Opened: 2021
Non-verbal

“In times of crisis, returning to basics is essential to regain our resilience. This movement-based installation returns to the pure form of composition, a systematically organized framework, where creative ideas can emerge from the meditative-monotonous rhythm resonating inside a closed space. 

Choreographer Máté Mészáros has created a dark, almost black space with no spatial barriers between the dancers and the audience. There is only a fine, almost transparent line between what is made visible through light and what is left in darkness. This boundary of visibility is where our agency as a viewer is created, and where another performance starts to unfold when we are trying to complete with our imagination what is not perceptible by our senses.

The performers, dressed in black camouflage, focus all their attention on the mechanics of movement, repeating a seemingly simple, but in fact highly elaborated series of actions. Meanwhile, they are building and dismantling constructs of light in primary colors like Mondrian’s paintings, and utilizing each other’s kinetic energy, like parts of a Newton’s cradle. Watching them, we can immerse in the beauty of movement, in all the details coming alive through light, and in the body as a work of art. In this flow-state, limits of space and time are lifted, only the present exists. The atmospheric soundscape created by Ábris Gryllus also invites us to change our position and experiment with our freedom between the lines.” Orsolya Bálint, curator

CREDITS

Choreography by Máté Mészáros
Performers: Nóra Horváth, Máté Mészáros, Emese Nagy, Balázs Oláh
Music: Ábris Gryllus
Light: Katalin Dézsi
Co-producer: Trafó House of Contemporary Arts Budapest
Producer: Sín Arts Centre
Special thanks: Tamás Bakó, Gáspár Téri 

REVIEWS

“In this vision, it is not the body as a means of creating movement that is the essential point, but rather the other way around: the body as a common subordinate of movement and light. You can witness, if you like, a continual unveiling of a power relationship in which the lights are instrumental in both maintaining and unveiling this relationship. This characteristic distances the viewer from the bodies being viewed and brings them closer at the same time. The experience is eerie and delightful. It is as if through light, we can be both vulnerable and liberated.”
Zsolt Stermeczky, Tánckritika.hu

“The viewer enters through a secret back door onto the main stage of Trafó and begins to wander independently in the pitch-black space. The only source of light are coloured neon tubes that twinkle here and there, turned on and off and moved around by silently gliding figures in black. Here and now, these lightsaber-like luminaries take center stage: that which they give visibility to is there, that which they don't is not (or exists only through the extension of our consciousness, our imagination). And this is precisely the point: because what the light brings out of the darkness is not only highlighted but also framed; it acts like a camera, zooming in and out, but mostly zooming in - clinging to the micro-experience, to the details. It cuts out of the space the movement actions below/above/around it, breaking down the body into mechanically robotic parts, showing only parts of the whole, the richness of the fragments, the grandeur of the small, the momentariness of the moving body(torsos) advancing from the darkness and then receding into it. An exciting adventure.”
Csaba Králl, Élet és Irodalom

“The darkness, which disorientates perception and at the same time expands it, suggests unknown worlds full of possibilities. It opens up and removes the viewer from space and time, creating passages between external and internal, real and virtual spaces: it activates and brings into play the associative network of personal experience, memory, and imagination. The key question in a medium with such potential is: what will the light do, to whom or on what, and above all, how will it be projected? (...) Experience and imagination work together: seeking solutions, explanations, filling in gaps, anthropomorphizing, creating imaginary beings and their narratives. It “neutralizes” the often frightening-grotesque nature of the torsos, of the body parts and surfaces that live a life of their own. It tries to emphatically interpret the lack of emotion, the absence of characters, aiming to weave the fragments of scenes into a story.”
László Százados, Rudolf Lábán Award laudation 2022

TOURS & FESTIVALS

Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (NL), 2021 - Through Light dance film 

Máté Mészáros 

… graduated from the Hungarian Dance Academy in 1999. After 3 years at the Szeged Contemporary Ballet, he worked at various European companies (CarteBlanche – Norway, Lanonima Imperial – Spain, Ultima Vez – Belgium). Since his return to Hungary in 2014, he has created five choreographies – Hinoki, United Space of Ambivalence, Mechanics of Distance, and Through Light – an installation of light and bodies. All his works toured extensively around the continent and overseas. His site-specific project titled Mechanics of Distance premiered in 2019 and was featured in the Aerowaves Twenty20 priority selection, then toured Europe within the frameworks of the Perform Europe programme in 2022.

In 2023, he launched his process titled Máté and I - inviting audience members into an immersive creative process, exploring new ways of collaboration and performance as a genre. 

He is a regular guest choreographer for various European dance companies and theaters and holds international partnering workshops. In his choreography, he applies a high level of physicality, regarding the body as a moving structure and phenomenon. He approaches the body as a dynamic object and the space as an ever-changing scenery created by the counter-effect of objects, bodies, sound, and light. 

Máté Mészáros is a regular guest choreographer at various Hungarian and international companies - such as the Central Europe Dance Theatre,Unusual Symptoms and more. He holds partnering workshops at dance academies and summer schools. His performative-participative walk as a supplementary project to the piece Mechanics of Distance invites viewers to experience the recreation of the piece in an urban setting.

CONTACT

Anikó Rácz 
racz@sinarts.org 
+36.30.525.15.51
www.sinarts.org 

Máté Mészáros 
matemesz@gmail.com

SUPPORTERS

National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Ministry of Human Capacities, Sín Arts Centre