Press

”Horizontal level means recognizing our differences but being aware of what we have in common.”

“I often say that if someone has never met a person with a disability, we shouldn’t expect them to be sensitive toward us. It is up to us to make ourselves visible — after that, they will no longer react to us with such awkwardness.”

”We set out to explore how the differently abled performers of Idol and their parents experienced the collaborative process. What was the greatest challenge for them, the most memorable moment, and what changed in or about them during this time?”

“(…) the company’s well-known and well-established stylistic elements are at play: irony that often veers into the grotesque or absurd, a semi-ironized use of obscenity, nudity, the (seemingly) broken fourth wall, mock-serious monologues, and so on.”

“(…) what is the difference when a performance is created with professional performing artists within a professional performing arts framework (Harmonia), versus when it is created not (only) with professional performers but based on community theatre principles (Idol).”

“(…) the gesture makes a sharp, yet not offensively overbearing, reference to the bubble of the contemporary dance scene.”

“We possess too many emotions, values, and morals, yet we no longer believe in them, always waiting for something new to come, constantly opening new chapters.”

‘‘The experience of movement has always been present in my mind and in my nerves…’’

“For me, contemporary dance is an opportunity to reflect on where choreography begins and who conveys it. It is a great freedom. It transcends the boundaries of physical attributes, prior training, and age as well.”

“In collaboration with Unusual Symptoms at Theater Bremen, Hodworks began creating performances in Harmonia that treat dancers with normative and non-normative physicalities as equal partners. Where does this intention come from?”

”The choreographer guides the audience’s attention along a deliberate dramaturgical arc, but the more spontaneous moments—where the performers’ less scripted movements advance the performance—invite the audience to “watch differently.” In other words, elements that would otherwise blend seamlessly into the whole piece can become more pronounced.”

”An unapologetically strong dramaturgical structure is meant to drive the coherence of both verbal and movement-based events.”

”As audience members, we were given the opportunity to glimpse another reality, where we could also see the similarities behind the differences. The performance became not only an art form but also an important tool for community building.”

”Hodworks’ latest piece, Amber — taking a sharp turn from the provocative tone of their 2020 work One More Dance Performance — returns to a calmer space, welcoming its audience with a refined setup and deep self-reflection. (…) Passion, intimacy, and attraction become clear through the universal gestures of the human body, pushing verbal communication and conscious awareness into the background.”

”Vam haver d’entendre com seria crear una peça de dansa amb ballarins amb físics normatius i no-normatius: com entren a l’estudi, quant de temps podem treballar, les pauses, com trobar un bon mètode de treball per a tots. Va ser molt bonic, però també molt desafiant.”

“Nudity is both a weapon and a tool, with which one can provoke, aestheticize, or make people reflect. What matters is how it is used.”

”Why the performance is called Idol, I think it doesn’t really matter: it’s a kind of séance that probably shouldn’t have a title. What the shared intention has brought together here is a genre-less happening from which everyone—whether involved or not—takes home something different as their deepest impression.”

“(…) here, every body and every movement is valid.”

”There is a touching reciprocity in this, a palpable attentiveness to each other as a swift foot gently touches a barely moving hand (…)”

”How conscious is our use of the body, and how fully do we inhabit our most personal earthly home? How do we treat our own bodies and each other’s? On stage, we see gentle touches, rocking embraces, and trust-filled weight exchanges that can be therapeutic—not only for the participants but also for the audience.”

“(…) seeks to answer the question of how a social taboo can become a value in the eyes of all of us on stage.”

”Compared to this, what I got thrown in my face at Trafó surpassed everything, and I will remember it for a long time.”

”The joint production by Hodworks and Dollár Papa Gyermekei was by no means created to make us laugh in the basement of Trafó, although in our discomfort we do chuckle at the deliberately awkward nature of the hour-and-a-half variety show.”

This cabaret is quite stripped down, filthy, and grimy. And it’s exactly because of this that it becomes beautiful, authentic, and powerful in every way.

”They didn’t just raise taboo topics or present them—they took hold of them and somehow treated them as if their taboo nature didn’t matter. Or as if going beyond their taboo status. They not only pushed the boundaries of theatre but also their own limits, the limits of the body, the boundaries of the audience—every boundary they could find.”

”It wasn’t easy to capture the cabaret genre this time and to find out what entertains people today, what helps them unwind and lose themselves. We struggled a lot with figuring out what makes something humorous and lighthearted, while still carrying weight.”

“(…) the performance does not evoke pity or shivers in the audience, but rather a genuine cathartic experience.”

”In this new work, Hód rages and builds, dancing on the ruins (…)”

”Next to one couple, a wheelchair indicates that one of them has a mobility impairment, but it takes time to realize which one…”

”For me, Harmonia is like a tapestry woven from different colors, textures, and movements, forming a unique image. Each thread is rich in its own hue and style, beautiful on its own, but when woven into the fabric of Harmonia, it becomes an integral part of a stunning final picture.”

”Movement is the shared language through which these very different performers meet.”

“Passion, intimacy, and attraction are conveyed through the universal gestures of the human body, pushing verbal expression and conscious awareness into the background.”

“How did you prepare for the performance? Is the question posed by the creators and writers of the piece. Is it a typical PR move, or just a silly question? Neither: Adrienn Hód’s latest work may catch even the most seasoned Trafó regulars and the core of Hodworks off guard—despite the fact that they’ve already experienced plenty of wild things.”

“The performance is not only an intensely visceral kinetic experience, but it could also be seen as a form of therapy — since we have yet to be free of the virus, if we want to reclaim the foundations of our former lives, we must learn to dance again.”

”By shedding norms, rules, and expectations, they enter a state of consciousness created explicitly for themselves and their partners, yet it can still resonate powerfully with those who have the opportunity to witness the performance.”

“In Amber, the dancers are together with their eyes closed throughout, so they are not affected by external visual stimuli that could inform or even influence the performer’s intensity during the performance.”

“(…) can the string be stretched further, beyond the boundaries that were once thought to be the final ones, or felt to be the limit?”

“The physical task, the movements take such priority that I don’t have time to think about the fact that I’m naked. Nudity transforms into a costume.”

“In Dawn, we depend on each other; we feel when the other, like a limb abandoned by strength, reaches this point, and vice versa. At these points, we must turn together to keep moving forward.”

It seems that lately, Hungary’s young and mid-generation of dancers and choreographers wants to talk – more than anything else – about themselves. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise in the age of selfies and Instagram. But in art, self-expression often goes together with self-reflection and even self-doubt, and that is where it gets a bit more complicated

“The body reveals its anatomically-mechanical nature, once so suppressed and tabooed, its ‘animal quality.'”

“I don’t know what this was. Constructed and random, intimate and distant, personal and universal, something we should talk about a lot and something I’m not sure can even be spoken of.”

“While in the Dawn we witness the creation of movement, the body, like a landscape, unfolds before us in intimate proximity. The naked body is ‘dressed’ by the outline of muscles, the folds of skin, the imprint of touches, and the flush of the skin.”

“Dawn,” by the Hungarian choreographer Adrienn Hod, is a very naked dance. At the beginning of this work, seen Sunday at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse, four dancers — from Ms. Hod’s company, Hodworks — enter the stage in warm-up clothes and matter-of-factly undress. Over the next 45 minutes, they execute a series of daring physical tasks in this most unencumbered state.

“It’s a serious wandering through the labyrinths of art history and body culture, reflecting on our own little life stories and moral games, accompanied by the live-mixed inner murmurs of Zoltán Mizsei, a contemporary composer.”

The short film is available via the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzY1zfJYH1A

“The continuity of interactions, the unstoppable changes, transform this daring performance — which seeks the rare moments of human-physical experiences — into an extraordinary display of awareness, strength, refinement, and attention, all demanded from the dancers.”

“During rehearsals, I am always drawn to those movements that I can’t quite figure out what I’m actually seeing.” – Adrienn Hód

“It unfolds like a landscape, the contours of the muscles, the folds of the skin, the imprints of touches, the blushes dress it.”

“’High Cave’, therefore, is a piece of dance theatre carrying much nearness, much emotion as well as a political approach. A completely different dance evening, for once.” (Frieda Ahrens, Bremen Zwei, 29 May 2026)

“Both choreographer and company […] involve the audience; they urge them towards shared movement. This demands courage, on both sides, for it can also go awry. Yet nothing went wrong during at the premiere, on the contrary: The power and (potent) force of shared movement – notwithstanding all conflicts that are certainly also on display here – evoke the utopian vision of a different, better society. To witness this is a visceral experience.” (Thomas Kuzaj, Kreiszeitung, 2 June 2026)

“What appears as a flaw can become a distinctive quality, and behind the all-encompassing label of ‘disabled’ there can be infinite expansiveness.”

I used the remaining blank page to scribble some ideas down during Charlie, created by Adrienn Hód and performed by Károly Tóth. I witnessed Charlie at the Multiplié Festival on the 23rd of April, 2026.

When movement is involuntary, can we read the mover’s intention with certainty?

I overhear the visual interpreter whisper, They are shaking the bag. My brain instantly engages in an imaginary dialogue, Are they shaking the bag? Or is the shaking of the bag a result of a series of involuntary muscle contractions?

Fact, the bag is being shaken. Fact, there is no way for us to determine whether the bag is shaken intentionally or not. Fact, we can be certain that the context within which we have been called to observe the movement of this bag and the person who is interacting with the bag is intentional.

This is when I realised—in a felt-sense kind-of way—how delicate this work was. How deeply understanding of the conditions needed for movement, in all its complexity, to come to the foreground. Movement, not for what it can mean (movement as gesture, movement as symbol), but movement for how it can make us feel-think-respond-daydream (movement as texture, phenomenology, poetry). Think of Dana Michel or Meg Stuart, and the way they instrumentalise duration to foreground movement in all its complexity, exposing its affective range.

Time is measured in achievements. A cause for celebration, no matter how significant we may assume any action to be in anticipation of its outcome. Who’s to say what’s significant anyway? What’s simple, or easy? What’s challenging, or hard? A phone that needs charging needs that charger to be plugged into the socket. However long it takes to plug the charger into the socket is however long it takes to plug the charger into the socket. We celebrate the joys of the charger plugged, but quickly wish it wasn’t. Achievement brings relief, it also measures the end of a particular measure of time. Every next achievement clarifies the point. Achievement is not the point.

The red marks left on the skin from the simple act of applying deodorant. Did I ever hurt myself applying deodorant?

Repetition highlights purpose. It reminds us, this event, this ritual was set up on purpose. All time has is purpose. Duration exposes purpose. This particular achievement—the unbuttoning of the pants—measures the time of subtlety. I wish Virginia Woolf could be here tonight.

The fist, made, unmade, made unmade again. And again. The meaning of effort held tenderly in time, a smile. Affect, involuntary. I, too, am surprised in this moment, taken. I, too, am experiencing disbelief. Hyper-flexibility strained strings biomorphic songs. A snail. A branch. A spider’s catch. Remember how spiders sneak up before they pounce their pray?

The red marks left on the skin from the simple act of applying deodorant are still there.

In the performance Charlie by Adrienn Hód, the wheelchair user Károly Tóth carries out a series of everyday tasks. Plugging a cord into an outlet requires many attempts when the fingers are completely stiff. Drinking from a water bottle seems almost exhausting when the body cannot bend properly. 

The performance is intimate and vulnerable, but also humorous when the audience realizes we are allowed to laugh together with the performer. Charlie is the performance that most gives me a so-called “aha moment.” The dancer’s actions highlight how living as the character Charlie involves a shift in the experience of time, in the sense that time is subjective. Of course, I already know that life for someone with a severe disability differs from my own, but the performance elevates the theme from practicalities to something existential. 

It makes me reflect not only on how time is experienced in Charlie’s case, but also on how both small and large events in life take on new meaning as a result.

Charlie is a highlight of the festival.