In front of Emperor Wilhelm II, he gulps down a barrel of fruit with imperialistic hunger. His stomach swells and rumbles, while an inflated digestion transforms into a strange belly dance. What do Orientalism, the imperial Germany, and Dadaism have in common?
Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm channel baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a radical Dada artist and poet who was written out of history. She paraded the streets of New York in the 1910s, transforming garbage into costumes, and responded to militarism and patriarchy with her own body – excessive, unruly, and without boundaries between art and life. She died poor in Paris while her male contemporaries became legends in the hegemonic art canon.
The performance reactivates her strategies: inversion and bodily surplus as political resistance. Börcsök fluidly moves between different bodies, figures, and genders, drawing on the grotesque and burlesque to create a choreography where the obscene, the comic, and the critical collide. Smell, bodily openings, and hygiene become tools for disturbance – reminders that modernity built sanitary systems to enforce control, exclusion, and colonial power.
In a world marked by war, genocide, imperialism, and inherited infrastructures, the baroness’s unruly energy feels acute. Her “queerness” was a practice – a rejection of fixed positions, and an embrace of contradictions and chaos. SUBJOYRIDE invites the audience into this exaggerated, uncomfortable, and liberating space where the body responds to power.
