Internationality. Networking. Mobility. Homesickness. Homelessness. Liminality.
Is my heritage strongly linked to the notion of ‘being at home’?
Body is my only companion. My remembering body. The body of a dancer.
But what is this body? Flesh and bones created in Hungary and trained to dance?
How does it store the knowledge and preserve the past? Scars and memory traces.
Our bodily behaviours emit all the corporeal experiences that we lived through. My premise is that each person stores and re-organises body memories (e.g. injury, running/escaping from something, kissing) as an evolving archive. Our everyday body techniques[1] reveal the culturally codified essence of one’s body, which means that the way we organise our movements is just a composite of what this body has learnt or experienced over time.
[1] Borrowing the expression from French sociologist-anthropologist Marcel Mauss.
Can we understand a dance through the history of a body that performed it?
Is it possible to approach a dance by the historical, political, aesthetical contextualization of its performer/creator?
Is body really an (evolving) archive?
These are my inquiries.
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Primarily (but not exceptionally) this project wanted to be proposed for theatres without a permanent company and specific profile, namely for host institutions. The project provides the opportunity to arrange a post-performance event, so to encourage the audience for a discussion.
The project can be attached to any ongoing dance shows regardless their style.
Any hosted companies can take part in it by proposing a collaboration with at least one dancer of the presented piece.
This project has the intention to help digesting any experience caused by a seen performance, but it does not work through theatre pedagogy. My aim is not to initiate the people to the language and structure of theatre, but to focus on their own exeriences and try to amplify those. Watching Someone Dancing is an individual journey, where there are no common conclusions (in the meaning-making), but only personal interpretations.
Until I cannot realise the project in this manner, I am going to perform it as a solo work, thus presenting a my choreography, then tracing my body history.
Further information and visual materials of the creative process are provided here:
I can undertake the set up of this project in any institutions either personally or by training the local staff how to maintain it. In case of interest, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me:
Allowance would be required only for travelling and accommodation if the host institution is not in the city where I am located.
(At the moment I am living in Budapest, Hungary.)
(At the moment I am living in Budapest, Hungary.)