BOGLÁRKA BÖRCSÖK, KATALIN ERDŐDI, ANDREAS BOLM

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO GHOSTS*

*Reference to Jacques Derrida, as discussed by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler about Ghost Dance (1983) directed by Ken McMullen.

This text first appeared in Kajet Issue 05.

Katalin Erdődi:

Boglárka, in collaboration with Andreas, you have created a film about the Art of Movement, an early modern dance movement at the beginning of the 20th century in Hungary, which was part of both the so-called life reform movements of this period, as well as the avant-garde art scene. The film is based on intimate encounters with three elderly dancers—between 90 and 100 years old, I believe—who were all connected to the Art of Movement, albeit in different ways. What struck me in your work was the incredible sensitivity and even sensuality with which you shared these encounters. Even though it is not a dance film per se, but much rather a documentary, the situations you created allow us to linger on and take in the details of your protagonists’ movements, their physical presence and, also, the labour of their aging bodies, as they re-visit and eventually re-live choreographies that they have once learned or devised themselves, in order to share these with you. One scene particularly stayed with me and moved me at the time of watching and I would like to share this as a starting point for our conversation. It is one of your protagonists, Eva, in her bed, practicing the movement sequences that she does every morning. Her movements possess an incredible vitality and I remember thinking that you are showing us the power and potential of what a life dedicated to movement can be. And that this dance is much more than a physical practice; there, in the privacy of her home, of her bed, it appeared to me also as a political practice, one of resilience, of continuing to do something during a lifetime, no matter the banning that we will surely come to talk about later. However, first of all, I would like to ask you about how it all started, how did you arrive at making a film as a dancer and choreographer, and how did you arrive at this kind of intimacy?

Boglárka Börcsök:

I started this project by asking how do I situate myself as a young female dancer in the context of where I work in relation to where I come from. I left Hungary when I was 18 to study dance in Austria and Belgium. I never felt the need to create a national identity or belong to one country. I think that this sort of ‘broken’ relationship with Hungary allowed me to develop another perspective on my project, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I still lived there.

I would say the project started out as a study interest; I became aware of my own as well as a general lack of knowledge about Hungarian dance history in the West, and I asked myself where does this gap come from and how can I address it artistically? I also wanted to interrogate the history of the twentieth century from a feminist perspective, so I was doing a lot of research on female artists and authors, also Hungarian ones. Eventually, my way of addressing the gaps of my knowledge was by meeting these elderly dancers, getting close to each other, having an exchange, a dialogue: you touch, you have a real encounter.

Dealing with the history of the three women also became a way for me to deal with the current rise of nationalism within the post-socialist context. It has been challenging for me to try to understand how people living in Hungary relate to communism/socialism today, or to the period of the right-wing Horthy regime between the two world wars. Many people disagree with the Horthy era and nevertheless regard it as their heroic times.I asked myself how this relation is navigated and instrumentalised by the populist discourse of the current government (ed. note: referring to Orbán IV in 2022). It is a relationship to a history full of paradoxes. But it didn’t make sense for me to talk about history and politics in general terms, as it only leads to generalisations. Instead, the main intention of the project was to narrate everything from the intersubjective perspective of the three women I worked with. How could our dialogue unfold from the personal to the physical, from the historical to the political? 

At the same time, I was not only interested in learning about history. I wanted to engage in a longer process in which I could learn without being pressured by a deliberate outcome. I wanted to resist the determinism that, because I am a dancer, I have to do a dance piece, which I then put on the market. How to think outside of this ‘production logic’ that we all know all too well in the art field, and more within what a process can be for me artistically?

It was not obvious for me to make a film: first I did interviews with several women connected to the Art of Movement in Hungary. One day, after visiting all these elderly dancers, I woke up in the middle of the night, at four in the morning, and I was suddenly seeing one of the protagonists, Éva, in her living room sitting in a chair and performing. It was such a strong image—first I thought, this could be photography, but then I realised, shit, then there would be no movement, so this had to be filmed.

Andreas Bolm:

I remember having a similar experience with one of my films. It may seem like a banal detail, but it expresses a lot about the approach. I wanted to film my protagonists in their bedroom, in the bed. In any fiction you can do this easily because you simply instruct the actors to get into bed, but if you work with real people in their homes, in their own bedroom, it takes you much longer to get there, to build the trust needed to achieve such an intimate scene.

However, in connection to what Boglárka was saying, I rather wanted to stress that, similarly to her image of Éva, I had this one scene in my head when I started working on the film. I wanted to be in this intimacy. That was exciting for me. I find this first vision always important, particularly for the creation process, because it gives a basic force and angle. I believe that we intuitively find things, images that already contain it all. Éva’s movement in her bed, or in the living room, says as much about the Art of Movement historically and politically as any text could say… through movement, in an embodied way.

No matter that you never made a film, Boglárka, and that you were sometimes overwhelmed by all the technical aspects—what is important and what stays is this movement of Éva, which contains everything. I think it is an important capacity to be able to notice that it is all in there, it is already in there, and that is why you still continue to work with it.

Katalin Erdődi:

There are several ongoing discussions in the art field about decolonising methodologies and necessary interventions into historiography—also with regard to art and performance history, which are still largely dominated by Western narratives—in order to write or rewrite history from other, underrepresented, or marginalised perspectives. You mentioned your interest in working with history from a feminist and a non-Western, Eastern European perspective, as well as the gaps of our own knowledge, which also need to be interrogated. At the same time, we can also regard choreography as a writing practice, albeit a non-verbal one, using movement and the body. Your film’s acute focus on the body, also as in ‘bodies of knowledge,’ shows us the incredible depth and richness of experience, which is inscribed in the bodies and in the movements of your protagonists, creating something that we could call a ‘choreography of memories.’ How do you relate to the question of writing or rewriting history through other narrations and perspectives, but also with and through the body?

Boglárka Börcsök:

In terms of relating to history, I have to say that just the Art of Movement itself, the archival material, from a historical point of view, wouldn’t have triggered me so much. I really needed the encounters with the dancers. The scene I described with Éva was what convinced me to make the film, it gave me the feeling that this was something so amazing that it needed to exist. However, from the beginning, it was clear to me that it was not possible to make a portrait only of one person, because the historical context and the political positions needed to emerge from the multiple trajectories that connected these women, and the ways in which they complemented or contrasted each other. It’s a collective telling process.

At the same time, when working on the film, especially the editing process, we came to understand what a challenge this meant: we were on the limit of handling all the strands and complex layers of these stories. This may explain why our engagement with the Art of Movement and the three protagonists includes not only the film The Art of Movement, but also a performance-installation titled Figuring Age.

The artistic process was among others inspired by the writings of Jacques Derrida. This connects to your remark on the ‘choreography of memories,’ as Derrida says that ‘memory is already written, it’s a writing.’ When you recall and retell a memory, this is something already written and thus constructed. I find it important that we consider this writing not only as something that we do with words, but also with the body. 

In both the film and the performance-installation, I am interested in the notion of the ‘ghost,’ not in a literal sense, but in a Derridean sense, in how we can give ghosts a space to come back. In The Art of Movement, it is the women themselves who embody their own memories, but also in this case there is an element of writing, especially with and through the body, in how they incorporate movements and experiences from the past, in how they allow their personal histories to ‘haunt’ them in the present. 

While the film tries to capture the three women’s presence, in Figuring Age I stretch this presence into the performance by embodying them myself, I insist on their presence, although they are absent. I transform myself to incorporate them, which is an extremely physical act, as I strive to renegotiate how the audience perceives me. 

I start with a short text, an excerpt from a scene with Jacques Derrida in Ken McMullen’s film Ghost Dance, in which he talks about how ghosts do not simply appear, but they come back, and that ‘this returning presumes a memory of the past that has never taken the form of the present.’ He also speaks about Sigmund Freud’s theory of mourning, which was further developed by the psychoanalysts Mária Török and Nicolas Abraham, who claimed that if mourning ‘goes wrong’ a so-called incorporation happens: the dead are taken into us, but they don’t become part of us, they just occupy a particular place in our bodies. 

Derrida’s thoughts inspired me in a performative way, rather than theoretically. I was interested in how it was possible to perform this encounter with the ghost. So, after speaking this short text as an introduction, I start transforming myself into those women, and the audience witnesses this process of becoming, their return.

Everything is hyper-embodied, which in turn interrogates the reading of my younger body: What do I create by letting my young female body become aged, deformed, or distorted? By resisting the capitalist image culture’s logic of feminine beauty, youth, and sexiness? After the performance, several visitors told us that they had the experience of encountering someone else that wasn’t me. 

Andreas Bolm:

I must admit, I am not very comfortable with these notions of writing or rewriting. Especially if I consider it as a filmmaker, it makes the process feel very top-down, like I ‘come from above,’ so I would be rather inclined to question who is writing history and from which perspective. Perhaps I am also sensitive to this issue because I never script my films and I would much rather see filmmaking as sculpting. You create an intimate relationship with your protagonists and you can undo stereotypical ways of perceiving them, but in order to achieve this, very precise work needs to be done in the editing, through which you sculpt things differently. 

In terms of collaborating with Boglárka on the film and the performance, I very much enjoyed that it has been such a responsive process: the film doesn’t actually end when it is edited and presented, because with the performance you can continue writing the story…

Sculpting is also relevant for me regarding the performativity of how you tell a story, which relates to the question of writing with and through the body that you talked about earlier. In the film, there is a scene where Irén tells the story of a boy who was courting her in the 1930s and then one afternoon, in her parents’ living room, he suddenly asked her: “Are you Jewish, ma’am? Pardon, then, I was never even here.” Irén recounts the whole drama with a smile, which does not make it less of a drama. I cannot forget her sly, Irén-smile and that playful gesture she made with her hand, almost accidentally. In this gesture, there is such a lightness and great tragedy at the same time because everything that comes after that, as we all know, leads to the Holocaust. I am always waiting for the moment when you do it in the performance, Boglárka.

This brings me to another notion that I am interested in: transmission. My mother fled from Hungary during socialism, because she saw no future for herself there, as she was not allowed to study. She wanted to go to Canada or the United States, but she ended up in Germany, so I was born in Cologne. I often talk with Boglárka about how one lives through communism through one’s parents, about how they transmit their experience via gestures, memories, and desires.

Boglárka Börcsök:

Yes, this is also a ghost. I was born in 1987, so I no longer have memories of the socialist era, but at the same time I am embedded in it and I want to deal with it. Another important inspiration for me, also regarding this transmission between generations, was one of the dancers I met, Ágnes Losonczi. She is a renowned sociologist in Hungary, who wrote a book titled Sorsba fordult történelem (History as Turned into Personal Fate), in which she reverses the idiom ‘fateful turns of history’ and traces the fragmentations and movements of Hungarian society in the twentieth century ‘as seen from below.’ Her book was like an explosion of memories for me: she talks about all the ups and downs of personal histories, about mobility within society, also class mobility, and trans-generational trauma, about moments, in which something is not transmitted from one generation to the next and how the next generation can or cannot relate to this. I became interested in these gaps and felt that the gesture of breaching the silence with the elderly dancers could be my way of responding to this.

Losonczi’s writing also inspired the notion of collective telling that I mentioned before: in her book, she narrates personal fates without significantly modifying the way in which people shared their stories. This pluri-vocal methodology guided me to understand how to approach the stories of the women I wanted to work with and led me to appreciate the way in which differences could dialogue with one another. 

Losonczi also wrote extensively about old age, its temporality, and the ageing body from a sociological point of view. As a dancer, she was part of the last generation of the Art of Movement, shortly before it was banned by the Horthy regime. After the war, her father became an important communist politician and she got involved in cultural politics, so controversially, she was a member of the Cultural Committee, when the second banning happened in the 1950s. This might also be why she declined to be part of the film eventually.

Katalin Erdődi:

Yes, here we come to the point that I alluded to previously: the banning, the multiple bans actually, which forced this avant-garde artistic movement into illegality and tried to suppress its practitioners. This is why for me the image of Éva in her bed, committing herself every day to her movement practice, can also be seen as a form of political practice, a way of resisting in the private realm the fact that the Art of Movement and thus both her art and her teaching were illegalised. If I remember correctly, you also mentioned that filming the women in their private homes was important for you, not only because of the intimacy and ‘personality’ of these environments, but also because these were actually the spaces in which the Art of Movement was sustained, where artistic and educational activities could continue in a clandestine way. The story of the Art of Movement, of these three women, is also very much a story about the freedom of art, the freedom of expression and even I would say, of movement, albeit in a more abstract way.

We have spoken about writing histories, through narration, through movement, through sculpting, but of course, in this context we also have to speak about silence and silencing, the gaps that you already mentioned, when transmission does not happen or is hindered, and thus it becomes relevant to try to breach the silence, as you intended to do through the encounters with the elderly dancers. Nevertheless, I assume that not everything can be talked about, perhaps simply, because your protagonists didn’t want to address certain issues and thus these silences—this dance of gaps, not uttered, but maybe commented on by small gestures, such as Irén’s smile or the movement of her hand—also become part of what I called, a choreography of memories, stressing its embodied aspects.

Boglárka Börcsök:

Yes, these silences also became catalysts for the artistic process, actually. Regarding the banning, Éva didn’t want to talk about it at all, so, of course, I became interested in what she didn’t want to talk about. There were also other taboos, such as her Jewish family history, which were stronger at the beginning as we were less familiar with each other, so these were also things that I wanted to learn more about, they brought me further. The banning was an investigation: I wanted to understand what it meant to have this ban, but also how it resonates even today with me personally.

I was very much aware of the cultural and political situation in Hungary at the time: we started shooting in the summer of 2016, one year after the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. But already beforehand I had the feeling that there is a repetition happening, a recurring of history, as Derrida would say. So the project developed very much in resonance with this, around the question of how to relate to politics.

Regarding the silences, these emerged very much depending on the three women and what they did or did not want to talk about, what they wanted to reveal. For example, Irén talked a lot about her Jewish background, Ágnes almost not at all. The situation was often very delicate and we needed to be sensitive about not crossing certain lines. Although we did cross them with Ágnes and the banning, she was also very much inviting us to do so, as she talked about it all the time. This is why I brought her the document that declared the ban in 1951—labelling the Art of Movement a ‘petit-bourgeois disfiguration’—and decided to see what happens. 

On the other hand, about the fascist takeover of the Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes) during the war in Hungary (1944–1945), Ágnes just said: “Luckily, I survived the nyilas.” Her husband was deported to a concentration camp in Poland, but she didn’t want to say more.

As you already mentioned, there were multiple bans: before the war, Jewish people were banned from performing on stage, and some of the Art of Movement schools (such as the school of Alice Madzsar) were banned for their Leftist views and their connections to the workers’ movement. Then, the whole movement was banned again after the war by the socialist regime. It seems that the freedom of movement, of society, and of women was regarded as a threat by different political and ideological contexts. We must not forget that the Art of Movement spearheaded women’s emancipation and liberation.

Andreas Bolm:

This is very important, because we didn’t only deal with the institutional bans, but also with the banning that happened at home, through their husbands or other male figures in the family. For instance, Irén’s father took her out of school in the sixth grade, so she couldn’t attend high-school and study to be a doctor, as she wanted to. I would see this as a kind of ‘pre-banning’ already. Éva had to stop her dancing career because her authoritarian husband didn’t want her to be on stage. And Ágnes’ husband didn’t let her have a knee operation after an accident, so she also had to stop her dancing career. These stories are all inside the film because it was important for us not only to talk about the larger historical context, but also these personal experiences. 

With both the film and the performance—through the encounters with these three women—we wanted to create a space of resonance between the bans and the political situation in Hungary today. We asked ourselves how we can transmit these stories that are politically significant, because of what the women have lived through and how they transformed their lives and practices in order to survive the social and political transformations of the past century.

Irén, for instance, tackled things directly. She experienced very difficult times, but she went through them with strong optimism and realism. A certain groundedness. Éva, on the other hand, was the contrary. She was flying. Dreamy. Like a princess—although princess is probably not the right word, as she was very professional. And Ágnes comes from a workers’ family with a Jewish background, which put her in a different class position than the other two women. The first opportunity she had to visit a ballet school and receive an education was after 1945, she couldn’t access these possibilities before, as she was from the working class and the Art of Movement schools were very expensive. Later on, she made a career within the socialist system, which some people found questionable and condemned her because she adapted. At the same time, I can absolutely understand that if you suddenly have the possibility to study, you want to step out of your milieu.

Katalin Erdődi:

I am curious about how you see the resonance that you wanted to achieve between the past and the present in terms of political situations, also regarding the future. We have talked about transmission, but there is one aspect of your exchange with the three dancers that we haven’t addressed yet: the physical transmission of knowledge. In the film, Boglárka offers herself not only as a dialogue partner, but also as a dance student to the women and asks them to teach her choreographies that they learned or created themselves. In this way, you trigger their recollections of past movements, but also of experiences. Contemporary choreographers often address the question of transmitting such a dance heritage via re-construction or re-enactment in order to be able to share this knowledge with future generations. However, in your case, the physical interaction, this learning exchange seems to be much rather a tool that facilitates dialogue than a goal in itself. In the performance, you do not aim to reconstruct any of these choreographies, much rather you strive to embody the women themselves, very much in the age that you encountered them. There is no desire to conjure a younger version of them on stage, but in fact quite the opposite. So, I was wondering about how you see your work in terms of transmission geared towards the future?

Boglárka Börcsök:

In this regard, our approach was two-fold. Censorship is always also about the power of the narrator, right? This is why we wanted to insist on a certain narration of the past through these women, so that we can hold onto other memories, the ones that are not favoured by the current political regime. We wanted to resist the erasures of the past that are currently happening in Hungary, but also elsewhere. As much as the past, the future is also created by those in power: it seems to me that there is a predetermined grip on what is to come, adjustments are made to history that are actually creating our future. So I wanted to deal with history—through the film and the performance—with the intention of transmitting another narrative into the future, so that others can also access it. 

This is why breaching the silence between generations and initiating a dialogue with these women was such an urgency. I had a chance to meet them and work with them, but there was also a kind of deadline due to their old age. My interest was not to re-construct, but to reveal the gaps, to break the continuity of movement. It is not about the successful transmission of a past form: for instance, when I am doing the class with Ágnes in the film, I don’t even understand some of her instructions, because it’s not universal, it’s not a continuity. My intention was continuing with this discontinuity.

This is particularly tangible in the performance-installation Figuring Age, where I am not simply carrying on the Art of Movement, no, I am carrying on this dialogue with the women, which is not resolved, which cannot be resolved, nonetheless there is something to carry on, and perhaps these are the paradoxes in a way. I try to locate them in my body, as I mentioned before, through incorporation, I identify different points in my face, for instance. Éva is here, Irén is more there, and Ágnes here. There is a whole body architecture to it.

Around this, we create the performance room as a space of temporalities, which resembles an elderly care unit or a hospital room. Thus, it is a space of passing—between life and death, somewhere in-between—but also a séance room, in which the ghost returns. Our intention was to provoke the visitors’ personal memories of such a space and how they relate to aged bodies. Nowadays, we live less and less together with our elderly and have more and more confrontations with such spaces. We wanted the visiting of the performance room to have an activating function through which you can recognise yourself in a situation, which you have either experienced before, or through which you can anticipate a future visit to your relative or imagine yourself being visited.

In such a way, we wanted to confront aging as future, while challenging the perception of the aged body as a condition that fails us, and thus resisting the techno-neoliberal visions that seem to dominate our imaginaries of the future nowadays. These discussions have become increasingly acute since the COVID-19 pandemic: when we did the online premiere of the film in the spring of 2020, elderly people were dying due to the virus and thus the presence of the elderly dancers in the film moved the spectators much more. We could not have anticipated this. However, the awareness of potentially losing a generation and the question of how we can build alliances with the elderly seemed to shine a spotlight on the intergenerational solidarity and care at work in both the film and in how I carry on these aged bodies in the performance. 

Andreas Bolm:

I remember that when we started working together, Boglárka, you were very interested in the aesthetics of the elderly body, the textures, the skin, the surface. I have to admit, I didn’t fully get this at the beginning, but when we had the first shooting and you entered the stage with Éva, that was for me the moment when I understood that you offer yourself to trigger something, to reveal something, to enter a play, a dialogue together, a physical dialogue. You gave your capacity of moving and they started to move too. I also remember how, during and after the editing hours, you were already performing them and reciting dialogues on the balcony. This anticipated the process of transformation and embodiment, which later became such a crucial part of the performance. You have even said a few times that you would like to do this performance also when you are older, in 30 or even in 50 years’ time, so that the performance grows old with you and your body, which to me is also related to the question of the future. 

There is a novel by Ray Bradbury called Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel about a totalitarian society in which culture is forbidden and people are not allowed to read. Fire brigades are not extinguishing, but setting fires and burning books. At the end of the story, the protagonist escapes to a forest with a book he has saved and in the woods he meets a clandestine group, in which each person has learned a book by heart, everyone embodies a book like a character and recites it. 

For me, this resonates with what Boglárka is doing in the performance: by embodying the women and their stories, she keeps them alive. Authoritarian systems can burn books, they can index knowledge, they can erase histories, they can censor media, culture, and art, but they cannot take these women away from us. I see it as a political act to take the histories of these women and carry them and their stories forward. 

* This dialogue was coordinated and edited by Katalin Erdődi. Special thanks to Léna Szirmay-Kalos for initiating this conversation and making contact between the artists and the editors of Kajet Journal.