Trafó House
Dance performance
Non-verbal
Trigger warning: darkness
UTTU is landscape slowly emerging from the darkness, the screeching of layers pushing against one another deep below, the human form materialising, being born from the relief of the terrain. Anna Biczók’s performative movement research invites us into a liminal space where presence and hiddenness, darkness and light, outside and inside constantly permeate one another. Fragments of memory, fragmented and complex movements surface, tracing pathways through the space and across the viewer’s retina. Like UTTU, the Mesopotamian goddess of weaving, Biczók weaves whatever is ingrained in the body or trapped in the space into hypnotic images. Her gaze finds us, then looks straight through us, as if the body we are watching were moving in another space or dimension invisible to us, a memory or ritual. The work’s thrillingly unsettling atmosphere emerges in synergy with Márk Bartha’s ethereal, undulating music.
In her artistic practice, Anna Biczók explores the nature of memories and qualities stored in the body. UTTU is closely connected to her research into somatic memory, the materiality of the body, and the imprints left by personal and cultural heritage. (Judit Böröcz, curator)
UTTU
is the space of the hidden
is a memory that emerges from the right hip
is the wound of the past worn on the skin
is weaving together the inside and the outside
is letting the light cut through the bones
is making her wounds shine
UTTU is a piece of performance research investigating non-separation through movement, materiality, and sensory perception. Inspired by Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action – the idea that entities emerge through their relations rather than preceding them – the work explores how body, object, space, and audience continuously constitute one another.
Operating at the threshold of visibility, the work relies on minimal shifts of light and texture, inviting the audience into active perception. Visibility and invisibility serve as central themes. Beyond perception, the inquiry examines their political dimensions: who and what is seen, who and what remains hidden, and how positionality and power structures are negotiated through acts of appearing and disappearing.
Alongside Barad, the work draws on Carl Jung’s concept of Separatio (individuation through differentiation). While rooted in entanglement, UTTU questions how subjectivity emerges through moments of distinction, inhabiting a productive tension between merging and separating, dissolution and formation.
UTTU is also a Mesopotamian goddess associated with weaving.
Credits
Concept, artistic direction, performance: Anna BICZÓK
Music: Márk BARTHA
Costume: ‘Personal Skin’ by Fruzsina NAGY
Light: Kata DÉZSI
Supervision: Darko DRAGIČEVIĆ
Creation Support: Stockholm University of the Arts, Weld
Special thanks to Stockholm University of Arts NPP program peers and Head of Program Tove Salmgren
Bio
Anna BICZÓK is a Hungarian dance artist, performer and choreographer based between Stockholm, Vienna and Budapest. Her practice is rooted in dance, extending towards broader questions of embodiment, perception and relation. She approaches choreography as a way of exploring how bodies emerge through their encounters with space, materiality, memory, and other bodies. Rather than understanding the body as an isolated entity, she sees it as both an archive of lived experience and a relational field – situated, continuously changing and always becoming.
Her artistic practice has evolved from investigating autobiography, cultural inheritance and Eastern European histories towards broader questions of embodiment, entanglement and situatedness. Through movement, she explores how bodies shape and are shaped by the relations they are part of. Her work is informed by the lineages of American postmodern dance and Western somatic practices, while continuing to question these traditions from an Eastern European standpoint.
As a performer she has collaborated with HODWORKS, Viktor SZERI, Karin PAUER and Claudia BOSSE, among others. Her choreographic works include Precedents to a Potential Future, presented at several European festivals, and DELICATE, selected for Impulstanz 2023 8[:tension]. From 2020–2022 she was a selected artist of Creative Crossroads (Life Long Burning). Her ongoing performance research UTTU was initiated as her degree work within the New Performative Practices MA at Stockholm University of the Arts and has been presented at Weld in Stockholm and UNDER500 Festival in Budapest.
CONTACT
Anna BICZÓK
abiczok@gmail.com