Author: Jaka Bombač.
This November, I visited Budapest for the Sissi Dance Week Festival, where I saw two performances: Border/Body Line by Leroy Dance Company (performed by Ukranian dancers Kateryna Kasianenko and Dmytro Mitichkin) and Dirty Dancing by Eryk Makohon and M Studio (performed by Deák Zoltán, Nagy Eszter, Polgár Emília and Szekrényes László). While the two performances are completely different from a narrative as well as from a technical viewpoint, they share the topic of borders or boundaries. This thematic emphasis seems interesting, especially given Hungary’s current political conservatism. Hungary, similar to Serbia, also shows a lot of support for folk dances, which were also represented in the festival program.
Border/Body Line by Leroy Dance Company (chor. Olha Drobysh) – Budapest, Hungary – 15 Nov 2025. Photo by Gábor Dusa
The performance Border/body line thematizes the relation between what we could call outer borders and inner borders (so called ‘boundaries’). Ambient music starts playing when a male performer slowly walks onto the stage and uses duct tape to inscribe various shapes into the floor. The shapes don’t symbolize anything specific, but are relatively abstract. While the performer is taping the floor, a female performer walks onto the stage and starts outlining the inscribed shapes with her movement. She is not only sampling shapes, but also qualities. When moving around sharper shapes, her movement begets a sharp quality, but when moving around rounder shapes, it becomes softer and more fluid.
In the next few scenes, the two performers are put into several different – not so much abstract as embodied – relations. But since the concept of borders is taken in its abstract aspect (judging by the abstract forms, taped onto the stage, which the performer is dancing around, as if following their contours and interiorizing them), the interpretative frame is left fairly wide open: the performers could be friends or lovers and even organizations or states. They are continually switching between supportive and antagonistic actions and counteractions; first, one is running after the other trying to catch him or her, then vice versa, then they are lifting each other or transferring the weight of their body onto one another, etc.
Concepts and procedures of physical theatre are used to produce not so much an embodied effect but more to illustrate the concept of borders from different perspectives in order to produce a unified understanding of it. In a review I recently wrote,¹ I pointed out that I sometimes find illustration of political concepts in physical theatre problematic, since it can seem self-explanatory or circular: a concept is taken as a theme and physical actions are taken as a sort of embodied arguments, together constructing the presupposed meaning of the concept (which is often not reflected or commented upon, since the discursive aspect is left aside, but the body can only tell so much).
Border/Body Line by Leroy Dance Company (chor. Olha Drobysh) – Budapest, Hungary – 15 Nov 2025. Photo by Gábor Dusa
On a second thought, we could understand the first performer as setting borders (or boundaries), and the other as adapting to his different set-ups. However, the limiting-limited duality can be performed in different ways, more or less abstractly: a choreography could search for the potential for formal difference (in the limiting means), or it could be portraying a power relation, the oppressor and the oppresed, which in turn could be interpreted externalistically or internalistically, politically or psychologically (in the modern pop-psych sense of inner critic or internal saboteur). Because the interpretative frame is left fairly wide open and the performers continually switch between everyday movement, contemporary dance and physical theatre, I can’t decide neither for a political nor for a psychological interpretation. Therefore I conclude that the performance must be trying to shed light onto the very relation between the »inner« and the »outer« borders.
On a more general note, it seems that physical theatre is not so much representative as it is denotative. Even if it sometimes tries to represent characters or stereotypes, its core characteristic seems to be a certain playful attitude towards physical phenomena. Even if it starts off as a story, the pull of the narrative process is constantly counteracted by the pull of our hermeneutical need to make sense of the basic building blocks of the narrative, the embodied metaphors. If the embodied metaphors are too complex or too many, we can never quite fall for the narrative, because we are constantly doubting our interpretive tactic. Object theatre, which more radically overturns the relation between the animator and the animated, seems to be different in this aspect, since it tends to more often break the fourth wall and let us in on the very act of performing or making/constructing objecthood (and by analogy, objectivity, truth).
Dirty Dancing by M Studio (chor. Eryk Makohon) – Budapest, Hungary – 16 Nov 2025. Photo by Gábor Dusa
If Border/Body Line tries to construct an abstract narrative, but overloads movement with a sort of propositional meaning, Dirty Dancing starts from a clearly defined situation, in which dance movement is sidelined for the sake of character devlopment and situational humor. Therefore, it makes us question what a dance performance is even supposed to be and where it differs from a theatre performance and where from a public performance such as a cabaret. While the performers’ body in Border/Body Line is supposedly »neutral«, the performers’ body in Dirty Dancing is very clearly characterized and stereotypized and is in that sense more theatrical. Precisely because of this clear characterization, it can open up the topic not of borders but of transgression, »crossing boundaries« of established meaning and stereotypes.
As Saro, Epner and Pesti note in their article on performativity and transgression,
»borders, boundaries, and limits in social systems are constructions and could be considered both obstacles or opportunities for communication, exchange or transformation. It means that transgressive acts not only breach established values and norms but also serve to examine, map, and transmit them, functioning as a catalyst for societal change and artistic expression«.²
In front of us we have four clearly delineated characters, which express different male and female stereotypes: a younger woman who wants all the attention to herself; an older woman who only gets side roles; a younger man who wants to give the impression of a macho, but might be secretly gay; and an older man who is taller and bigger than everyone, but very kind. In this combinatorics of human psychological, embodied and moral character, the audience’s gaze plays a crucial role, even if the audience is never explicitly included. The situation is set in the context of a theatre or contemporary dance institution: the four characters gather to practice for a show, but can never quite put the piece together, because they keep on failing the steps and interrupting each other with personal caprices. It is a classical story, but with a modern twist, since it touches on the topic of political correctness.
Dirty Dancing by M Studio (chor. Eryk Makohon) – Budapest, Hungary – 16 Nov 2025. Photo by Gábor Dusa
None of the characters is a typical contemporary dancer, neither a typical theatre »star«, but they are put into a system in which they must somehow produce a spectacle for the crowd. This provides for situational humour, but also for a deeper revelation of the characters’ humanity when they crumble under the pressure of having to be represented. In fragmented scenes, typical for cabaret, we get to know the characters’ caprices, emotions, and even fetishes. In this context, two questions arise: firstly, how do the characters transgress the borders of their own stereotype; and secondly, where is the border between transgressive and demeaning or insulting behavior (or in other words, can the very repeating of the stereotype be transgressive).
While the transgressing of stereotypes does provide for a sense of comic relief, it is still an open question, depending on an individual’s aesthetic judgment, if the performance also transgresses some boundaries of »good taste«. At several points, the performers are using body humour to highlight their specific body disposition or explicitly make fun of their constitution: in one scene, the wannabe macho man is exposed as wearing thongs; in another, the big guy is using his belly as a sort of soundboard. Obscenity, of course, can hold a revolutionary potential, and it should not only be understood in the negative sense, as a synonym of »crude«, »course« and »vulgar«. As Alicja Müller writes following Jean Baudrillard, obscenity in the modern age could be thought of as a »complete transparency/visibility of things«.³ Ob-scenity, paraphrased as »situated beyond the scene/stage« (ob scena), can then be understood as a potential transgression beyond bodily-subjective and systemic boundaries.
Dirty Dancing by M Studio (chor. Eryk Makohon) – Budapest, Hungary – 16 Nov 2025. Photo by Gábor Dusa
The new trend of ‘cringe culture’ – as opposed to the old ‘political correctness’ –seems to really embody Baudrillard’s idea of postmodernity as a world where the Debordian spectacle can no longer take place, because everything has already been made visible and brought to the surface. Everything is a series of cringes, and possible transgression is incalculated into every image. Can anything even really be obscene anymore, or is everything becoming sort of obscene?
In that context, the performance was at the same time too much and too little. Too little because it had some jokes that could have been funny and subversive in the »political correctness« age, but not in the »cringe culture« age, when we are used to seeing obscene images everywhere (on social networks, in the news, AI photos etc.). And too much because of that very same reason: because nothing is a spectacle anymore and performances need to overproduce in order to catch our attention. Because the jokes are often on the brink of »good taste«, they often get across as »too much«; I slowly get flabbergasted by the material and stop seeing or feeling its emancipatory potential.
1 Jaka Bombač, »Ukrotiti znanstveno fantastiko«, Portal Kritika, 2025, https://veza.sigledal.org/kritika/ukrotiti-znanstveno-fantastiko-r
2 Anelli Saro, Luule Epner and Madli Pesti, »Performativity and Transgression: An Introduction«, Nordic Theatre Studies, 35/1, 2023, p. 3
3 Alicja Müller, »Between the Stage and the Obscene: On the Critical Potential of the Naked Body«, Didaskalia, https://vntheatre.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Hundred-Toasts-Didaskalia.pdf
This text was written by Jaka Bombač within the framework of the Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery project.
