Csaba Kutszegi: Frenetic on Stage (Tánckritika.hu)
FrenÁk Company · FrenÉsie · Müpa Budapest
It feels as though Frenák hits the world square on. He speaks about us in bursts of collective madness and in moments of quiet, frightened solitude, confronting us with our own desperate struggle for attention, for the chance to keep going, to survive, for joy, victory and pleasure.
The secret of the Frenák phenomenon is hard to fathom. It must be twenty years since I first heard someone say of him, “It’s always the same. He repeats himself.” It was true then, and it’s still true today. Pál Frenák still stages what is essentially the same choreography, or, if you like, he still talks about the same thing, still says the same thing. So how is it that it’s different every time, and even keeps getting better? I can all but predict when he’ll have the dancers repeat one familiar sequence or another, over and over. Yet there I am, along with everyone else in the audience, watching with taut, expectant attention to see what will happen. And nothing particularly unusual happens. Or, to put it another way, what keeps happening, or keeps failing to happen, is very, very unusual indeed.
Photos by Csaba Mészáros
Especially of late, every Frenák choreography seems like a scathing parody of itself. There’s a charm, and hardly a discreet one, in the way Pál Frenák has spent decades shamelessly pouring Frenák clichés onto the stage, having first laid the groundwork with pop culture’s brazenly loud, brilliantly crafted international hits. If someone else did this to him, the result would be cheap plagiarism. When he does it to himself, it feels as though he hits the world square on. He speaks about us in bursts of collective madness and in moments of quiet, frightened solitude, confronting us with our own desperate struggle for attention, for the chance to keep going, to survive, for joy, victory and pleasure. Equally impossible to explain or understand is how, on Frenák’s stage, even the brutal, aggressive creatures are somehow vulnerable. You can hardly stay angry with them. You might even love them. Perhaps that’s because in this world the aggressor can become the victim at any moment. Even Jesus Christ the Saviour is taken down from the cross, his body placed in a motorcycle sidecar and driven off into the endless round. And who drives off with him? Why, we do. It’s us everywhere. We’re victims, saviours and aggressors, all to some degree, if only deep down.
FrenÉsie has me from the opening scene. A song comes on. The company’s director, dressed in white inside and out, from head to toe, all but hidden in white, his sunglasses the only dark thing about him, seems to give the signal to begin with a few ethereally delicate gestures. The song plays softly, recognisable from its opening chords and then its first line, “Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin…” Yes, it’s Leonard Cohen singing Dance Me to the End of Love, one of his melancholy, decadent songs, and an astonishingly wise, life-affirming one at that. Rarely do you see such magnificent, outlandish contemporary mega-kitsch on a dance stage. Rarer still, sitting in the audience, are moments that warm you through and make you inexplicably happy. It seems we’ll simply have to accept that on Frenák’s stage, a Barbie doll becomes the Mona Lisa and a sentimental klezmer chanson becomes a Mahler movement. And the other dancers haven’t even come on yet…
Then the dancers appear in flashes. One after another, they vault over the back of the enormous, movable semicircular sofa that dominates centre stage and has by now become a fixture of Frenák’s work. They land and set about starting, or carrying on, the FrenÉsie, the frenzy in full swing. That’s what frénésie means in everyday French, too. Pál Frenák has shown us time and again how much he enjoys playing with titles. In that spirit, I’d happily suggest an alternative title for his new piece, FRENetika. But a dark shooter game has already claimed it. We could, however, coin an aesthetic category, Frenákian frenetics (even Mihály Babits would envy that alliteration). I wouldn’t be surprised if it became a favourite dissertation topic.
The motorcycle and sidecar keep coming back, this time without the body of Jesus. A wild biker in black leathers is at the controls, with a sexy woman in black knickers and a bra clinging on behind him. He treats her like a rag. He reaches back for her, whips her from side to side, tosses her about and lays her head in his lap while still riding. Léna Árvay-Vass flails and slams against the bike, then flies through the air in blithe defiance of the laws of physics. Plenty of people know what it is to be that helpless rag doll in real life. Then there are the tough vamps who bring men to heel. Every guy submits to Bettina Rose Jurák. They’re down on all fours at her feet. At one point, four macho men in helmets and leather jackets, with just tiny black briefs underneath, fawn over this wonder woman on the dizzying sofa of life, while Tom Jones’s unbeatable Sex Bomb blasts at full volume in one of pop-rock’s finest voices. Then, all of a sudden, innocence arrives in a low, velvety voice. I doubt anyone has ever used that word to describe Katalin Karády, yet there’s a real purity in the way Thália Egerházi translates one of her songs into sign language.
What’s going on here? What is this madness? You’re not supposed to write this sort of thing nowadays, but back when we were students, we called the sum of all this intensive totality. The idea was that art could capture the fullness of life in a single explosive burst. Just try putting all that into words! It’s a cliché that dance begins where words run out. That’s where you enter the world of abstract bodily expression, of gestures and glances, of images that burn themselves into you, of everything the stage can do at once. Explanations get you nowhere there. You have to give yourself over to the experience before you can begin to make sense of it. It takes artists with a sense of vocation and the humility to serve the work to bring that world to life onstage.
Frenák’s dancers lay themselves bare before us, body and soul. They want to do more than get through it. They want to live it, and they go as far as they have to. Every night they give themselves wholly to what they’re doing. They’re distinctive individuals, all working towards a shared success. Could that be the whole secret? That, plus deep concentration, practice, a way of life and a hell of a lot of work… They’re frenetic on stage.
FrenÉsie · FrenÁk Company
PerformersLéna Árvay-Vass, Balázs Buda, Gergely Cserháti, Kristóf Deák, Thália Egerházi, Bettina Rose Jurák, Mátyás Kovács, Zsolt Szlavkovszki
Creative and production team
Dramaturg: Dr Nóra Horváth Music editing: Attila Gergely Visual design: Victoria Frenak Costumes and design: Gergő Nyári Lighting design: FrenÁk Lighting implementation: Dávid Barad Artistic assistant: Léna Árvay-Vass Production assistant: Viktor Török Rope rigging: György Zoltai Co-choreographer: Bettina Rose Jurák Choreography: Crazy Társulás Concept: FrenÁk
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