The Alkalmi Company (Ad Hoc Company) is a small group with changing members that was formed apropos of a theatrical experiment in 2010. The founding members met at the French Institute at the University of Debrecen. Roused by the experiences gathered at Judit Lukovszki’s drama game classes and by the French theatricals’ legendary (hi)story, and also driven by their curiosity towards each other, the students decided to begin their collective artistic work.
After their first play called God slapped me in the face with a honeybread (2010, Eszter Liktor, Zita Sándor), which consisted of the text montage and motion-study they built around the theme of the play, the members did not want to give up the atmosphere of the rehearsals and the joyful time spent together, so they continued to work on artistic and theatrical projects together. This is how their next play called Burn baby burn (2011, Eszter Liktor, Zita Sándor, Melinda Papp, Zsigmond Lakó, Lóránt Katona), whose cast was not exclusively made up of students of French by this point, came into being. This time, the group used an already-existing script. The French contemporary playwright Carine Lacroix’s play was translated by the Ad Hoc Translation Workshop, a group formed by the French Institute’s senior students, who used their experiences from an OSZMI and National Theater co-organized literary translation workshop. The play they formed based on this text already involved “outsiders,” too. The next play in the series was the Serbian writer Đorđe Lebović’s modern and nearly absurd fairy tale: The Thousandth night (2012, Eszter Liktor, Zita Sándor, I. Bence Marczin, Lóránt Katona). The group performed the play with great success at the Scene Transitions Festival in 2013. It was only natural for the group of core members that had developed over the years to continue their work together with yearly productions.
With their performance called Let’s blame Poe! the group received Golden Qualification at the Inspection of Hungarian Works. The contribution of Lóránt Katona, the permanent musician member of the group, played a great role in the strengthening of the group’s cohesion. Thanks to his contribution, the next duo performance called “Weöres-Evening” was able to come to life in 2014, co-starring and written by Gina Éles, and this duo participated at the Amateur Theaters’ Assembly in Balassagyarmat.
The group’s 2016 performance was commissioned by The Roma Press Center, which also organised a Roma Day with the contribution of university students in Debrecen. This play, called …but since He created man in his own image was a stage study that was an impressionistic tribute to the art of the Roma poet Tamás Jónás. It was a “song for the cold fire,” dealing with the depraving dilemmas of self-worth, humans’ compulsive desire for perfection and its impossibility, and the cruelty and pain found
in human existence. On the other hand, it was a playful pursuit of joy, too, since “whoever does not dance may come to grief.”