Trafó House
Dance
Non-verbal with English subtitles
Trigger warnings: heavy smoke and sound effects, 12+
mama is the first evening-length group work by Gergő D. Farkas, unfolding ideas first explored in the solo babes and developed through Farkas’ ongoing research organing. Created with three performers, the work looks at the body as something openand changeable, shaped by sensation, touch and relation. In its hazy, atmospheric world, familiar forms and bodies become less recognisable and take on unfamiliar qualities, seeming to extend into one another and into their surroundings, somewhere between the human and the more-than-human, while even the smallest movements acquire unusual intensity.
There is something both uncanny and liberating in this loosening of familiar bodily expectations. mama makes space for ambiguity and curiosity, allowing identities and relations to emerge and dissolve without becoming fixed, and giving the work its distinctly queer quality. Sensual and mysterious, the work invites the audience to experience bodies and the ways they connect as still capable of surprise, and to find pleasure in forms and sensations that resist easy naming. (Gábor Thury, curator)
insides out
backs turned to time
a thousand tongues cry
for a shelter
mama is a choreographic space somewhere at the intersection of the obscure and the sensual. Through a choreographic and movement practice exploring enigmatic, fantasmic organs, mama proposes an embodied sense of self-alienation where the human is challenged as identity and stimulated as materiality. The piece nurtures a realm of countless entanglements, where the sensual and the erotic reach beyond human-to-human contact and become forms of belonging.
mama unfolds farkas’ previous solo babes and continues the choreographic research organ-ing. Organ-ing proposes a sense of fiction that intertwines with the body’s pre-existing narratives and bring forth an array of fantasies that weave together the felt sense of the body. With a queer perspective on somatics and anatomy, the practice aims to create a form of world-building that stems from the inside of the body and doesn’t stop at its borders. In mama the material and the fantastic are in continuous synthesis.
CREDITS
Concept, text: gergő d. farkas
Performers: Adél JUHÁSZ, Csaba MOLNÁR, Júlia VAVRA
Choreography: gergő d. farkas in collaboration with the performers
Music: Márton CSERNOVSZKY
Objects: Balázs Ágoston KISS
Light design: Kata DÉZSI
Costume design, image, and scenographic consulting: Csenge VASS
Assistant costume designer: Panna MAKAI
Video: András SZOMBATHY
Outisde eyes: Ádám CZIRÁK, Tamara Zsófia VADAS
Producer: SÍN Arts Center
Production partners: Staféta, National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts
REVIEWS
"Everything can ultimately be understood as movement. Light moves, sound moves. Stillness – the absence of movement – is a human construct. We can create the illusion of stillness, but it does not truly exist. Even a body held perfectly still is constantly in motion: blood circulates, the heart beats, breath flows, and this idea can be extended much further. Perhaps this is also the foundation of our choreographic practice: to regard movement as something inherent and given."
"I think of choreography as a composition that gives equal space not only to dancing bodies, but also to light, which can at times exist autonomously, and to music. (...) I have no interest in subordinating either the objects used in the performance or the music to the dancing human body."
"I believe that knowledge can exist without understanding, and perhaps that is exactly what both attracts and unsettles the viewer. (...) What interests me much more is the relationship between the work and its audience – one rooted in embodied, sensory ways of knowing."
https://www.es.hu/cikk/2025-01-31/krall-csaba/feluliras.html
"Their artistic voice is unlike anything else. The usual points of reference in contemporary dance no longer seem to apply to their work. The artistic self and the private self appear to merge almost completely. What we encounter on stage is so deeply connected to their personality, their way of thinking, and their identity that the two become difficult to separate."
"The bizarre mingles with the mysterious, the fantastic with the surreal, always arriving when we least expect it."
https://revizoronline.com/beszelgetes-farkas-d-gergovel/
BIO
gergő d. farkas (they/them) is a gathering of cells with a passion for choreography, dance, romance and mischief. Being lost in Vienna, Budapest, Stockholm, or somewhere in between, they dream of belonging to sensual spaces where not only humans are invited to dance. By merging somatics with practices of world-building, gergő desires to entangle the fantastic and the material in pursuit of a body that feels more and loves harder.
Their choreographic work has been presented in venues and festivals such as Zürcher Theater Spektakel (CH), brut Nordwest (AT), Tanzquartier Wien’s RAKETE (AT), Trafó House of Contemporary Arts (HU), Dansehallerne (DK), MDT Moderna Dansteatern (SE), and Réplika Teatro (ES), amongst others. Their first work, 'Deep Fake' has been a part of the Aerowaves Twenty22 as well as the dunaPart 2023 selections, and was nominated for Zürcher Theater Spetakel’s ZKB Acknowledgement Prize (CH), while their second work, 'babes', was selected for Aerowaves Twenty25 and nominated for the Rudolf Lábán Award (HU). Their latest work, 'rascal', premièred in Vienna as the closing piece of 2026’s imagetanz.
Besides dance performances, gergő’s choreographic and movement practices manifest in open-level workshops. As a teacher and facilitator, they collaborated with Paso a 2 (ES), Sín Arts Centre (HU), Höjden (SE), Dance Cork, Firkin Crane (IE), and worked as one of the travelling artists of Creative Europe’s program Performing Gender / Dancing in Your Shoes. Together with Balázs Oláh and Júlia Vavra, they organise queer-inclusive Hungarian folk dance and other movement workshops under the name W*tches and F*gs.
In 2021, gergő received the DanceWeb Scholarship (AT), under the mentorship of Frederic Gies and Anne Juren. As a performer, they’ve worked with Cullberg (SE), Frederic Gies, Kata Juhász, Veza Fernandez, Ofelia Jarl Ortega, Karin Pauer, Alma Söderberg, SERAFINE1369, Viktor Szeri, Alex Franz Zehetbauer, amongst others.
gergő holds a BA in Contemporary Dance from the Amsterdam University of the Arts (MTD department) and an MFA in Choreography from the Stockholm University of the Arts.
CONTACT
Anikó RÁCZ
racz@sinarts.org
+36.20.525.1551
Virág BUZÁS
buzas@sinarts.org
+36.30.620.3701