Part of Trafó’s transdisciplinary focus work-free-time.

Critical, empowering and joyful community theatre on the relationship between labor and leisure, about the burdens and beauties of freelancing, vulnerability, constraints, self-exploitation, and burnout. Co-created with participants from diverse backgrounds, it interweaves past and present: the history of the workers’ movement in Hungary with contemporary precarity.

For their participatory theatre performance, Gábor Thury, Lili Thury, and Zita Thury draw on their family legacy: their grandfather played an important role as cultural organizer in the workers’ movement of the 1930s that was first tolerated and later banned. Among other activities he worked with movement and recital choirs, giving voice and a platform for self-expression to the working class of the time. Preserving the interdisciplinary and community-based character of these practices from a century ago, the three siblings now create a performance about a typically 21st-century group of workers: the freelancers.

Drawing on the experiences of the research process and archival materials from the 1920s and 30s, the performance examines life situations in which the boundaries between work and free time, the workplace and private life, become increasingly blurred: situations that are so similar yet different that they are worth addressing collectively.

Gábor Thury, Lili Thury, and Zita Thury are siblings working in different artistic fields. At the core of their shared interests are participatory and community-based creative practices, which also characterize several of their previous, otherwise separate projects.