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international school. During the day I w ent to class, and in the evenings I went to see performances by Lindsay Kemp - w hose assistant at the time w as Zoltán Imre, who had just resigned as artistic director of the Szeged Ballet Daniel Larrien, Pina Rausch and the Philodolus Dance Company. One day I realised that what I was seeing was fundamentally different from what I was study ing during the day. Gradually I discovered that the ojiportnnities offered by 7 pantomime were very narrow 7 , and that I was much more interested in Moses Pendleton's technique for the transformation and nuuoticeable transposition of body weight. When I returned to Hungary I and some of my 7 friends established the Kaktusz Kreativ Tánezinház (Cactus Creative Dance Theatre) where we tried to implement the things that I had learned and seen in Paris.« Rókás is a unique character: weighing over a hundred kilos he hardly has the body of a dancer. Despite this his body seems to fil the world of Sofa Trio productions perfectly well. »I deluded my self about my bodu for a long time. I suffered, because I could not even do the basic exercise chest out, stomach in, because my stomach was simply 7 too big. I had to face up to my self and to accept my self as I am. I created a dance language fitting my own body 7 , but then another problem came up. As a choreograjïher I tided to impose this language on others: this is how I do it, repeat after me. What I had done on my 7 own I projected onto six others, but I soon discovered that it looked extremely unnatural. The reason for this was that each movement was tailored to me, to my arm length, to my muscles, to my turning speed, etc. I could not impose this on others. Today we work differently 7 . We discuss a given topic with my group and then each of us finds his own means of expression«. In connection with the Bagnolet award The Times critic, John Percival, wrote
about the Trio, tbat »we change well from dance to drama within the same piece, but he still fonud it a disadvantage that we were not professional dancers. The old boy was right in that we very skillfully conceal what we cant do, or, to put it more precisely, we only dance what we can perform well. Recently I have discovered that there is no such thing as dance theatre. It is an absurdity. Something is either dance or drama: the two things may be skillfully mixed within one work but they cannot be interpreted together as one, at least this is how I see it. We first try to work ont a dance scene, a divertimento, which is then followed by a dramatic scene. The dramatic scene has a different expressive content to the dance scene. There is different action and atmosphere, which may be manifested in colour, sound, light or something else. Action and dance. The wish to combine these two element makes Sofa Trio productions into theatre. Action is the story which may be narrated, while dance scenes following dramatic scenes are exj)ressive rather of the atmosphere surrounding the action. This is how r Sofa Trio seek to shade in a more sophisticated manner the unfolding scene. It is a pity that due to a certain impatience on the part of the Trio the elaboration of otherwise brilliant scenes based on meaningful ideas in most cases seems to be left unfinished - and this is quite a characteristic feature of Trio productions - while consecutive scenes - probably intentionally - are not sufficiently linked together. Therefore the audience expect more of Trio productions with a very loose structure than they actually see. One character who appears regularly in Trio productions might well be described as the embodiment of Kókás ars poetica. He is a contemporary