Voice of Power

In her new piece, Voice of Power commissioned by steirischer herbst festival ‘23, choreographer Adrienn Hód explores how today’s resurgent rules, morals, and social norms affect our corporeal reality. In a darkly humorous choreographic language, accompanied by the voicework of experimental church musician Zoltán Mizsei, Voice of Power uncompromisingly mirrors a society increasingly alienated by its inescapable obedience to overarching figures of authority.

A voice of power dominates a tribune-like stage, sending rules, orders, instructions into the space. The performers exist in this landscape of power and thematize their personal freedom and the threats to it through performative means.

The performance, with its episodic dramaturgy, explores the relationship between imperative cultural and social narratives and the individual in different constellations. Various positions – such as the controlling and the controlled, the parent and the child, the preacher and the believer, the organizer and the rebel, the agitator and the indifferent, the provocateur and the naïve freethinker – alternate in the interaction between the performers and the voice. 

The soundscape plays on a wide stylistic and tonal range with well-known but in depth rarely understood texts such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Ten Commandments, or often repeated moral and political slogans, or ironic fictional guidelines such as obligations for politicians or pieces of advice to an authoritarian leader in time of war, etc. 

The performers use a variety of creative means (both verbal and physical) to challenge what seem to be hegemonic narratives, in such a way that the performance achieves a constant oscillation between theatre, performance and contemporary dance. The etudes invite the audience on a surprising and sometimes provocative road trip, culminating in an ironic parade-like choreographic structure based on the tension between the revealed human body and the tribune of power.

“Hungarian choreographer Adrienn Hód and her Hodworks presented “Voice of Power”,
a slowly evolving, funny and absolutely demonic dance performance. From the comfort of one’s seat, spectators could watch a series of individuals evolve into a (nakedly) uniformed, homogenised mass over the course of 90 minutes. In the process, both the dancers and the visitors were pushed to their limits and beyond.” (M. Reichart, Kronen Zeitung, 23.09.2023.)