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—a gallery space, an underground bunker, the streets of Budapest—before arriving at Trafó's Club, where it culminates in a concert in collaboration with experimental musician Áron Porteleki. Engaging with diverse urban realities, SENSE INTO NONSENSE critically explores artistic freedom, consumerism, and social exclusion within the contemporary neoliberal landscape — connecting Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s legendary street provocations to today's struggles for self-expression and autonomy.

Following the international success of their performance-installation Figuring Age, Boglárka Börcsök and Andreas Bolm return to Trafó to collaborate with the film and theatre actress Orsolya Török-Illyés: together they delve into the life and times of a boundary-pushing avant-garde female artist who has largely been forgotten.

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German-born Dada artist, is often referred to as “New York’s first punk persona.” 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.

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