Boglárka Börcsök

Reviews & Publications

Das darüber Nachdenken review including Figuring Age by Rico Stehfest in the frame of Come Together Festival in Hellerau, Tanznetz.de, 2022.09.18

Nyon : faire danser les fantômes du passé French review on Figuring Age by Maxime Maillard in the frame of Far Festival Nyon, La Cote, 2022.08.16

Paths through ImPulsTanz, Part 1 review including Figuring Age by Léna Megyeri, on Springback Magazine, 2022. 09.06

Die späte Wiederkehr der Éva E. Kovács nach Wien review on Figuring Age performed in mumok at ImPulsTanz Festival by Alfred Oberzaucher, Wiener Tanzgeschichten, Tanz.at, 2022.07.29

Wiedererweckung verdrängter Größen review by Helmut Ploebst in the frame of ImPulsTanz, Der Standard, 2022.07.27

‘Figuring Age’ ImPulsTanz review by Ditta Rudle, Tanzschrift, 2022. 07.25

Im Dialoge mit Geistern im Gespräch mit Christine Standfest in the frame of [8:tension] Young Choreographer’s series, ImPulsTanz, FAQ Magazine, excerpt online and in print 2022.07.06

The Future Belongs to Ghosts conversation between Boglárka Börcsök, Andreas Bolm & Katalin Erdődi, printed in the Issue 05 On Easternfuturism by Kajet Journal, Budapest launch in the ISBN Gallery, 2022.02.22

Helsinki’s Moving in November: pasts, pleasures, projections review by Anna Kozonina including Figuring Age at Moving in November Festival in Springback Magazine, 2022. 02.14

Conversation between Boglárka Börcsök and Kerstin Schroth written dialogue published in the frame of Moving in November Festival Helsinki, 2021. 12.8

What Leaps Out of History? Essay about The Art of Movement written by Katalin Erdődi at KAJET Journal, online format, 2021. 09.27

From Archives into Living rooms interview by Nitsan Margaliot and Sasha Portyannikova with Boglárka Börcsök about The Art of Movement and Figuring Age on ‘Touching Margins’ 2021.02.20

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Laudation by Katalin Erdődi for Rudolf Lában Special Prize 2023

"The future belongs to the ghosts", says French philosopher Jacques Derrida in British filmmaker Ken McMullen's 1983 experimental film Ghost Dance, in which the characters explore the relationship between the moving image and hauntology as they become involved in various adventures and bizarre situations. "The ghost is me," Derrida continues, "Ever since I was asked to play myself in this more or less improvised scene, I feel as if a ghost is speaking through me... Strangely, instead of playing myself, I let a ghost put the words in my mouth, play my part. The moving image is the art of ghosts, the battlefield of phantoms." Derrida speaks of presence instead of apparition, and in doing so, as the philosopher Mihály Vajda puts it, "he realizes that to be, to live, to inherit, to remember, not to remember, but to be tormented by the repressed is nothing other than to be haunted. [...] I am haunted, therefore I am."[1]

But why is it important to talk about ghost dance and Derrida's hauntology when we are talking about the documentary film The Art of Movement by dancer-choreographer Boglárka Börcsök and her collaborator, filmmaker Andreas Bolm, and their performance-installation Figuring Age?

With both works, the creators trace their roots back to one of the most influential movements in the history of modern dance in Hungary, the art of movement, which gained ground in the early 20th century. With the help of three protagonists - Éva E. Kovács, Irén Preisich and Ágnes Roboz - they recall and revisit the significance of this artistic and life reform movement through personal life journeys, reminiscences and, last but not least, through movements and choreographies. In the film by Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm, and later in the performance installation, it is primarily the body that remembers; knowledge and experience that can be articulated and transmitted through the body, movement and movement are reactivated with the help of E. Kovács, Preisich and Roboz.

When we follow the movements of 90, 96 and 101 year old bodies on the screen - through sensitive, slow, but never sentimental, rather contemplative close-ups - what Jacques Derrida talks about in Ghost Dance makes sense. The ghost is me. In the presence of old bodies - in their movement, their effort, even their pain or discomfort - a much more complex and multifaceted temporality and corporeality suddenly begins to unfold. The energies of youth, the almost forgotten movements, now recalled and relived, their drift and momentum, haunt us.

"For me, it's such a strange, stair-step thing: A part of me is an 18-year-old and another part is 120-year-old, and there are different steps between them... The 18-year-old thinks the same way as before, but only for a moment, and then it passes away" - says Éva E. Kovács in the opening scene of the film, when together with Boglárka Börcsök they re-enact a series of movements from the dance performances presented there. Before our eyes, the movements and gaze of Éva Kovács bring to life the 18-year-old youth she is talking about, and the coexistence of different ages and time planes - or, in Éva Kovács' words, "stairs" - in the body becomes tangible.

The body remembers, relives and articulates the former movement material, pushing and pushing its own age and limits. The movements fill in the gaps of storytelling and the blind spots of memory; Börcsök and Bolm's film gives us the impression that they capture the past more precisely and sensually than words.

The Art of Movement is both a dance film and a documentary, a dialogue between past and present, a ghost dance of different generations. An important moment of learning from each other and transferring knowledge is the request of Boglárka Börcsök, choreographer and dancer, to the three main characters to teach her a choreography, a movement sequence that they remember. Although she often remains invisible or appears only on the periphery of the screen, Börcsök becomes the partner, mirror and counterpart of the elderly dancers in the film, and as a student she constantly stimulates this embodied memory. The desire to understand and live through the body, the curiosity to do so, becomes a particular way of working throughout the film: it is through this that we learn about the three protagonists' relationship to movement, dance and teaching.

Their stories are intertwined at many points, yet unique; they are fragments of a movement's history, and it is this fragmentation that highlights the diversity of both the movement and the personal life paths and choices. What they have in common is a desire for freedom, which they experienced as free dance practitioners, while all three of them had to face various forms of social oppression: not only the two bans on movement art, first as a left-wing movement in the 1930s and then as a bourgeois art under state socialism, but also domestic oppression, anti-Semitism during the Second World War and a patriarchal society that restricted women's freedom.

We find out what freedom of movement meant to them, and how they reacted to prohibition and repression. It is no coincidence that most of the footage was shot in the intimate surroundings of the protagonists' homes, as this was also the site of later resistance, where the movement artists retreated and continued to practice after being pushed out of the public sphere. Some turned to teaching in defiance of illegality, others to state institutions and international careers, others to medical gymnastics. Their struggle for survival and their dilemmas may even sound familiar to today's independent artists - choreographers, dancers.

Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm not only commemorate the art of movement, but also the strength and resilience of the three protagonists. One of the most impressive scenes in the film is when we see Éva E. Kovács slowly and persistently doing her morning exercises in bed. These intimate shots not only show the effort and frailty of the elderly body, but also capture the incredible commitment she showed day after day to the freedom of movement.

In 2020, after five years of work, the film The Art of Movement was completed, followed in 2021 by the performance installation Figuring Age, which continues and retells the story of the three women without the direct physical presence of the main characters in the film, performed by Boglárka Börcsök herself. We witness a new revelation as Börcsök moulds her protagonists in detail, actually giving them bodies. In her introduction to the performance, she draws inspiration from Jacques Derrida's hauntology and the Hungarian-French psychoanalysts Mária Török and Miklós Ábrahám Ábrahám's theory of the "phantom and crypt". After watching them again and again, I saw them again and again. [...] In a normal grieving process, the dead are internalized and assimilated. This internalization is also a kind of idealization that helps us to accept death. But not all mourning processes develop naturally; sometimes they go wrong, and internalisation does not take place, but is replaced by incorporation. The dead enter us, but they do not become part of us, but occupy a particular place in our bodies and speak through us in their own voices. They haunt us in our bodies. They put words in our mouths. The spirit is locked in a crypt, and this crypt is our body [...]."

The future belongs to ghosts. Both works by Boglárka Börcsök write the past for the future. In the spirit of solidarity across generations, she carries on and retells the life stories of the three protagonists so that we can learn from them. So that we may be haunted by their strength, courage and perseverance. Börcsök has made her film at a moment when it was still possible to hear the last of their generation, the last of the movement artists, speak, listen and, more importantly, dance and remember. Börcsök learnt from them so that we could learn from them, and with contemporary artistic means, she boldly and experimentally approached a dance heritage that she wanted not to conserve and musealize, but to bring to life. It is not only an artistic achievement, but also a political act to retell the history of movement art and these women's destinies.

Börcsök's film and performance installation also sends a message to us, the contemporary dance professionals: we are haunted, therefore we are.

Katalin Erdődi

[1] Mihály VAJDA, "Derrida and the Spirits", Beszélő 10, no. 1 (January 2005).

(translated from Hungarian by Deepl Translator)