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 gergö d. farkás, 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. CREATURE is co-produced and presented by Mabou Mines in association with Tamás Marquardt.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Támas 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 PuSh, VIDF, Dancing on the Edge, rEvolver, Summerworks, The Tank, Brooklyn Museum, BAX, Under the Radar, U500 Feztival, and The Collapsable Hole. They have worked with JoAnne Akalaitis, Jerome Bel, Ballez, Jess Barbagallo, Mallory Catlett, Fay Nass, the only animal, radix, and the Leaky Heaven Circus.