Interview with Pál Frenák

Rita Szentgyörgyi @ Horizon magazine
2011 may

He progresses along his own unique, modern road of choreography, music and visuality. With taboo-free sincerity, he probes the boundaries of sensuality. On the basis of sign language and Japanese Butoh dance, he reinterprets the art of movement with each performance. Frenák’s world involves an acrobatic contest of pure dynamism, eroticism and clashing bodies. He recently created a road movie-like vision, k.Rush, and he has directed a play for the first time at the National Theatre in Timisoara. The Pál Frenák Company is one of the few outstanding Hungarian contemporary dance troupes which can hold its own in both at home and abroad.

What turned you towards directing?

PF: I received an invitation to direct Mátyás Varga’s sWitch, which in essence we had written together using my conceptions. I projected the issues of female identity and reproduction into a futuristic world with robot-like masked figures, test-tube babies and visions of the future. I also created the scenery and the choreography.

Why particularly Timisoara?

PF: The new director of its National Theatre had seen some of my works, including InTime and Seven. He said he’d like to introduce that type of atmosphere with its use of light and space to Romania.

Since Seven, which deals with migration, you’ve turned towards collective themes, while earlier you were concerned with the individual and with gender roles. With k.Rush, however, inspired by cinematic history you are sweeping right across the 20th century.

PF: With k.Rush I was experimenting with the crossover of different generations. Cinema inspired me. I was greatly affected by David Lynch and by the road movie concept. I wanted to put new life into movement in the manner of a film.

Talking of influences, what drew you to Paris in the early 80s?

PF: As a kid I lived in a children’s home. I escaped that collective imprisonment since by the age of eight or nine I knew how to handle the kids and the teachers put them in my charge. They realised I wasn’t like the others. I found writing and speaking very difficult. Moreover, my father wanted to teach me by banging my head on the table. One of my teachers was a great Francophile. On Saturday evenings I used to watch films in secret. Simone Signoret, Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had a great effect on me.

So you might have become a film director...

PF: I’d like to shoot a film, to go back to those years in the home and show how that child saw the world through a barrier, and how that would be projected into his future memory. I’d like to show a world where you don’t know what is real and what isn’t. I would describe that 1960s incarceration, the strange situation where among the children of alcoholics and prisoners I was considered odd or different with my deaf and dumb mother.

Did that ’prison’ experience make you set off for the world with next to nothing when you started your career as a dancer?

PF: I wanted to break away and the sound of Edith Piaf lured me. Paris itself, the free expression of the body, the ideal of ’liberty, equality, fraternity’. Later, of course, I didn’t experience French life as I had imagined it. When the police first threw me against the wall at the Place Pigalle and severely beat me I certainly asked myself what’s going on here.

Still, there’s no cause for complaint – with stubborn work you’ve managed to get to the top.

PF: I established my own company and have expressed what I wanted to formulate in the language of choreography.

Your trademark became incorporating sign language into the idiom of contemporary dance.

PF: Not many people are involved with that, at least not like I am. I’m not building on what I’ve studied but on lived reality. The way my deaf and dumb mother communicated with me is something which cannot be learnt. That’s why I turned sign language into something abstract. For example, at the end of Tricks & Tracks I remain alone on stage for several minutes – a figure painted white in the spotlight. You don’t know what he is saying, though he communicates with sign language.

Do you feel yourself French or Hungarian?

PF: I lived for 25 years in France and I’m even a French citizen. I feel fine there, but I didn’t become French. I feel I’m a citizen of the world. I’ve inherited Hungarian culture from my childhood, from my physical memories – it’s in my roots, in my guts and in my nerves. Today everyone’s beating their breast, proclaiming they are Hungarian. I sadly see that there’s self-destruction underway, that in this manner the Hungarian people are ruining themselves. I don’t communicate anguish, but reflect the struggling Hungarians, fighting for aims, who wrestled with the communist system, with minority existence, whose families carved something out of nothing. Wherever I go in the world I feel like an honorary ambassador. I’m qualified to transmit to people a positive impetus and creative energy, and whether or not people like what I do, they’ve never questioned the quality and personal strength which characterise my work. Through my efforts the country also gains esteem.

As an alternative company, what difficulties have you had to face in Hungary?

PF: Right now everyone’s waiting for the tender competitions to be announced. For years I’ve been stressing that the principle of quality should take precedence over quantity. People have often told me they don’t support this type of sensuality, these effusive emotions. I would like the decision-makers to come to our performances and get to know the world of contemporary dance, as happened in the time of Zoltán Rockenbauer. Meanwhile, every morning we have to be able to stand erect and be happy we can get on with our work.