Compagnie Pál Frenák: Tricks and Tracks
Hungary
choreography: Pál Frenák
dancers: Christine Merli, Kata Juhász, Emese Jantner, Attila Gergely, Miguel Eugenio, Ortega Alvarez, Ádám Zambrzycki, Pál Frenák
lighting design: János Marton
music composition: Fred Bigot
Photo: archive.
To begin with, the choreographic expression of Pál Frenák and the expression of his company in dance are obsessive. And in the words of Hölderlin, without obsession, there can be no poet. Frenák's choreography is poetry of a very personal nature, written in free verse. When we chance to see Frenák himself dancing, it is like seeing Kaspar Hauser with our own eyes: naked, lost, and frustrated in an alien world (in the forest of his own instincts). At the same time we sense that he must have been abandoned by a family of aristocrats.
The style of Frenák's dance company is sublime. Even if it is brutally stripped down, committed to physical risk and the breaking of taboos, this is the expression of dancers of noblesse. Even the space is noble. Pál Frenák works with material strips like monumental ancient pillars, vanishing somewhere into the clouds. Beauty radiates from the performance - beauty of space, colour, beauty of bodies, arcs of movement. Rotation and spirals return again and again. The obsessive repetition of hanging bodies and the motif of the body stripped naked. At one point in the performance a naked, female body hangs upside down from a rope, trying to merge with the body of a man standing below who is turn trying to catch the woman, embrace her…
Contemporary dance makes strong reference to the gender and sex of people. This reference is altogether tragic. It is as if the dancers wanted not only to refer to their sex but even… show it off the way children do, and not just show it off, but get rid of it - in a flinging, rotating, spiraling, exorcist dance. Let's not get confused by the kneepads, kilts or red wigs and clown make-up. Such grotesque elements are only shadowing the piece's sorrow. The slogan of Frenák's choreographic work could be: beauty and courage!
Pál Frenák - choreographer, the son of deaf parents, was placed into a children's home after the death of his father. In the mid-eighties he studied in Paris. He worked with many illustrious figures of classical ballet, and through other mentors from various contemporary disciplines he became familiar with and learned the language and world of contemporary dance. In 1989 he founded the Compagnie Pál Frenák in Paris. Starting in 1990 he frequently returned to his native Hungary to lead courses and workshops. Most of his works premiered in Budapest, and he invited many young Hungarian talents to work with his company in Paris. Between 1993 and 1998 the Compagnie Pal Frenak also toured France, Romania, Russia and Israel. He also teaches in the Theatre for the Deaf of Lille, and was invited by the French National College of Circus Artists to tutor and choreograph. In 1998, under the title 'Culture in the Cure', Frenak instituted a Dance Rehabilitation programme for disabled children at the University Hospital of Amiens. In the same year, he won the choreography prize which enables him to work for six months in Japan. In 1999, with a group of young Hungarian dancers, Frenak formed the Budapest-based Compagnie Pál Frenák with the collaboration of Hungarian and French dancers. A few months later the newly-formed group presented the experimental production "Out of the Cage". In the same year, in collaboration with French dancers, "Les Palets" ('Skateboards') was revived from the repertoire of his French company. Frenak also performed his solo choreography "Men-Non-No" in Japan. "Tricks & Tracks" gives an introduction to the Hungarian-French company's language. In March 2001 a new choreography was premiered in Budapest entitled - Festen.
Andrew Princz, Touring Development Agent Manager, Hollan E. 28. V. em 2, 1131 Budapest, tel.: +36 20 9147775, e-mail: info@ontheglobe.com
Pál Frenák, 25 rue Condorcet, 75009 Paris, France, tel./fax: +33 1 42812219, e-mail: pal@ciefrenak.hu, www.ciefrenak.org, www.ontheglobe.com
