The performers formed a quarantine community and started an ‘experimental season’, where they examined the organic relationship and simultaneous formation of sound and movement.

Afterparty was born from this framework, a performance by Viktória Dányi, Patrik Kelemen, Balázs Oláh, Veronika Szabó, and Dániel Szász. The director, Réka Szabó is known worldwide for her documentary, The Euphoria of Being.

Renowned jazz singer Veronika Harcsa trained the performers and contributed to The Symptoms’ boundary-pushing experimental season. Could it be that paying attention, listening closely and looking for our inner, nuanced voice is actually a social statement?

We are all able to shake the air, to touch each other’s eardrums with our lungs. The landscape is deserted, yet it’s still breathing. You know there are a couple of them left, they are watching too. It is easy to close your eyes. Everything that can be heard gets bigger.

Stomach, heart, lungs, joints. It’s time to relax and speak in another language. Touch, embrace, sweep away. Sweat freely together with the other one. How can we help each other to break free our unknown, buried voices?

The performance was created in a quarantine community in the frame of The Symptoms’ experimental season. The team gave space to everyone’s curiosity and creativity. We researched the relationship between human voice and movement to discover how far the limits of what we perceive as music can be pushed and whether it is possible to create a work that can be interpreted both as a music and a dance performance.  

"The virus was raging around us, people had to shelter in place. We were slowly turning into a fictional tribe as we experimented with the interplay of sound and movement day after day. The cornerstones of the performance are the exercises we performed in a ritual-like manner for months. To unleash sound and movement is a playful psychological and artistic experiment. The intimacy that always characterizes The Symptoms — although the performance begins with a very personal, yet quite universal story — is expressed in this piece not through words but with our buried voices and involuntary movements.” – said director Réka Szabó.

Actors and co-creators of the performance are Viktória Dányi, choreographer who graduated from the Budapest Contemporary Dance College, Patrik Kelemen, a young dancer who studied in Budapest, Salzburg and Brussels, Balázs Oláh, who graduated from the folk dance department of the Hungarian College of Dance, then sudied in Salzburg, Veronika Szabó, a freelance artist and director who studied in London, and Dániel Szász, one of the founding members of The Symptoms.

Music trainer and co-creator is Veronika Harcsa, the production assistant is Réka Oberfrank, light is done by Kata Dézsi and the costumes are designed by Vass Csenge.

The English-friendly performance is sponsored by the Ministry of Human Resources, the National Cultural Fund and the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts.

Click here to virtually visit Trafó House of Contemporary Arts