Boglárka Börcsök – Performance/ Video-Installation 2019/2020

Genre: Performance, Video-Installation 

Partnerprogram: Workspacebrussels MMpraxis – Die Plattform hinter Montag Modus DIE IRRITIERTE STADT – Festival of the arts, Within Tanzpakt Stuttgart | TANZPAKT Stadt-Land-Bund TANZFONDS ERBE – an initiative by German Federal Cultural Foundation La Musée de la Danse / Centre choréographique de Rennes et de Bretagne, Senatsverwaltung für Culture und Europa, Berlin 

Project in HELLERAU: FIGURING AGE FIGURING AGE is a performance and video installation, made in collaboration with the filmmaker Andreas Bolm. In the performance, Börcsök tells and revives the personal stories and memories of three elderly female dancers from Budapest who are between 90, 96 and 101 years old. The Ladies were part of the early development of modern dance in Hungary. While accentuating and enlarging details of their gestures, postures and movements, Boglárka creates an uncanny presence that oscillates between living archive, physical proximity and a ghost séance. In parallel, a two channel video installation reveals the same elderly dancers in their private homes. The stillness of their rooms filled with personal objects and memories become the scenographic background for their dynamic performances on screen.

 

What inspires you? “The present is not a vanishing instant, it is a rich temporality of living and dying, inheriting pasts and enabling futures, but not futurist and not fixated on a vanished past. A thick present, a thick now is the potent time at stake.”       Donna Haraway 

Your first three thoughts about HELLERAU? What exactly did the SS do in the guesthouses? How did the Theater space look like when it was used as a military hospital? Do you have any pictures? 

How would you describe your way of working? For me, life experiences and performing practices are in constant dialogue. My working processes originate from personal encounters, observations, emotional connections and the practice of listening and looking. Based on extensive research, I enter into long-term artistic projects that deal with hidden histories, forgotten artists, abandoned localities, unseen power-narratives, questioning aesthetic hierarchies while exploring methods of embodiment, choreography, documentary and fiction. In the past 10 years, I’ve been developing a performative intensity that spans through various sources of movement and vocal expressions, working at the crossroads between dance, choreography, film, video and voice work presented in both theater and museum context.

www.boglarkaborcsok.net