A gorged Kaiser Wilhelm II devours a platter 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, who has largely been written out of 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 many of her male contemporaries came to be celebrated as legends of art history.
The performance revives and extends her strategies: turning established forms upside down and using the body as a site of excess – and of resistance.Börcsök moves fluidly between multiple bodies, figures, and genders, drawing on the grotesque and burlesque. The result is a choreography in which the obscene, the comic, and the critical collide.
Smell, bodily orifices, and sanitation become tools of disruption. They remind us that modernity built systems of hygiene also to enforce control, exclusion, and colonial power.
In a world marked by war, genocide, the aftermarks of imperialism, and inherited infrastructures, the Baroness's unruly energy feels urgent. Her queerness was a practice — a refusal to settle into fixed positions, and an embrace of contradiction and chaos.
SUBJOYRIDE invites the audience into this excessive, uncomfortable, liberating space where the body responds to to power.
● Boglárka Börcsök is a choreographer and performer whose work explores female biographies and the erasure of women from art history. Since 2020, she has collaborated with filmmaker Andreas Bolm on research-based projects that combine archival material with embodied practice.
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 who we perceive the body, presence, and power, through innovative choreographic methods. Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm visited Oslo Internasjonale Teaterfestival in 2024 with FIGURING AGE.
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)
