Krisztián GERGYE is director, choreographer and dancer. He started his stage career as a Javanese dancer. Mixing tradition with a modern attitude, he then created his own vocabulary for dance and body. He has been staging his own choreographies since 2001. He began with independent projects to put on with permanent collaborators and finally his own company. His experiments lead him to the border territories between dance, straight plays and fine arts, an ambition his company’s motto, “not just dance”, reflects well. His performances explore and expand the boundaries of artistic genres, and are characterized by the fascinating interplay of music, physical presence and visuality.
In its original meaning, the satyr is an imaginary creature, a combination of god and goat that emerged from the desire for a primeval, natural state. It is the product neither of Christianity nor of the harmonious and sophisticated Greek world, but has barbarian roots. Its barbaric nature represents vitality, liveliness, the uninhibited pleasure of life without remorse or moral obligation, which it manifests in its intense sexuality and emphasized carnality. The figure (character) of the satyr is suitable to demonstrate the quality of the body still un-enslaved by the soul in a cultural context.
The satyr demonstrates plastically how culture falls down: it explores what lies in the depth, what culture – or what we tend to call culture from time to time – tries to handle, control and often deny, or at least conceal. The way the typical icons of different ages overlap, fall and play with one another in this sometimes heartily delightful and ironic, sharply satiric, archaically physical and desperately passionate, totally liberating and immensely sad performance is breathtaking and almost irresolvable.
Performers: Krisztián Gergye, Melinda Virág, Adrienn Hoffmann, Ágens, Marica Tárnok
Sound: Ferenc Boudny
Gergye likes mythological monsters: working persistently, he wins them over, makes them eat out of his hand, and then seduces them. The reason and purpose of the limbs twisted in the pleasure of exaggerated existence and the dirty gestures unfolding from smooth eroticism lie in the distorted desire consuming everything and everybody. (...) A flimsy chiton and perfect suit, torn tail-coat and high heeled shoes ending in hooves: the basis of Gergye’s vision, evoking Nietzsche, lies in obsessive repetition and the certainty that the festive dance dedicated to the delightful god of wine and performed in bright sunshine will, in the darkest hour, be sublimated into a murderous hacking of bodies. The gods are devoured in the end.
Tamás Jászay, the Alternative Theatre Festival’s Journal, www.aszsz.eu