SUBJOYRIDE performance poster - Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm

@Gedvilė Tamošiūnaitė

A performance by Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm

synopsis

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.

credits

Artistic concept, dramaturgy, music, scenography
Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm 

Performance Boglárka Börcsök
Guitar Andreas Bolm

Text Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm
Lighting Catalina Fernández 

Sound design Neda Sanai 

Costume design SADAK

Technical director Andreas Bolm

Production assistance/ props management Beatrice Zanesco

Vocal coach, music advisor Vera Jónás

Artistic advisor Susanne Sachsse

Production & distribution Nicole Schuchardt & Rodrigo Zorzanelli 

3D Print “Fountain” Daniel Valencia Ferrá / Digital Craft

Photos by Mayra Wallraff 

 

A production by Boglárka Börcsök & Andreas Bolm

In co-production with Black Box Theater (Oslo), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Sophiensaele (Berlin)
Funded by Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion
Supported by NATIONALE PERFORMANCE NETZ Koproduktionsförderung Tanz, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
With the kind support of Tanzfabrik Berlin e. V. and Centre Français de Berlin, Kristina Konrad – Weltfilm
Thanks to Dragana Bulut, Jule Flierl

 

Senat NPN

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) 

Press

“Above all, she (Boglárka Börcsök) weaves the obscene and the scatological into her bodily vocabulary as witty gestures of resistance against the authoritarian spirit of Wilhelminism and against social convention. At one point, she even lets her bare buttocks speak to us.”

“Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven [...] offers a marvelous projection surface for inventing a defiant, sexually and intellectually uninhibited, taboo-breaking role model that affirms contemporary feminism through the past. The performance 'subjoyride' draws on this, yet also reveals fantasy as fantasy.”


TAZ, Auch stinken regt zum Denken an, by Katrin Bettina Müller, 17.09.25 

“We were less interested in representation than in the spirit of the Baroness. In her poems, such as “Subjoyride”, we found a language that deals with subversion, the body, consumerism and war.’“[...]

“We are not concerned with creating a complete portrait, but rather with inviting people into a queer, grotesque, exuberant world that continues to inspire to this day.“

SIEGESSÄULE, Subversion, Konsumkritik und Krieg: Interview with Boglárka Börcsök, by Lara Hansen, 10.09.25 

video / images

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© Mayra Wallraff
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© Mayra Wallraff

All photos ©Mayra Wallraff

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biography

Boglárka Börcsök is a choreographer and performer whose artistic practice engages with female biographies as a choreographic resource and a means of transmitting knowledge. Her work focuses on the erasure of women from art history, as exemplified by her exploration of the grotesque artist Valeska Gert in Valeska Gert Monuments (in collaboration with Eszter Salamon).

Since 2020, she has been working with documentary filmmaker and sound artist Andreas Bolm on video and performance projects grounded in long-term research and the alternative use of archives through embodiment. Their documentary The Art of Movement, portraying three dancers in Hungary over the age of 90, led to the performance installation Figuring Age, which merges film and choreography. The piece has been presented at venues such as Sophiensaele in Berlin, the Moving in November Festival in Helsinki, and ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna. It received a Special Mention from the jury of the 8:tension Young Choreographers’ Series, as well as the Rudolf Lábán Special Prize from Hungary’s independent performing arts scene. The project was selected for the prestigious Aerowaves Twenty23 Artists' platform and featured in SHOWCASE 2023 of the Impulse Theater Festival.
Boglárka and Andreas view theatre as a framework to challenge the politics of physical presence, proximity, perception and societal conditionings of the audience. Through choreographic methods and practices of embodiment, they push the boundaries of representation and experiment with new forms of expression. 

technical

BASIC INFO
SUBJOYRIDE is a solo performance with live music (electric guitar and vocals) in a frontal stage configuration (proscenium).
Performance duration: approx. 70 minutes
Touring team: 6 persons
Audience capacity: 80–200 spectators

For two performances, a total of 4 working days is required, including shows, setup and strike.
The lighting rig must be pre-hung by the venue prior to the setup period.
The venue should be converted into a full black box, with black curtains covering all walls. The complete stage area must be covered with black dance floor.

Most scenographic elements (special curtains and carpet) and props are transported by the company as extra luggage when travelling by plane or train.
No additional freight transport provider is required.

STAGE SETUP
The ideal stage dimensions are:
12 m (width) × 13 m (depth) × 6 m (height)
The production is adaptable to smaller sizes - to be discussed with the presenting venue.

The stage consists of two distinct performance areas:
• MAIN SPACE (front) consisting of Bütec stage elements of various sizes
• RED ROOM (rear performance area)

The size of the MAIN SPACE area is defined by a three-part black curtain line placed approx. 8–9m from the first audience row.
The central curtain, mounted on a rail track system, separates the RED ROOM from the MAIN SPACE. It remains closed at the start of the performance and is opened manually later in the show.

For more details please download TECHNICAL RIDER

download

press kit (text only)
Images
Technical Rider

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