Zsuzsa Rózsavölgyi investigates the female body, its role in today’s society, its reasons and aspects of successfulness or unsuccessfulness. Revealing taboos and personal confessions about living in a female body in a lecture-performance solo piece.

“The starting point of my solo piece is that my whole being is communication itself. All I need to do is simply exist in order to communicate some meaning. The size, colour, smell and condition of my body, and above all its gender, will communicate a context in which I exist, a character, a role that I have opted to take. When faced with a female body on stage, what do people actually see? What can a female body communicate about the roles that we choose to play and the roles that are pressed upon us by society? How can we transform this female body into a free entity of self-expression?” Zsuzsa Rózsavölgyi

Zsuzsa Rózsavölgyi’s self-composed, playfully humorous solo piece, which is backed with video inserts highlighting a number of social aspects of the female body, explores how society restrains and curtails female nature through the phenomena of tradition, advertising, manipulated media, or mere tomfoolery. All this is conveyed in an uncontrived and personal manner, through movement and dance that is devoid of all fabrication, which has the effect of making us feel that we too could be up there on stage alongside the performer, even with our imperfect bodies, sharing her thoughts. By unpicking the roles of a modern woman, we arrive at the ultimate problem: should we offer up our biological capacities to the service of society in order to raise the European birth rate, which currently stands at 1.7 (hence the title of the performance), or should we solve the approaching demographic crisis in Europe through immigration? Why should we even care, if we feel that the way we are treated in our society is not fair and not politically correct?

Following her participation at the previous dunaPart, Rózsavölgyi was invited on a three-week residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. There, in a more intense city than her customary environment, where issues of gender are seen in a completely different light, she began to work on her solo piece. Together with her collaboration with New York-based musician Ryan Seaton, this led to the creation of the work titled 1.7.

CREDITS

Concept and choreography: Zsuzsa RÓZSAVÖLGYI
Music: Ryan SEATON
Animation: Viktor VICSEK
Light: Zoltán NAGY
Production manager: Dóra TRIFONOV

ZSUZSA RÓZSAVÖLGYI

Zsuzsa Rózsavölgyi studied at SEAD and P.A.R.T.S., and she has been making her own choreography for 10 years now. She worked on the Rabbit Project with David Zambrano, during which he invented the improvisation technique known as “Passing Through”. Rózsavölgyi was a member of the Rosas Dance Company in 2004-2009, and worked as choreographic assistant to Thierry de Mey in the project titled Simplexity. In her works, Rózsavölgyi is keen to collaborate with visual artists and to employ digital technology and sound design. She is also active as a teacher. She is currently working towards two master’s degree: a Dance Pedagogy Master at the Budapest Contemporary Dance Academy, and an Arts and Science Master at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

COPRODUCERS

SÍN Arts and Culture Centre

SUPPORTERS

National Cultural Fund of Hungary, MU Theatre, Budapest Municipality, Baryshnikov Arts Centre, Staféta, FÜGE Production, BVA Budapest Nonprofit Ltd

The production was realised within the framework of Staféta, a programme by the Budapest Municipality.