[ Narrative story that reconstructs the astonishing resistance to
Victor Orbáns authoritarian power-grab against universities in
Hungary: students and faculty at the Academy of Theater and Film in
Budapest occupied the school for 71 days...]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

STUDENTS AND TEACHERS FROM HUNGARY’S THEATER AND FILM UNIVERSITY
BUILD AN ALTERNATIVE TO AUTOCRACY  
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Alisa Solomon
November 11, 2022
Theater - Yale's Journal of Criticism, Plays and Reportage
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_ Narrative story that reconstructs the astonishing resistance to
Victor Orbán's authoritarian power-grab against universities in
Hungary: students and faculty at the Academy of Theater and Film in
Budapest occupied the school for 71 days... _

,

 

_Narrative story that reconstructs the astonishing resistance to
Victor Orbán's authoritarian power-grab against universities in
Hungary: students and faculty at the Academy of Theater and Film in
Budapest occupied the school for 71 days to protest a privatization
scheme that installed right-wing oligarchs as a new board of
directors; most of the faculty quit and much of the student body
decamped with them -- and now they are creating a model international
program. They are speaking to the US from the future. [Forthcoming in
Theater [[link removed]] Volume 53, Number 2]_

László Upor, rector-elect of the University of Theater and Film in
Budapest, sat grimly on the stage of the school’s main auditorium
along with students, other teachers, and the faculty senate. The text
of a statement he wished he wouldn’t have to read lay in his lap,
the final version printed out just moments before the event. It was
August 31, 2020, and Upor and his colleagues were hosting a press
conference to present a public account of their months-long clash with
the Hungarian government, which was coming to a head in a matter of
hours, barely a week before fall classes were slated to start at the
155-year-old academy. The previous February, Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán’s administration had announced a “model change” for the
school—a privatization scheme that would install a new five-person
governing board with lifetime appointments. Made up of Orbán cronies,
the board would usurp the faculty in running everything from student
admissions to budget allocations to the curriculum. In short, they
would undo the standards of university autonomy and academic freedom,
contravening both the Hungarian and EU constitutions.

The plan hardly came as a surprise to Upor and his colleagues. Their
school—popularly known as SZFE (for Színház-és Filmművészeti
Egyetem, pronounced “ess-ef-eh”)—had been in the regime’s
crosshairs for a good while. The Ministry of Innovation and Technology
(the government agency in charge of higher education, among other
things) had neglected to authorize Upor’s position as
rector—usually a routine rubber stamp—after the faculty had voted
for him almost a year earlier. Meanwhile the SZFE had frequently come
under attack in government-friendly media, portrayed, in standard
culture-war rhetoric, as a swampy breeding ground of degenerate
wokeness. More widely—in addition to jerrymandering, packing the
courts, eroding checks and balances, and centralizing and delivering
most of the news media into the hands of loyal plutocrats—Orbán has
made arts and academic institutions primary sites for entrenching his
self-proclaimed Christian “illiberal democracy.”

In 2018, he forced the prestigious Central European University,
founded by the investor-philanthropist George Soros, long maligned by
the right, to leave the country after almost 30 years in Budapest. He
disassembled the revered Academy of Sciences and placed government
appointees in charge of the research agenda. His regime outlawed
gender studies—even at the university level—and installed as head
of the country’s leading literary center a former Orbán
speechwriter who said he wants to promote more Christian nationalist
narratives in Hungarian letters. The regime has been picking off
public universities one by one, handing over their funds, real estate,
and academic functions to Orbán’s political allies.

For even longer, Orbán has been squeezing the country’s theaters,
which play a more vibrant cultural role in Hungary than in the United
States. (In a population of fewer than ten million, pre-pandemic,
Hungarians were buying more than eight million theater tickets in a
year.) One of Orbán’s first acts after sweeping into office in 2010
was to slash funding for Hungary’s independent theaters, and soon
after, to replace Róbert Alföldi, the successful artistic director
of the National Theater (driven out in a homophobic and antisemitic
campaign) with a reactionary appointee, Attila Vidnyánszky. More
recently, the regime has given itself veto power over the directors of
theaters that receive government funding (which can be generous in
Hungary). It seemed like only a matter of time before the boot would
drop on SZFE.

What _was_ surprising, when it did, is how the SZFE community fought
back: with a sustained and effective movement of cultural
resistance—the most serious defiance from any of the universities
commandeered by the regime. The young civil rights lawyer—and recent
TV student at SZFE, Nóra Aujeszky—has been keeping a tally: On
January 1, 2020, there were twenty-one public universities (plus five
applied sciences institutes), she tells me, and by January 1, 2022,
only five were left. In those two years, the twenty-one others were
handed over to private boards aligned with Orbán’s right-wing
party, Fidesz.

It’s hard to withstand their dominion. As much as Orbán admires
Vladimir Putin (and he managed to exempt Hungary from the European
embargo against Russian oil last spring), his authoritarianism is more
bureaucratic than blustery. Through legalistic maneuvers and scads of
money, his regime swamps rather than aggressively suppresses
opposition. So, on the surface, Hungary looks like a functioning
democracy: protesters march in public, voters go to the polls,
journalists aren’t jailed. Rather, dissenters are overwhelmed. The
state and its tycoons buy up institutions like the press, consolidate
their power, and simply drown out those who somehow remain
independent—which is how Orbán won a landslide re-election to a
fourth term last April: media repeatedly trumpeted his false
accusation that his opponent would send Hungarian troops into Ukraine.
“We have defended Hungary’s sovereignty and freedom,” Orbán
crowed as the results came in.

Little wonder that Orbán is a beacon to the American right. He drew a
standing ovation as the headliner at CPAC —the Conservative
Political Action Conference put on by the American Conservative
Union—in Dallas in August, where he proclaimed, “The globalists
can all go to hell. I have come to Texas.” He was featured as the
keynote speaker at CPAC’s earlier May gathering, held in Budapest.
Donald Trump fawned over him in a video address: “He is a great
leader, a great gentleman, and he just had a very big election result.
I was very honored to endorse him.” Along with the blatantly
antisemitic and racist Hungarian talk-show host, Zsolt Bayer, and the
American “pizzagate” conspiracist Jack Posobiec, Orbán shared the
CPAC podium with his biggest US cheerleader, Tucker Carlson.
“Programs like his,” Orbán enthused, “should be broadcast day
and night. Or as you say, 24/7.” A year earlier, Carlson broadcast
his show from Budapest.

At the time, Carlson described Hungary as a “small country with a
lot of lessons for the rest of us.” He meant, of course, Orbán’s
systematic transfer of democratic institutions into the hands of
conservative plutocrats. The crucial lessons for the _rest_ of the
rest of us, who already quake at the overweening power of minority
Republican control and the party’s unabated Trumpism, can be found
in the fortitude and ingenuity of the refuseniks of the SZFE, who
resisted their university takeover with a combination of direct
action, court challenges, and powerful spectacle. When they had
exhausted those democratic means of opposition—and demonstrated to
the public how Orbán bulldozed right over them—this scrappy band of
artists, a breed not known for prolonged political organizing,
invented an autonomous, forward-looking alternative: the Freeszfe
Society.

They are speaking to us from the future. Assembled from dozens of
interviews between the spring of 2021 and autumn of 2022 and from
documents, videos, and social media posts, this is their story.

I      

Where the story precisely begins is hard to fix. “It’s like a
Greek tragedy” in that respect, Upor says, noting that one could
take it back to Orbán’s embrace of ultra-conservatism with his
victory in 2010 or to Hungary’s first waddling steps toward
democracy after the fall of the USSR or to its capitulation to Nazis
in 1939 or even to the territory-ceding Trianon treaty of 1920, much
mythologized by the wound-scratching right. But for what would amount
to the action of the Greek tragedy—and it must be said that the
story of Freeszfe is no tragedy, but more an “overcoming the
monster” tale—it starts with the announcement in the winter of
2020 that Orbán was coming after SZFE. Students and faculty spent
months seeking to negotiate with the Minister of Innovation and
Technology, László Palkovics, exploring their legal options, and
organizing. The faculty senate hosted weekly meetings and invited
students and all SZFE personnel; they issued a regular newsletter and
kept up an active social media stream, publishing their correspondence
with the government for everyone to see. Kata Csató, a puppetry
professor, got to work activating SZFE as a chapter of Hungary’s
higher education union. Students, meanwhile, arranged forums for
themselves—sometimes bringing sociologists or political scientists
as presenters—to help them understand what was going on and to plan
their response. They also traveled to other parts of Hungary to meet
with students from other threatened schools. “We were waking up,”
says Aujeszky. Through their own social media accounts, the students
made “#FreeSZFE” a trending hashtag.

By summer 2020, it was clear enough that Palkovics wasn’t going to
take any student or faculty concerns about academic freedom or
self-governance into account in the government’s swift imposition of
the new model, even as he went through the motions of seeking input.
Students organized public protests to request negotiations with the
ministry and though Palkovics finally sat down with them, he rejected
outright the demand that the faculty continue to choose its own rector
and, too, that faculty have any input into the members of a
supervising board the new model created. The SZFE community had sent
the ministry suggestions for what kinds of competencies such a board
would need, and recommended some excellent candidates—not so much
because they expected the government to heed their advice, but to
assert, as Upor puts it, that “this is how democracy should work and
you, government guys, are playing a dirty anti-democratic game.”
Then, in early July, Parliament passed the bill authorizing the model
change, and by the end of that month, unilaterally announced the
members of the new board. The SZFE community learned their names in
the press—among them, two oil magnates. The board chair would be
none other than Attila Vidnyánszky, who had spent the preceding
months belittling the SZFE in the Fidesz-aligned press, deriding
students as “Lenin boys and girls” naively carrying out orders
from extremist professors. The school, he insisted, needed to be more
nationalistic and Christian.  

As the deadline for the September 1 takeover loomed, the faculty
senate sent Palkovics their proposal for updated bylaws that might
make the model change workable, and the minister invited them in for
what they thought would be a discussion. Instead, Palkovics handed
over the ministry’s own nonnegotiable bylaws, which stripped the
senate of all powers. “There was no way we would keep even a small
grain of our autonomy,” Upor says. Faculty leaders wrote to
Vidnyánszky one last time in hopes of hammering out a viable SZFE
future together and asked him to respond by the morning of August 31,
the eve of the new semester and the imposition of the new bylaws.

With no reply, the senate gathered backstage before their press
conference at SZFE’s Órdy Theater, a blocky mid-twentieth-century
building that served as the center of the theater department—and
soon became the headquarters of the resistance. While the audience
filed in—members of the SZFE community and, as Upor puts it, “an
army of reporters”—the faculty senators met backstage and went
over their plan. “Are we really doing this?” they asked each
other. Upor cried as he rehearsed their statement. He and his
colleagues, it announced, were compelled to take “a sadly drastic”
action: they would be stepping down from their leadership positions;
the senate was disbanding itself. They’d hang on for one more month
to take care of the myriad administrative tasks needed to launch
students into the semester, and they wouldn’t abandon them as
teachers. But come the first of October, Vidnyánszky and the board
would have to figure out how to run the place on their own.

Still, a twinge of uncertainty poked at Upor as he sat on stage
listening to the dramatically orchestrated sequence of speakers, who
took turns telling of their frustrations of the preceding months. He
had been teaching at SZFE for almost forty years and couldn’t bear
to think there wasn’t a way to save it. About eighty minutes into
the program, a staff member crept onto the stage to give Upor a
printout of an email just in from Vidnyánszky. “The bylaws stay as
they are,” it said. Bleary-eyed behind his frameless glasses and in
need of a shave and a lot of sleep, Upor stood and delivered the
resignation in a quiet, even cadence. The audience responded with a
standing ovation.

That evening, the somber mood of the auditorium was swept away by an
almost carnival spirit in the street—equal parts the reflexive,
terrified laughter of freefall and the giddy rush of knowing one has
made a righteous, irreversible move. The faculty leaders had lit a
match and, after months of smoldering, the students were on fire. They
had organized a street party in front of the Ódry, both a protest of
the model change and celebration of their teachers. They planned a
countdown to midnight when the SZFE would become another Orbán
outpost. In getups pulled from the costume shop, they cavorted as rock
bands played, and in-between tunes, some testified. The directing
major Bálint Antal, for one, told the crowd that come morning, he’d
be attending a different university from the one he’d applied to
four years earlier, but that they couldn’t let the new board define
them. “They can have the walls and buildings,” he said, “but the
university is its people, and we can’t be taken over.”

Out of nowhere, it started to pour—a deluge befitting _King
Lear_ or _The Tempest_, says directing student Dániel Máté
Sándor—and everyone scrambled into the auditorium. Some dozen
students, who had organized the forums and actions all summer, huddled
in a hallway: Was this the moment to ask whether their classmates were
ready to escalate their tactics? A rock band made up of acting
students—assembled for a theater project Sándor was
developing—took to the stage and struck up some alt-rock covers, the
countdown clock projected on a scrim behind them. As midnight
approached, the crowd hollered out the seconds. “Tíz, kilenc,
nyolc, hét, hat!” In a classic frontman gesture, the lead singer
grabbed the standing mic and yanked it toward his face—Öt, négy,
három, kettő … ”—but instead of belting the next Control Group
number when the countdown arrived at “egy!”—one—he posed some
questions: “Do we take over the university?” The crowd screamed
its assent. “Are we going to stay here?” Even louder cheers, soon
followed by lusty boos when he added, “Do we accept the new
leaders?”

In their many summer meetings, students had floated the possibility of
preventing the new board from entering the building and they’d
posted about it in their wider student Facebook group, but until that
moment, no one was sure they’d do it. Petra Al-Farman, a quietly
intense dramaturgy student, was thrilled—and frightened. “If you
say you’re going to do this, you have to see it through,” she
thought, even as she shouted along at the concert, “and we weren’t
really prepared.” They got prepared, fast. Along with Antal and
other classmates, Al-Farman stayed at the theater through the night,
hashing out next steps until they fell asleep. Antal was jostled awake
a few hours later by a friend: “Bálint, Bálint, the press is
here!” Word of the occupation was out, but the building
didn’t _look _like it was occupied, so he and friends went running
through the dorm upstairs to awaken and mobilize their colleagues;
those living in apartments who’d gone home overnight to change
clothes, returned with sleeping bags, yoga mats, provisions. Quickly,
they made banners and flags declaring “#FreeSZFE,” “We Stand for
the Freedom of our University,” “We Won’t Be Silenced” and
hung them out the windows of the six-story building.

Students assembled in the theater for the first of what would become
daily hours-long, democratic, decision-making forums and issued their
demands: The new board must resign and the ministry restart
negotiations on the basis of the university’s lawfully guaranteed
autonomy. Until those conditions were met, they declared, the students
would maintain the blockade. About one hundred of them moved into the
Ódry building, and soon some shifted to a couple of other SZFE
spaces. The group’s press office set up in the film department’s
building, where screenwriting student Panni Szurdi slept on its small
couch; dramaturg Al-Farman preferred the gym beneath the Ódry theater
for the mats on the floor. “We just jumped into it,” says Antal,
driven by the feeling that “anything can happen and the strong
belief we were doing the right thing.”

The occupation lasted seventy-one days.

II

As theater- and filmmakers accustomed to dividing labor to produce
work as a team, students instantly formed groups (or beefed up some
that had been functioning since the summer) to handle communications,
street protests, legal strategies, social media, banner-making, COVID
protocols, and more—even as the semester began, and classes went
forward. One student acquired some do-not-cross police tape—red and
white in Hungary—and stretched it across the building entrance. That
tape, along with “#FreeSZFE” and the image of a hand raised in
protest—or to represent a student claiming a turn to speak in their
forums—produced a powerful visual identity for the movement, soon
adopted by the students’ many supporters in liberal Budapest, often
vilified by the right with the usual tropes that depict urban centers
as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the hinterlands as the “authentic”
nation. Café and shop owners decked their storefronts with police
tape; dog owners tied a length around their pets’ collars. Untold
numbers posted selfies with a hand pressed toward the camera lens,
“Freeszfe” penned onto their palms. Locals dropped by the Ódry to
donate mattresses, pizzas, home-baked goodies, and so many groceries
that the students passed many of them along to foodbanks.

International arts luminaries—the likes of Peter Brook, Caryl
Churchill, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Ariane Mnouchkine, Nico Muhly,
Eddie Redmayne, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Robert Wilson—signed
letters of support and posted encouragement on social media. Cate
Blanchett sported a Freeszfe t-shirt under a fancy blazer at the
Venice Film Festival. Yellow pandemic facemasks, printed with the hand
and Freeszfe logo, became the it-accessory of the season, selling out
at demonstrations for a donation of any size, and popping up all over
Europe.

Every day the students put on a brief press conference in front of the
festooned building, featuring different speakers each time. There were
no leaders in this horizontal movement, but a clear message for every
morning session was hashed out in the full forum the night before.
Reporters from the independent media dropped by daily to check on
developments. If the team worried that they risked repeating
themselves, they nudged the action committee to plan a performance or
protest to “build a narrative around,” as Panni Szurdi puts it.
Each press conference ended with the students’ adaptation of a
well-known Hungarian folk tune about a clandestine romance, whose
lyrics they changed to proclaim that their “secret
university”—one involving trysts with other schools—would, like
the lovers in the original song, soon shine forth. Students sang it at
all their events, and it quickly caught on. Actors in independent
theaters sang it at the curtain calls of their shows as a gesture of
allyship.

All the while the protesters kept up their studies, learning about
Kleist or klieg lights part of the day and debating and preparing
their actions the rest, all in a new way: “Today, in agreement with
our professors, we are stepping out of the traditional educational
framework to found a republic at our occupied university,” they said
in a statement released in the press conference the morning fall
classes began. For their part, the faculty—thanks to Csató’s work
with the union—declared a strike on October 1. They refused to
cooperate with the new administration but kept working with their
students in their “learning republic,” where, together, they broke
down disciplinary boundaries, brought political theory into aesthetic
discussions, and made artwork responsive to and expressive of their
defense of the school, all “in the name of democracy and creativity
with the tools of democracy and creativity.”

While hitting the goals of the standard syllabus, for instance, film
students documented the movement, refining their camera, narrative,
and editing techniques as they made movies about the occupation, often
quickly supplying polished short daily pieces for the press team to
post on social media. They worked as a team on a full-length
documentary, amassing more than 1000 hours of footage. One segment
powerfully chronicles how students planned, in a nerve-fraying
all-night meeting, to block the entry of the SZFE’s newly appointed
chancellor the next morning. The chancellor, Gábor Szarka, a former
army colonel who blustered into the story like a _miles
gloriosus_ of ancient Roman comedy, had tried to tiptoe into the
building through a back parking lot doorway one day, but was rebuffed
by students; now, about 10 days later, he was coming back with a full
media entourage, to insist on marching into his office. In Frederick
Wiseman style, the student filmmakers follow the events without
commentary or explanation, from the wee-hours debates in the
auditorium to Szarka’s arrival and stand-off at the door. The camera
closes in on Szarka as he reads a prepared statement that reveals his
cluelessness about the students’ collective authority: “The person
who sent you here will be responsible for this,” he threatens. The
camera stays on his face with its twitchy jowls, as we hear a student
delivering the response: the new leadership must resign, and autonomy
be restored. Szarka didn’t try again; he set up an office in a
different building.

Students had role-played passive resistance the night before in case
cops would try to drag them from the blockade; after all, police in
riot gear had skirmished with demonstrators when thousands took to the
streets to protest the crackdown against CEU in 2017. But the
authorities didn’t send in any muscle that day, or ever. That had to
be a measure, Szurdi ventures, of the favorable image the students had
managed to project nationally. Unlike CEU, which had been painted as a
foreign entity, the #FreeSZFE movement, Szurdi explains, “let
Hungary see us for what we are: students who wanted to learn and were
frustrated by unfair changes, smiling and singing” and not
“whining like rebellious teenagers” as right-wing media would have
it. What’s more, the students didn’t align themselves with any
political faction nor invite any party representatives to speak at
their events. While they framed their struggle within the wider attack
on democratic safeguards—and the scapegoating of LGBTQ and Roma
people—they showed themselves as independent thinkers, committed to
their studies, serious about their rights, and unwilling to surrender
the optimism, ardor, and downright joy befitting their youth. This
wasn’t tactical “respectability politics,” but a vivid
demonstration of how to advance a cause democratically, and without
the vitriol, cynicism, and aggressiveness of the regime: a compelling
alternative to authoritarian power in style as well as substance.

Addressing the public, after all, is part and parcel of what
performing artists do. “We _always_ have to think about how we can
communicate our story,” says Antal, as if noting something as
ordinary as breathing—and the movement found ways not just
to _present_ their struggle, but to involve fellow citizens in it.
In addition to the students who staffed the building’s doors and
admitted only those who were currently enrolled or employed there (and
checked temperatures and mask compliance), the group also posted more
symbolic sentries on the deep overhang above the entrance to the Ódry
theater and scheduled leading members of the cultural and civic
community to stand guard with them in half-hour shifts. Locals came by
regularly just to see who had joined the defense—and, as Upor points
out, to imbibe a heady dose of hope.

Civilians could participate in the group’s first major demonstration
after beginning the occupation, as part of a chain stretching from the
Ódry to the Parliament about four miles away; the route went along
the Danube and passed by other privatized universities, whose own
students joined in. From hand to hand, some five thousand human links
(with thousands more walking alongside them) conveyed the faculty
senate’s charter emphasizing “the separation of universities from
political and economic power,” rolled up and tied with a ribbon of
police tape.

To honor the faculty leadership when their month of post-resignation
service was up—“that September was the longest five years of my
life,” Upor notes dryly—the students staged a tribute on the Ódry
balcony, inviting them to stand guard with torches as hundreds of
students on the street below applauded, then stayed still, in silent
salute, for thirty minutes. One torch ignited a small fire that
remained on the balcony for a few days, and from it, five students lit
new torches and set out running in different directions with copies of
the university charter, passing them in Olympic relay style to
colleagues from universities in five cities beyond Budapest; they
covered a total of nearly seven hundred miles. When the students
prepared a legal complaint contesting violations of academic freedom
and autonomy stipulated in the Hungarian constitution, a woman dressed
as Justice, in a white gown and a blindfold of police tape, delivered
it in a ceremonious procession to the Constitutional Court.

Beyond the usual histrionics of protests, the major demonstrations of
#FreeSZFE were dramaturgically shaped, taking participants through a
carefully built narrative arc. Their grandest production was a mass
event on October 23, the anniversary of the start to Hungary’s 1956
revolution against Soviet rule, which had, itself, been kicked off by
university students. The demo, sixty-five years later, says Sándor,
who directed it, “was something of a remake.” Sándor, who gives
off a friendly tortured-artist vibe even via Zoom as he sucks skinny
cigarettes and pulls at his watch cap, chuckles over the monumental
form of the event: it’s the style favored by Vidnyánszky, he notes.
While Vidnyánszky presents jingoistic historical dramas at the
National Theater, the October 23 demo turned pageantry to dissenting
ends, placing the SZFE students in the same trajectory as their
freedom-defending great-grandparents, and interpellating all the
participants into an alternative idea of patriotism. It was
performative in the original sense of the term: the protesters enacted
their vision by calling for “Free university! Free Hungary!” while
marching through the streets, some thirty thousand strong.

Sándor planned for the crowd to walk the last five hundred yards of
the route in silence, so they would come to the endpoint, a stage with
a huge screen, in unified solemnity. As they arrived, symphonic music
enveloped them: An orchestra—forty students from the Liszt Ferenc
Music Academy livestreamed onto the screen from inside a nearby
classroom—struck up the stately string opening of Beethoven’s
“Egmont Overture,” the unofficial anthem of the 1956 revolution,
broadcast repeatedly on radios in that period. It is known by
Hungarians, says Al-Farman, as “the soundtrack of the fight for
freedom.” The crowd stood in a rapt hush through the eight-minute
piece, and with the accelerating notes of the blaring brass finale,
burst into passionate applause.

Throughout the occupation, students kept their daily forums going,
determining collectively not only how to respond to each logistical
challenge the new administration put up, but also how to keep fighting
for the underlying principles. With some bluster, Szarka cut off the
internet in the Ódry building at one point, and several times, sought
to declare the semester canceled because, he asserted, students
weren’t doing their schoolwork. With six hours’ notice one day, he
ordered the building evacuated, including the fifty or so students who
lived in the upstairs dorms. While students stood their ground in
every room, supporters massed in the streets outside the building; no
one was evicted. In a court challenge, they at least won a stay, with
the judge reasoning that there would be no way for students to get the
class-time back should they prevail when the case would eventually be
decided. So Orbán’s regime decreed that students have no standing
to bring such legal complaints, and the new SZFE leadership declared
the school closed, again. And again, tied up the students in
time-consuming legal battles (which they fought with the help of pro
bono attorneys.) Though the students eventually won a convoluted fight
to have their fall credits counted, the court has yet to deliver a
ruling on the closing of the semester.

In the immediate term, the matter became moot on November 11, when
Hungary proclaimed a nation-wide COVID lockdown, and classes—and
late-night forums—had to move on-line. No one wants to say that the
health mandate provided a respectable out for an occupation that had
no logical end; packing up with her comrades, says Szurdi, then age
twenty-three, was the most miserable day of her, admittedly lucky,
life. It was clear enough by that point that the students were not
going to reverse the government’s expropriation of the SZFE and
while they’d soon have a Christmas break, the question of what to do
about the next semester now hung over them like a swelling cloud.
Still, the activism had changed the students’ lives—and their art.
“For the first time in my life and in my country, I felt
powerful,” says Antal, “even when they were making laws against us
and trying to assassinate our characters in the media. I could feel
they were struggling. Society was united behind us and they couldn’t
spin the story to their side.” As for his art, early in the
occupation, Antal decided to change his thesis directing project from
an adaptation of a Garcia Marquez novella to Ibsen’s 1882 social
comedy, _An Enemy of the People. _“It is a horrible feeling when
you are working in a rehearsal room and something more important is
happening outside the walls,” Antal says, tugging at his goatee.
“I wanted to work on material that was about the things I was
thinking about as a citizen.”

As they rolled up their tents and blankets and stuffed toothbrushes
and t-shirts into their knapsacks, the students issued a promise:
“We are not giving up the blockade, we are taking it with us… And
the blockade will last until the political repression ends.”

Then they headed down an astounding alternative path to victory, one
their teachers had been quietly blazing throughout the fall.

III

All semester long, Kata Csató, the puppeteer, was on the phone almost
daily with Christoph Lepschy, a Dramaturgy professor at Mozarteum
University in Salzburg, and nearly as frequently with Elisabeth
Schweeger, then the director of the Academy of Performing Arts
Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg, Germany (ADK). They were acquainted
through an exchange platform called Europe: Union of Theater Schools
and Academies (E-UTSA), which fosters visits between theater students
from different European campuses. SZFE’s E-UTSA colleagues followed
the seizure of their school with alarm and immediately signed onto
statements of support. But that hardly felt adequate. Though the
assault on academic freedom was extreme in Hungary, the threat
pervades Europe, Lepschy notes, whether from far-right
“authoritarian processes” or from mainstream “neoliberal
developments,” and, he’s quick to add, “You understand this
very, very well in America.” Institutions, he continues, citing
Timothy Snyder’s recommendations in _On Tyranny_, have to be
protected.

For months, Lepschy, Schweeger and other E-UTSA colleagues met with
Csató and SZFE faculty in Budapest, Vienna, and endlessly in
cyberspace to figure out how they could do so. Invoking the EU’s
Lisbon Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning
Higher Education in the European Region—which requires that EU
universities accept the academic accomplishments of students from
other EU schools if they measure up to their own standards—they came
up with a radical plan. Once it was fully hatched, and the Hungarian
faculty knew it could protect the SZFE student protesters, they gave
it wings.

At the start of 2021, Csató, Upor, and their colleagues announced the
birth of the Freeszfe Society, a framework for sustaining—and
advancing—the independence, creativity, and democratic process at
the heart of their pedagogy for decades. A board of six—four faculty
(with Csató as president) and two students—would see to its mundane
functions while a democratic membership would develop programs and
policies in the style of the occupation’s forums.

A few weeks later, in a stunning blow to the Orbanist leadership at
the old SZFE, a majority of the full-time faculty— some thirty of
the roughly fifty full-time professors—informed the authorities that
they were not showing up for the new semester: They quit. And then 150
of about 250 students walked out, too.

The Freeszfe’s first crucial program was ready to embrace them.
Called Emergency Exit—EmEx for short—it enabled those students to
continue their studies and complete their degrees with one of five
European partners. The defiantly creative core of the project is that
the Budapest students keep working with their local classmates and
professors but amass credits, take their exams, and celebrate their
graduations at parallel programs in Austria, Germany, Poland or
Switzerland. EmEx could have dispersed students to study abroad at
their partner schools, but, says Upor, the sense of community was one
of the strongest aspects of SZFE, and they wanted to stick together,
especially after the upheaval they’d been through.

Students and faculty alike experienced a collective adrenaline crash
in the spring of 2021, compounding their share of universal
COVID-dread. But they carried on with the many legalistic and
administrative tasks required to make Freeszfe happen—the sorts of
unflashy sitting-at-a-computer activities that don’t draw the
attention the blockaders could attract for their high-production
protests. A flurry of problem-solving—how to plug students in
SZFE’s combined, five-year BA-plus-MA format, into the partner
schools that work differently; what languages exams and theses should
be in; how to fund student travel for graduation ceremonies—went on
quietly. “We held classes today. Not exactly a news story,” notes
Upor.

But under the circumstances, that effort is as staggering as 100
students holding down their school for seventy-one days. The Freeszfe
teachers, who were now giving seminars on translation or the history
of Hungarian theater or opera analysis or acting technique, as well as
advising end-of-term projects, were no longer earning a salary, or
even a minimum wage. They were working for free, while the Society was
scraping up some funds for space and equipment rentals from a Patreon
account, some grants, and fees for a few continuing education
courses—five of them, with a total of fifty-one students
enrolled. The classes meet in rooms offered by a local cultural
center and—sweet irony—in the vacated building belonging to the
Central European University, which also offered dormitory places to
about sixty EmEx students.

The old SZFE tried to thwart the new venture. First, they attempted to
sue Freeszfe over name infringement—and were laughed out of even an
Orbán-regime court. Then they sent cease-and-desist letters to the
European partner universities, which calmly replied by citing the
program’s accordance with European law. They shut down the Ódry
theater, not only the nerve center of the occupation, but also a
long-standing venue for young theater-makers. (Students staged a
funeral for it.) A Hungarian representative to the European
Parliament—a Fidesz member—complained of unfairness when that body
announced it would be awarding its estimable annual Citizens Prize to
Emergency Exit. Then, even as the Orbán-regime poured money into the
old SZFE—doubling its budget—in September 2021, another
seventy-one students decamped for Freeszfe.

October 2021 saw the first heady graduation ceremonies for EmEx
students, those who had been in their final year at SZFE during the
occupation. With some travel funding from the Goethe-Institut, nearly
fifty students took a weeklong bus trip to Germany and Austria—eight
to receive diplomas in Dramaturgy in Ludwigsburg and ten in Acting in
Salzburg, the rest to cheer them on. Traveling with them on the
eight-hour drive, Csató was astonished by their muted intensity as
they reflected on the tumultuous year they’d been through—“too
much for young people,” she says. It was emotional for faculty, too.
Directing professor László Bagossy, had to repeatedly rehearse his
speech about how the European partners used exactly what SZFE had
lost—their autonomy—to make EmEx happen, not so much because he
would be delivering it in German, but because he needed to “practice
not to weep on stage.” In her opening address, Elisabeth Schweeger
described the solidarity of ADK and the other partners: the “only
legitimate use of privilege is to use that power to work for
equality.” A graduating student spoke for his cohort, explaining
that the eight of them had written their speech collectively,
exquisite corpse style. A better name for a diploma, he said, would be
‘synergy,’ “from the Greek
word _syn_—together—and _ergon_ – work,” because it better
describes the experience of the students and professors and now, too,
ADK. German students celebrated their Hungarian counterparts with
song.

For his part, Upor, less than 14 months after he had dolefully
announced the SZFE leadership’s resignation in Budapest, stood
on-stage at ADK in a dark blazer with a Freeszfe button on his lapel,
and delivered a speech of jubilant incredulity. The Dramaturgy
graduates, he gushed, wrote brilliant analytical theses that showed
“we have not forgotten that we have the possibility to transform
society through art.” Not in a crude, didactic way, but with
open-ended inquiry and aesthetic invention.

IV

That was evident this past May, when Freeszfe presented “Art is
Free,” an ambitious six-day festival that featured screenings of
work by and discussions with independent filmmakers, and roundtable
discussions and expert lectures on themes like labor unions,
gender-based violence, and the invasion of Ukraine. Most important, it
showcased the work of EmEx pupils. The fourteen films by student
filmmakers, cinematographers, and television producers ranged from the
story of a drag queen to a dystopian fantasy of a world without snow.
Theater productions included adaptations of _Prometheus Bound_,
Orwell’s _1984_, and S. An-ski’s _The Dybbuk—_and a
pared-down, participatory version of Brecht’s _Caucasian Chalk
Circle_, a play that considers the nature of responsibility and asks
whether things (and children) should remain under the charge
of those who best care for them. Petra Al-Farman presented a
plaintive documentary piece, _Torokolat _(Estuary) in collaboration
with an eight-person improvisational choir called Soharóza; based on
interviews with parents and would-be parents, it explored the whiplash
of emotions of wanting to have children while also not wanting to
participate in the state’s aggressive insistence that Hungarians
reproduce and that women take up their “natural” role. Al-Farman
staged _Torkolat_ in an old bathhouse, where the singing –
shifting among pleasant harmonies, modal monophonics akin to Gregorian
chant, and guttural grunts and high-pitched howls—echoed with
haunting overtones.

One day of the May festival was dedicated to an open house about
Freeszfe’s upcoming continuing education programs. While the Society
can’t offer degrees because Freeszfe remains unaccredited—as they
are likely to forever, since being recognized as an up-to-snuff
graduate school would make them eligible for state funding—Freeszfe
is offering the most innovative courses in the field anywhere in
Hungary, and likely far beyond. Csató, for instance, teaches a class
in using objects for abstract thinking; the entire May festival was
curated and produced by the current Freeszfe class in arts management
and communications.

 In addition to seeing Freeszfe continue such classes, members—as
they expressed in a May assembly of more than 200 people—also want
the Society to continue supporting film and theater productions by
EmEx students and alums and, eventually, to serve as a wider incubator
for young artists. That’s needed, they say, especially as the Ódry
was closed and independent spaces are overstretched and
underfunded—and as Freeszfe students worry that they might be
black-balled in more mainstream sectors of their industry.

As daunting as these projects are for a day-to-day team of six people
with a meager budget, no campus, and seat-of-the-pants infrastructure,
Freeszfe is pursuing an even bolder vision. In the onslaught of the
2020-2021 schoolyear, Bagossy recalls, the faculty leaders had one
essential goal: “protecting our graduating students. It was a
short-term plan.” But as they forged productive collaborations and
made space for expanding and reinventing curriculum, even as the April
election squeezed more oxygen out of their atmosphere, they came to
realize—with astonishing optimism and enterprise—that “we have
to think about the future. The long-term future.”

In another year or so, all the EmEx students will have earned their
degrees, but that won’t be the end of Freeszfe’s alliance with
their European partners. They are now laboring to create a
non-national academy—a film and theater graduate school that would
belong to no single EU country but involve many. Cohorts of
international students would move as a group to study together in
various places—a quarter of a semester at the great puppetry
department in Bialystok, say, then the sound design program in
Copenhagen, or the translation course in Budapest. The EmEx faculty
are awaiting word on whether they’ll receive a two-year planning
grant from the Erasmus foundation for this shrewd concept—two years
during which they’d discuss not just the labyrinthine logistics it
would require, but also topics like “nonviolent communication in art
production” and “art and activism.” “We have to face it,”
says Csató, whose typically low-key register rachets up in volume and
speed as she emphasizes the point. “Europe, and especially Central
Europe, have had the same systems and methodologies for so long. In
some ways they are helpful, in others too closed. We are the ones who
can open them. And this is why we will win.” She pauses, folds her
black-nail-polished hands, and gazes up, as if into the future.
“I’m really curious to see how far we can go.”

Some encouraging hints emerged from a four-week project in Salzburg in
July that involved about twenty-five students from Freeszfe and
Mozarteum and opened new vistas for participants. (It was cut short by
a week when half the group came down with COVID; they hope to
re-convene in February.) Bálint Antal, for one, was pushed to think
with more complexity about the appeal of populist leaders—and how to
represent them on stage—as he worked with peers from Germany,
Austria, and Ukraine on a text about authoritarian plutocracy by
Elfriede Jelinek, the postdramatic, Nobel Prize-winning Austrian
playwright. The half-dozen Ukrainian artists were recent additions to
the project, having come from embattled Kharkiv and Kyiv to continue
their studies at the Mozarteum, thanks to the framework the
Freeszfe’s Emergency Exit program had established. “We were
escaping from a culture war,” says Antal with equal measures of
pride and amazement, “and now, the system created as we were
fighting for ourselves could be used for others facing an actual
war.”

Meanwhile, Orbán’s assault on Hungary’s independent theaters
escalated again. Just as Antal was arriving in Salzburg, several
theaters announced drastic measures as funding was choked off: The
Atrium Theater, for instance (artistic home of Róbert Alföldi), was
closing because promised state subsidies for 2022 had not arrived and
what critic Tamás Jászay calls “the flagship of Hungarian
independent theaters,” Béla Pintér and Company, jacked up ticket
prices and moved to a larger venue in a desperate attempt to try to
make up for shortfall. The government announced a freeze in cultural
funding (among other ministries). For Antal, the Jelinek text seemed
ever more apt.

The play, _Am Königsweg_ (_On the Royal Road_), associatively
depicts the rise of a coarse, self-promoting grifter. Referring to the
Bible, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Grand Guignol, the Twitterverse, and
then some, it’s arrayed on the page mostly as a beguiling stream of
verbiage, so it serves well as “a point of departure,” says
Lepschy, one of the workshop teachers. Participants brought additional
material to incorporate. Antal created a scene based on the Hungarian
legend of the coronation of Matthias Corvinus, the folk hero on the
country’s 1000-forint note, to explore state media and election
campaigns that produce, he says, “so much noise you can’t know
what is true and what is not.” The Ukrainian actors in his scene
challenged one of its premises: Why, they wanted to know, was the
public falling for the false promises of a despotic leader and
cheering him on instead of fighting back? Could Antal generalize based
on the Hungarian majority’s embrace of Orbán in a way that made
sense for them?

And what about for us?

An unsettling allegory of the crisis of democracy as hypercapitalism
spawns right-wing populism, the play has—at least in German—a
punning subtitle: “The Burgher King.” Jelinek has made no secret
of who inspired this image of a fast-food-guzzling, narcissistic,
gold-grubbing autocrat, though he is never named in the play: Donald
Trump.

_[Alisa Solomon is a professor at the Columbia Journalism School,
where she directs the arts and culture concentration master’s
program. Her books include Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater
and Gender (1997) and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of
Fiddler on the Roof (2013). As dramaturg, she most recently has been
working with Anna Deavere Smith on her Pipeline Project and on the
play Love All.]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this article to Portside._

* Hungary
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* Victor Orban
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* Europe
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* students
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* Student protests
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* Culture
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* theater
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