A gorged Kaiser Wilhelm II devours a plate of fruits with imperial hunger. His stomach swells and gurgles, while bloated indigestion turns into a strange belly dance. What do Orientalism, Imperial Germany, and Dadaism have to do with one another?
Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm channel Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a radical Dada artist and poet, erased from history. She paraded on 1910s New York streets, turned garbage into costumes, and answered militarism and patriarchy with her body—excessive, unruly, refusing all boundaries between art and life. She died poor in Paris while her male contemporaries became legends of the hegemonic art canon.
The performance reactivates her strategies: inversion and bodily excess as political refusal. Börcsök moves fluidly between multiple 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 orifices, and sanitation become tools of disruption—reminders that modernity built systems of hygiene to enforce control, exclusion, and colonial power.
In a world shaped by war, genocides, imperialism, and inherited infrastructures, the Baroness's unruly energy feels urgent. Her queerness was a practice — refusing fixed positions, embracing contradiction and mess.
SUBJOYRIDE invites the audience into this excessive, uncomfortable, liberating space where the body speaks back to power.
● Boglárka Börcsök is a choreographer and performer who explores female biographies and the erasure of women from art history. Since 2020, she has collaborated with filmmaker Andreas Bolm on research-based projects using archives and embodiment. Their acclaimed documentary and performance installation, The Art of Movement / Figuring Age, has toured internationally to various festivals, receiving multiple awards. Together, they use theatre to challenge audience perception and the politics of physical presence through innovative choreographic methods.
The title of the performance is borrowed from the poem Subjoyride (ca. 1920-1922). Further poems of Baroness Elsa Freytag von Loringhoven referenced in the performance:
Coach Rider (ca. 1924)
Mefk Maru Mustír Daas (1918)
They won't let go fart (ca.1923-1925)
Graveyard surrounding nunnery (ca. 1921)
To whom it may concern (ca.1922)
Fix (ca. 1924-1925)
