receive the
blessing of the moth god
may your flights be swift
may nights keep their cool
may candles shine bright
meandering round the belltower’s faint translucence
night shimmers
night shivers
the known canopy
provides the safety
of luck, of distances
of the passage
fluttering,
a glitter tool
a glimpse of red
hail the moth god
and be praised her
thousand presences
may you receive the blessing of the moth god
may your flights be swift
may nights keep their cool
may candles shine bright
meandering round the belltower’s faint translucence
night shimmers
night shivers
the known canopy
provides the safety
of luck, of distances
of the passage
fluttering,
a glitter tool
a glimpse of red
hail the moth god
and be praised her
thousand presences
may you receive the blessing of the moth god
Mothmen (2024)
Its aim is to rearrange the performative situation towards a set of scenarios, where human skin becomes the theatrical fourth wall – a membrane, a barrier, impregnable yet porous.
How can the performers lure in audiences, towards the flame of touch, igniting mechanoreceptors in the skin?
The work occured within the very welcoming embrace of an environment of Bábel Tábor 23’ and Kolorádó Festival 24’, as a participatory WS - participatory performance. Huge thanks to all the brave souls partaking, performing and organizing.
Mothmen is a complex venture, where the fictitious wraps around the social, in a cocoonesque fashion. (btw, i think that's true for most of my work.)
Concept & choreography: Patrik Kelemen
Prototype created with and performed by: Anna, Dávid, Vilma, Boló, Cseni, Kamilla, Bobó, Dorka, Dani & Vera
Light + tech + cars: Áron
Kolorádó crew: Anita Czakó, Zsófia Lipták, Flóra Boros, Csenge Olexa, Kati Huszár, Adél Gaugecz, Arina Késely, Lili Hirsch, Ruben Farkas, Jonatán Kalmár, Katerina Angilella, Enikő Nagy, Johanna Kozma, Johanna Szőke, Johanna Rozsovits, Clotilde Vaida, Sári Csaba
Music: The Stanley Maneuver
Tech + set: Julcsi Mohácsi
Production: Zea Gyarmati
Co-production: Bábel Tábor, Kolorádó Festival
Special thanks to: Bitó Tanya, Bábel crew, Dani Makkai
molyemberek
Cardiology (2023)
These could’ve been the words of Dr. Carter from the series ‘ER’, Season 2, Episode 1.
However, you’re reading the lyrics from a 1996 track by the Hungarian dance group Emergency House, off their album Emergency House Party.
In this song, they name eight defining aspects of life: dance, music, rhythm, fever, dance, music, tempo, strength. Dance and music appear twice: that's how important they are.
The rest we might examine from cultural, social, and even physiological-biological angles.
That’s what Cardiology sets out to do: dancing to music, tuning bio-rhythm feverishly, dancing some more to music, metabolizing the tempo employing muscular strength.
But of course, that’s all really just another excuse to dance.
We are to interrogate our playful and painful hearts.
Cardiology is a collective choreographic framework, within which Patrik Kelemen proposes a scenario where performance is an ever-present part of the whole process. Its essence lies in performative togetherness and peer knowledge-sharing.
Over a series of nine sessions in public spaces, he calls on dance professionals from the BP dance scene to bear witness and offer each other renewed certainty:
Dance is metaphysical, all you need is but a stern heart.
--- a practice based dance performance based practice ---
performance: Alja Branc, Julija Pecnikar, Réka Szabó, Talia Ordonez,
Lili Raubinek, Vilma Braun, Zita Thury, Zsófi Szász, Kati Bitó, Vera Klausz
assistance: Alja Branc
DJ + music: Julija Pecnikar
partners: PLACCC Festival Budapest, FiDo Center for Youth Budapest, Workshop Foundation Budapest
Cryptic Bodies (2021)
How far did we stray from the Vitruvian Man? When good old Leonardo drew his infamous nocturnal sketches of anatomy and physiology, what sort of curiosity guided his hands? What did he find? When the cadaver opens up, does it reveal the same grimace as that of a living, functioning body?
Cryptic Bodies is a contemporary dance performance in which 5 dancers traverse through space, body and time to thumping experimental metal music. The work is inspired by ancient bodily practices such as Egyptian mummification and Mesopotamian occult healing rites. The piece imagines a self-indulgent, wilful and whimsically dangerous substance – dance that enters into a clandestine pact with all biopolitical parties involved.
In this work, Patrik Kelemen regards dance as a phenomenon. On stage, every touch explores, every dance dissects. Every movement is another opportunity to understand how bodies function. The performers are makers, subjects and observers of the unfolding events. Their attention scans, and wanders internally and externally at all times - sensually filtering noise.
Pulsating networks weave through our bodies. We are a set of circulatory systems, neural pathways, muscle fibres: blood, lymph, electricity, hormones, white blood cells and antibodies, sweat, saliva. Our attention engulfs both our bodies and our environment in a similar fashion. The senses pick up the wide range of mechanical and chemical stimuli. A subtle, invisible network envelops us wherever we go: this attention is immaterial yet palpable. We sense ourselves, we observe each other, we monitor our environment. There is constant noise in the body – noise and metal music.
Our body is everything, our body is our mother, our body is our enemy, our body is our lover, our body is us.
costume I visuals – Csenge Vass
sound I music – Áron Porteleki
lights – Kata Dézsi
media I photo – János R. Szabó I Máté Kalicz
graphic design – Anna Ivanov
guidance – Éva Karczag
concept I choreography – Patrik Kelemen
special thanks to Balázs Busa & Luca Kancsó
partners I co-production – Artus Stúdió, National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Zoltan Imre Program Hungary, Sín Arts Center Budapest, Workshop Foundation Hungary
MetaSurgery (2021)
The work brings together dancers, musicians, and designers with a wide range of backgrounds to collaborate, co-perform and co-create.
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
concept I direction
I facilitation –
Eszter Gál – Tamás Bakó – Patrik Kelemen
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
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
Plateau (2020)
When is the exact moment of shift, switch, flick - a transition from non-movement to dance?
Plateau is a long piece.
Through patience and sedimentation it invokes a fictitious geo-temporal dimension as the body of the performance. This larger body is to envelope all events and agents as per present parties.
Fabricating physiolgocial fiction. Physio-phantasmagoria. Phantasma Gore.
Its aim is to grasp the liminal now, from nothing/anything into dancing.
co-creation I performance – Áron Porteleki I Eszter Gál I Patrik Kelemen I Tamás Bakó I Viktor Szeri
costume I visuals – Csenge Vass
sound I music – Áron Porteleki
media I photo – János R. Szabó I Kalicz Máté
graphic design – Ivanov Anna
guidance – Éva Karczag
concept I choreography – Patrik Kelemen
partners I co-production – National Dance Theatre HU, Artus Stúdió, National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Zoltan Imre Program, Sín Arts Center, Workshop Foundation
Celestine -
heavenly apparitions and other unearthly phenomenae (2018)
alien.
what do we make of that?
what is that strange feeling we feel, when we don’t understand what we encounter?
is that fear? anxiety? or curiosity? excitement perhaps?
and what happens, when you find that; inside?
oh, and how is dance connected to all of this?
what do we make of that?
what is that strange feeling we feel, when we don’t understand what we encounter?
is that fear? anxiety? or curiosity? excitement perhaps?
and what happens, when you find that; inside?
oh, and how is dance connected to all of this?
CELESTINE is a dance science-fiction solo performance. It aims to dismantle the self for the sake of dancing. It is an experimental performative situation, where audiences are invited to witness the negotiation of the performer over form and over meaning.
CELESTINE is corporeal, an alien logic inscribed into the flesh. Embedded, embodied, embroidered arbitrary intelligence. The work addresses the question of the body - how does regarding the body differently changes the way it feels like moving? During the creation process, the work strives to install alternative routes of attention as means to afford to experience the body in a different manner. This difference becomes the gap - a hiccup, a sprain, within which the performer invites the audience to peep through.
CELESTINE is an ongoing effort towards the continuation of research initiated at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (PARTS). The work proposes new ways to relate to and to interpret dance per se. I propose to consider dance to be a natural phenomenon, where the dancer is not the master, but only the by-product of the dance. Dance is not there to be tamed, it is there to be hijacked. There is no conquest, only surrender.
CELESTINE is headed towards phantasmagoria, towards new fantasies on dancing. It strives for the creation of new, bold poetics of movement, a dance of future, post-human. In the creation process the maker makes an attempt to purge Dance of himself, letting dance on the loose. It despises theatre, does not become a fiction, does not distil itself into an image, does not banish itself into the virtual. Rejects representation, surrenders to presence, homogenizes the gaze.
CELESTINE is fiction manifest: an embodiment of an impersonal fiction.
CELESTINE is dancing and
DANCE is a force of nature.
photos by János R. Szabó
concept I creation I performance – Patrik Kelemen
lights – Kata Dézsi
guidance – Eszter Gál
feedback – Hein Mortier, Terry Beck
lights – Kata Dézsi
guidance – Eszter Gál
feedback – Hein Mortier, Terry Beck
music – Jeremy Soule - Skyrim Atmospheres; a filetta - Dio vi
salvi Regina,
In Paradisu, Kyrie; Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music For Nine Post Cards
a very special thanks to Lili Raubinek
partners: Sín Arts Center HU, MU Theatre Budapest HU, DeFiguranten Menen BE, Philadelphia Dance Projects US,
National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Zoltan Imre Program, HU
In Paradisu, Kyrie; Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music For Nine Post Cards
a very special thanks to Lili Raubinek
partners: Sín Arts Center HU, MU Theatre Budapest HU, DeFiguranten Menen BE, Philadelphia Dance Projects US,
National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Zoltan Imre Program, HU
RAMBÓ (2018)
I.
What’s Mt. Merapi gotta do with bursting fists thumping in a testosterone soaked, semi-wild Friday night? This co-curated research-series sets out to question (and answer!) our notions of machismo through action and participation.
II.
Long
abandoned monuments of power-driven megalomania, forgotten, rusty battle-barges
rotting moored and stranded all over the world. Rambó commemorates certain
behaviours whilst it exhausts and dismantles whitemalehetero macho
commonplaces. We invite the famed figure of the Action Movie Hero from the 80s
to filter and reflect on today’s decaying yet present male mannerisms.
III.
Rambó -
an action-packed socio-research, examines social exchanges through doing,
whilst inviting participants to re-consider themselves as sensuous objects. The
series of these performative deeds are to give space and perspective to the
reassessment of our cultural references and social selves.
IV.
Rambó
does not propagate mindless enduring, it’s aim is not to part from sentiment. Instead,
we invite participants to expand on their range of physical and social stimuli,
striving for a wider spectrum. We are to inflate and defuse toxic masculinity
for the sake of empowerment of the self.
V.
What
does it mean to be truly sensitive? Come and let Rambó find you.
guidance – László Hudi
tech support – Kata Dézsi
partners – Workshop Foundation HU, National Cultural Fund of Hungary, Divadlo na Cucky CZ, Sín Arts Center HU, National Dance Theatre HU, Artus Stúdió Budapest, Szőnyi Tábor Nagymaros HU
F R A N K E N vs F R A N K E N (2016)
bodies abducted, invested in an alien logic.
bodies like mentos in coke, like the molten lava core in a volcano.
remnants of a foreign compound that reveals its shy self through their flesh.
bodies like mentos in coke, like the molten lava core in a volcano.
remnants of a foreign compound that reveals its shy self through their flesh.
a(n early) work from Patrik Kelemen
dance by Klaas Freek Devos & Patrik Kelemen
mentoring by Gabriel Schenker
huge thanks to Klaas Freek Devos, William Ruiz Morales and Ewa Dziarnowska,
whose work and support has been invaluable in the process
dance by Klaas Freek Devos & Patrik Kelemen
mentoring by Gabriel Schenker
huge thanks to Klaas Freek Devos, William Ruiz Morales and Ewa Dziarnowska,
whose work and support has been invaluable in the process
The work is the direct outcome of research on the topic of the containment and contiguous nature of dance and the sublimation of the dancer's subjectivity while at dance.
Whatever this means.
Shown at Project(ion) Room, Brussels as part of the P.A.R.T.S. Research Studios final shows.