CREATURE brings Tamás Marquardt’s transmasculinity into collision—and communion—with their Hungarian lineage and traditional men’s folk dance. Moving between lecture-performance, ethnography, folk practice, and ancestral invocation, Marquardt’s performance is in dialogue with 19th-century Hungarian queer writer Count Sándor Vay, whose work and life troubled the literary and gender norms of his time. At the work’s center is the legényes, a virtuosic Hungarian men’s folk dance or ‘Lad’s Dance’; a solo using contra-rhythmic body percussion to express masculinity in community, with fiddlers and singers calling out instructions. Performed with co-creators gergo d. farkas, Bálazs Oláh, and Júlia Vavra, CREATURE reclaims the legényes as a site of transformation—choreography as archive, body as counter-history— where fluidity in the self, in the body, and a being connected to Land is not a condition unique to trans experience but to the condition of being human.

 
ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tamás Marquardt is a writer and performer who splits their time between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, Salish land/Vancouver, and Budapest. Marquardt was a Mabou Mines RAP Artist (2015-17) and is a longtime collaborator with Co-Artistic Director Mallory Catlett.  Their performances have been presented at The Tank, BAX, Under the Radar, U500 Fesztival, Dixon Place, The Collapsable Hole, PuSh, Summerworks, and Buddies in Bad Times. They have worked with JoAnne Akalaitis, Jerome Bel, Ballez, Jess Barbagallo, Mallory Catlett, Fay Nass, Theatre Conspiracy, Theatre Replacement,  and the Leaky Heaven Circus. Their book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway (Little A, 2018) was named a Best Queer & History Bio by The Advocate.