visual elements. We connect young, talented artists with other theatrical and circus artists. The primary target group of the foundation is young artistic talents, unique artists and thinkers of the society who create future values and productions. They represent the highest level of cultural appearance. Their values are high education, dedication, fresh vision, innovative use of tools and forms of communication, ability to convey messages. The leader of Cserje fest Ágnes Simor is also theater director like Zsuzsa Cserje after whom the festival was named. Since 2010 her company, Simorág DanCircus performs own fairytales across the country combining theater,dance, poetry, circus with many professional awards as a company and personally. Honoured also for cultural innovation and work against discrimination by the Cultural Ministry.

About Zsuzsa Cserje

Zsuzsa died a few years ago, and we buried her in Terény, next to the Mushroom Museum. In the last 20 years, she has been constantly changing rural farmhouses, sometimes falling in love with one, sometimes selling it and buying another. And wherever she bought a small house, she almost always organized a theater festival in its vicinity. She traveled the countryside, adored the authentic folk culture, and smuggled the world of an urban actress everywhere, in such an overwhelming way that the villagers loved her, organized joint cooking, when they held big parties, when the actors, actresses, singers, dancers, puppeteers, or musicians, her friends, whom she then involved in the festivals. She also performed local folk dancers, children's groups, and a local women's choir, while inviting various performances through music, dance, and theater to small villages. She enlivened life and summer after summer they waited for Zsuzsa to arrive and turn the village around.

She made friends everywhere, was loved by many and created a community around him. She brightened up any company in minutes with her humor, liveliness, and incredible ideas. Wherever she felt comfortable, she created a theater around her, the theater was a part of every moment of her life, she existed in a kind of permanent theater, and took this with her everywhere.

She invented, created and operated the official Terényi Theater Days for 5 years. In 2013, she opened the Mushroom Museum, where once again organized one or two-day festivals, with children's performances, concerts, theater performances, and dance programs. When she couldn't find funding for tenders, she put his own money into the festivals. It was a field to which she returned, outsold every village house because she found a better one, changed the location of every festival, tried it and moved on. But she returned to Terény and in 2017, organized her last Theater All-Arts Festival there almost entirely on her own.

In 2018, we buried her there in the spring, and in the middle of summer, many of us thought that now would be the Terény Days with Zsuzsa...it's hard without her, but Terény is somehow transforming, since then several artists have moved there, the theater, dance and musical camp has continued, the end of which his performances were always at Zsuzsa's festival, the members of the Noha creative workshop built three houses on the same plot of land, from which the Öko center is built, and this year they already held an art camp for hundreds of children, and they also borrowed the Mushroom Museum so that they could hold programs there as well. Zsuzsa created an unnoticeable artistic medium, which we would like to preserve directly.

In 2021, it was possible to continue the festival she started, in her memory.

Writings of contemporaries about Zsuzsa

Slide 1
NÉPSZAVA

Zsuzsa Cserje, actress, playwright, critic, director, died at the age of seventy-two. "The Cserje". In the theater industry, many people just called her that. Over the years, she quickly became a phenomenon. She started as an actress, later directed, wrote books, reviews, and organized festivals. She was always planning, always spinning. She was everywhere, at premieres, festivals, clubs, in lounges, but also on the street, you could only talk to her about the theater."

2
https://fuhu.hu/cserje-zsuzsa-halalara/

She was vitality incarnate. Her brain was also constantly moving, she always had new and new and still new plans, but her gesticulations were also broad and fast, and her speaking pace was fast. She was a fan of the theater, while she was able to express herself very well, if she didn't like a performance, she would start her text flow during the break. But she was even more enthusiastic about production as well as her own ideas, of which she had quite a few.
Zsuzsa only did something slowly, she drove the car extremely carefully, almost afraid, she brought us home from an evening performance in the countryside so that we got home much, much longer than usual. And she also took me to Terény with a snail's pace, where she organized a theater festival, but her language was fast, she told us a lot about the village of Nógrád, how she fell in love with it, and on the way we admired the dimbeket hills, which of course she also had something to say.
Later, she bought a farmhouse here and set up a private mushroom museum in it. She was a maniacal mushroom picker, and her apartment was also crowded with objects depicting mushrooms. When it was in season, she even called at the last minute to ask us to go to her place for a mushroom dinner, because what she picked was fresh. Of course, this also meant big prank parties, her sense of humor was crazy, you could laugh with her constantly.

3
SZÍNHÁZ.HU

"Zsuzsa Cserje changed her original name (Frank Zsuzsanna) because of her favorite actor, Sándor Pécsi, as the actor lived in Cserje Street in Budapest. She began her theater career in 1968 as a studio assistant at the National Theater, then played at the Katona József Theater in Kecskemét, and from 1970 to. She was a member of the Honvéd Art Ensemble between 1972 and the Literary Theater between 1972 and 1980. She graduated from the Faculty of Theater and Film Arts in theater theory in 1982. From 1983 she was a member of the Folk Theater and the Budapest Chamber Theater for ten years. Has two daughters: Zsófia Szamosi and Szamosi
Szandtner, both of them actresses"

4
FEMINA.HU

Zsuzsa Cserje founded the Terényi Theater Days, which ran for five years with great success, and later organized the Andocsi Art Days and the Four Seasons Children's Arts Festival in Dunabogdány.

5
fidelio.hu - Erzsi Sándor citation

She came up with an idea every day, but she made it happen. She had built in an indestructible drill shield, it operated and went through everything as she wanted good.
She always wanted good. She wanted well with the plays in which she sometimes acted but mostly directed them, she wanted well for the writers when she worked alongside them as a dramatist, she wanted well for the actor's friends whom she adored, she wanted well for the memory of Sándor Pécsi, she wanted well for those looking for and selling the apartment, she wanted well for Terény and she wanted well for the for mushrooms.
Until now, until this moment, everyone thought that she could only fall on her feet, or rather, like the ball that rolls, she was intangible and invulnerable. Zsuzsa Cserje became institutionalized as a theatrical Mother Teresa and private Mother, festival organizer, director, critic, collector of theatrical relics, but most of all as a theater person.
Cserje was a gesamtkunstwerk woman if there is such a word. A collective art participant, without whom there is and will not be a premiere from now on.

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The photos were taken by Zsuzsa Cserje.

Cultural management

2023

Memorial Theater Festival in Terény, in memory of Zsuzsa Cserje
/ theather days terény
- 16-18 of June, 2023.

We look forward to seeing you again at the Cserje Festival in 2023!

Cultural management

2022

Memorial Theater Festival in Terény, in memory of Zsuzsa Cserje
/ theather days terény
- 24-26 of June, 2022.

It was a wonderful, intimate, laughing-crying, witty meeting in 2021 at the first Cserje Festival. Something that Zsuzsa would have liked to see. Maybe she saw it... her spirit was always with us in the garden of his house and the Mushroom Museum she founded, as well as in the kitchen, in the rooms and during the performances, day and night. The friends already knew then that the summer of 2022 cannot pass without another Cserje Fest.

And now here it is:

Image

Best images of the festival 2022

Our supporters

Terény Önkormányzata és a terényi lakosok

Arttéka Egyesület

Mazsök

NKA

Emmi

EMET

Spiritusz Színház

Köszönjük Magyarország

spirituszonline.hu



Organized by:

Pro Jugendstíl Fiatal Művészek a Kultúráért Alapítvány

Cultural management

2021

Memorial Theater Festival in Terény, in memory of Zsuzsa Cserje
/ Theather days terény
- 3-4 of July, 2021.

Summary and further plans:

In the summer of 2021, in tribute to the memory of Zsuzsa Cserje, the Cserje Memorial Festival - Theater Days Terény was realized for the first time at the initiative of Ágnes Simor. The festival was held in Terény, a village that was decisive for the director and dramatist, following in his footsteps, creating a community experience for the villagers and the surrounding area, as well as for the interested visiting audience. The Memorial Festival was spent recalling Zsuzsa Cserje, touching and joyful moments of remembering her, paying attention to each other, and being together intimately. Zsuzsa Cserje's dearest friends and colleagues prepared special productions for the festival, children and youth programs, movement workshops awaited the visitors, and the event ended with her own final arrangement. Among the performers was the Terényi Kalácska Women's Choir, who have been participating in the festival since the first field festival.

The festival center was located in the garden of Zsuzsa Cserje's Mushroom Museum, where, in addition to theater productions, the audience was treated to dishes prepared by the villagers, old friends, and Zsuzsa Cserje's favorite dishes.

The event was realized with the support of the Terény Local Government and the village community, among others. The success of the initiative, the friendly and professional feedback encouraged the organizing team to hold the festival in 2022 as well.


Organizers: Ágnes Simor, Éri Ildikó, Dániel Gyöngy
Shift: Balázs Szabon /Bala, József Duksa-Kovács /Jocó, József Lénhárt/ Joci