Through her body, the Hungarian dancer Boglárka Börcsök awakens three ghosts, to whom she lends her body. She lets herself be inhabited, embodied by them, finally by them: Irén Preisich, Éva E. Kovács and Ágnes Roboz. Women aged 90, 96 and 101 who contributed to the development of modern dance in Hungary. Boglárka met these dancers on a documentary film project, The art of movementproduced with Andreas Blom.
Spatiotemporal Rift
We are a small group, cleared of our belongings left in the hall, and if necessary, equipped with an audiophone; the performance, in English, is dubbed live. We are invited to enter a small round space, partitioned off by immaculate white curtains, like the floor and the furniture. A bed, a few stools, two armchairs, a sofa.
A woman, Boglárka, dressed all in white, also moves, like an automaton. His red mouth contrasts with his skin, his face, his arms and his legs veiled in white, either by powder or by high socks and mesh gloves. White, everything is white. She looks like a clown, or a ghost, disjointed. Her voice is calm, curiously limpid, a bit serious, she tells. She tells us a theory about ghosts. They don’t just make appearances, they come back. And when the mourning linked to them is mishandled, they are not assimilated, not internalized, but incorporated, made prisoner of us, and they take possession of us.
Would she have mourned these three women badly? Or does she play out what it looks like when we find ourselves taken by another? Her body becomes a cathedral in which the voices, the gestures, the density of the three deceased resonate in turn. His facial expressions, his attitudes, his breathing as well as his swallowing, everything says the years that weigh on him. 90, 96 and 101 years old. Everything says the weight of a life, of a body that has moved, of a memory that remembers, of a past that resurfaces. Boglárka grabs us, projects us into another time, she presents us with the women who inhabit it.
Interactions between queens and politicians
In the circle, there are no defined places, we are together, taken in the journey, seated on the floor or on the furniture. Boglárka moves us according to his gestures, his requests. And yes, old ladies need help to move! On several occasions, she addresses us, she tells, in the childish sense of the term, with her whole body, her whole intention. The smallest of his gestures design performance halls, piano bars, a ball. It creates a bond, the one that is so lacking, that we struggle to find or keep. She commits herself, and engages the other. Holding an elderly person’s arm to help them move forward, sit down, get up, lie down and cover themselves, drink and take off their shoes, it’s so simple, and so complicated.
She reminds us, through modern dance, of the importance of gesture. The political aspect of the gesture. The essence of modern dance “is being able to move in your own way”, she tells us, “from nuance to gigantic”. This dance, although considered bourgeois, was banned by communism in the middle of the 20th century, replaced by ballet, folk dance and ballroom dance. We laugh. Aren’t there things more bourgeois today than these dances?
She also tells us about the Second World War, in her own way. Of these boys who ran away from the girls’ homes when they learned that, having converted to Calvinism, these women were of Jewish origin. She tells us about these women, their condition, what it was like to be a woman when machines did not exist. The weight of a house. It passes through his body, this contention. And we think about modern dance. “Being able to move in your own way”. We say that they were strong, Irén, Éva and Ágnes. Then, when the image from the original documentary emerges, we understand. We understand the tenderness, we understand the work. We understand the impregnation, a sublime illusion.
