FIUK AND CSAJOK - At the Rose des Vents

2005

What if we were to go back to our primal instincts? The first part of the diptych presented by Hungarian choreographer Pàl Frenàk at the Rose des Vents starts off with this question. Fiuk (The Hidden Men) is about the place of men in a castrating society that shuts up their instinctual nature. The dancers open the door to the cage and let their savagery express itself. As an inverted mirror image of this first segment, the choreographer offers Csajok (Credo Hysterica) as his second part, a world of women that plunges us into reverie and chaos. Through his four nymphs on stage, the choreographer attempts to show us the extent to which dreams, images created by our unconscious, make up our entire being and perpetually come back to us. Pàl Frenàk belongs to that generation of choreographers who are able to achieve brilliance. His danced discourse is full of images, gestures, clashes whose every blow goes straight to the guts and the heart. The dance is often violent, made up of bodies that crash into each other, that jerk as if overcome by seizures. Nothing very rational in all of this, just extreme sensitivity and an astonishing capacity to make bodies speak in order to bring us face to face with the limits of the human being. In addition to the dance itself, much care has gone into the sound and light design and they do not fail to grab our attention. Pàl Frenàk has a gift for offering us captivating melodies and fascinating lighting. Feeling both uneasy and hypnotized, we cannot take our eyes away from the stage. Going to see a work by Pàl Frenàk means agreeing to participate in an unsettling experience that, in the end, leaves no one completely unaffected.