The God known as Hymenaios in ancient Greece and Hymen in ancient Rome was referred to as the son of either Apollo or Dionysus. Regardless of his disputed ancestry, he was deeply revered and his name referred to feasts, matings and the sings sung in his praise. In Pál Frenák’s latest piece entitled Hymen, we are also invited to join a wedding. Over the course of this evening we can drift between the here and now and a far away place, while witnessing something deeply personal and yet disturbingly common. On this evening we can sense a drifting, irresistible force pushing us onwards, allowing us to discover – both as a witness and a participant – the painful pattern of eternal and yet still finite pattern of human games within the internal relations of a family.

Solitude, desire, love, physical contact, violence, power, subjection, possession, honesty, dissimulation… struggles fought by everyone throughout their life, even if maybe not so desperately as the dancers on the stage in this choreography of Pál Frenák. The tense theatrical pulsation of male and female roles, loneliness and togetherness, suffering and happiness, personalism and objectiveness call us to realise ourselves.
InTimE does not need to offer solutions: it is enough if it shows the complexity of these human relationships, so honest that the spectator cannot escape being touched by the performance. There are five dancers on the stage. They sometimes motionlessly observe the other’s fight from the outside and at a distance, while in other situations they take part in these battles. How can – if ever – one person become real to the other? Can the desire for each other remain unfulfilled forever? Frenák’s haunting question is how much our life is entangled in the opportunism towards others and ourselves; how much lying and insincerity impact our relationship to our body.

The motion of the performers on Skateboards reflects the life of children who are locked up in state institutes. Behind the fence, their violent reality requires them to repress their emotions and keeps them in a suspended, perplexed state of existence. The children engage in a dialog neither with replies nor even words. Frenák projects their state of existence and childish observations through his own unique sign system.

While seeking a much needed balance in life, the protagonists experience a string of real and imagined moments. The energetic movements, the imaginative scenery and the light and sound effects combine to make the play exceptionally dynamic.

The shadows on the platform attract our attention. Not only the spectators, but also the dancers are trapped by their own silhouettes coming to life. They are moving together, trying to touch or possess them. However, the tempting or sometimes fearsome phantoms flying by within reach finally prove to be unreachable.

In the western civilization, people are afraid of their phantoms and want to defeat them. In the Japanese culture however, which has had a deep influence on Frenák’s art, facing the inner self is a virtue. In this new creation, Frenák tries to remind us that shadows are stronger than the physical body, because they cannot be touched by fate, and since we are unable to control this world of shadows, it is best to accept it and dissolve in it.

He deals with metamorphosis, transformation, the boundary between clear shapes and established identity. That interim state full of doubts in which things appear in their clear and evident nature only for seconds. As is usual in Frenák’s art, the theatrical space and the elastic spatial shapes give definite and understandable contours to this permanent movement and the explosive presence of the dancers.

After many grand-scale and visually shocking performances, Frenák has this time created a restrained, almost minimalist universe, with a work that focuses on intimate, inward-looking spirituality.