In their first collaboration, dancer-choreographer Boglárka Börcsök, actress Orsolya Török-Illyés, and film director Andreas Bolm evoke one of the most radical figures of international Dada, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927). Through a performative walk that culminates in a concert, they revive the Baroness’s subversive artistic spirit, shaped by her urban interventions, poetry, and ready-made works — an artistic force that Marcel Duchamp described as “the future.” 

“True death must be earned by life – that is why I am still living.” (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven)

SENSE INTO NONSENSE is a performance, concert, and urban intervention in one, which draws on the Baroness’s anarchic energy to question how we live, move, and what we desire in the modern city. The work unfolds across unusual urban locations — shops, basement systems, and public squares — before returning to the Club, where it culminates in a concert with experimental musician Áron Porteleki. Through the lens of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s legendary street provocations, the creators examine artistic freedom, consumer society, and exclusion in the contemporary neoliberal urban environment, connecting the past — evoked through the figure of the Baroness — to present struggles for autonomy and self-expression.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German-born Dada artist, is often referred to as “New York’s first punk.” She became known for her avant-garde performances, poetry, and performative and installation-based use of found objects; some researchers even attribute Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain to her. She became legendary for her interventions into public spaces and situations with eccentric costumes made from street debris, meat and other garbage, which she transformed into living sculptures and, moving through the city as “class conflict made flesh,” subverted social hierarchies and norms (she was arrested multiple times because of her attire). In her performances, she expressed a liberated, often gender-fluid sexuality as a response to “patriarchal entrapment,” and used sensory means — such as body odor — to confront middle- and upper-class audiences with the often-suppressed realities of modern urban life. Her aristocratic title, acquired through a brief marriage, became a deliberate element of her avant-garde persona, used to challenge bourgeois decorum and the sense of entitlement tied to social status.

Following the international success of their performance-installation Figuring Age, Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm return to Trafó to collaborate with Orsolya Török-Illyés, turning their attention to a boundary-pushing avant-garde female artist who has largely been forgotten.

After showing their internationally touring performance-installation Figuring Age at Trafó, Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm return to Budapest to join forces with the acknowledged actress Orsolya Török-Illyés and celebrate the life and art of a boundary-pushing, avantgarde woman artist, who has been unduly neglected and forgotten.

A Co-production with the Goethe-Institut (International Coproduction Fund).