MetaSurgery (2021)

MetaSurgery is a speculative somato-fictitious approach, driven by composition of space, time, movement, and relationship—both within the body of the individual, and the collective body of a group of people. Somatics in this project interrogates bodies in action, examining them from multiple angles: the anatomical complexity of the moving body, the phenomenal body, choreographic imaginations of the contemporary body, intro- and extrospective touch (as in in- and outward sensing vectors), and the dance of the organs. The process explores the fine line between physiology and phantasy; all within the wrapped now of improvisation.

MetaSurgery was first developed in 2019 with Tamás Bakó and Eszter Gál as a creative trust and research power trio. Since then, it’s been expanded and reframed over the course of 2020-21, towards an ever-growing large-scale choreographic laboratory involving over twenty artists. Its core idea was that of the ‘exposée’, the process continually exposing itself to a variety of audiences.

The work brings together dancers, musicians, and designers with a wide range of backgrounds to collaborate, co-perform and co-create.

MetaSurgery is community-based, exploring bodies as sites of shared cultural imagination, anatomical complexity, and social transfiguration.

The project stages try-outs of alternative social patterns of cooperation—using the laboratory as a metaphorical and literal space of experimentation. Drawing from medieval Latin laboratorium (from laborare, ‘to work’), the work embraces creative labor as a collective and reflective act.

Shot at 2020.09.20., at the first iteration of Under500 Festival, Budapest, HU

Documentation of a research-prepping exposée preceding MetaSurgery, a short etude called ‘facing North’, where Bakó-Gál-Kelemen experiment with ideas that later become relevant for the collective inquiry.

concept I direction I facilitation –
Eszter Gál – Tamás Bakó – Patrik Kelemen

collaborators – Yelena Arakelow, Tamás Bakó,
Juci Dömötör, Eszter Gál, Ágnes Grélinger,
Patrik Kelemen, Judit Koncz, Dániel Makkai,
Zoltán Mózes, Zoltán Nagy, Lili Raubinek,
Cintia Sebők, Kinga Szemessy, Ida D. Szűcs,
Imre Vass

music – Dániel Makkai, Zoltán Mózes

special thanks to Zoltán Nagy, Csaba Molnár

partners: Sín Arts Center Budapest HU,
Workshop Foundation HU