Igor Shugaleev - Sergey Shabohin: Ich heisse Frau Troffea

Following the presentation of Igor Shugaleev’s and Sergey Shabohin’s The body you are calling is currently not available at PLACCC 2022, the Belorusain artists are back in Budapest wiht their new autobiographical monoperformance-manifesto.

A week before Mary Magdalene Festival in 1518, a certain Frau Troffea left her house through the courtyard and, unexpectedly for herself, began to dance frantically in one of the narrow Strasbourg streets. She danced all day and late into the evening, and even all night long. On the third day of this crazy dancing, she was at the stage of extreme exhaustion, shoes soaked in blood, but she could not stop. Finally, her contagious dance swept through the city, causing a dance epidemic that brought about many victims.

Diving into Frau Troffea’s story, the performer talks about his own experience of traumatic obsession and relentless search for freedom that seems painful and fatal. Through the shock caused by separation from his home and his past, absorbed by his forced emigration from Belarus and the search for himself, he dissolves completely in the attractive Berlin rave culture. The magnetism of techno brings in the external and internal transformation of the party-goer: the new freedom of communication and movement he experiences under significant dopings-driven stress. Dancing as an action both physiological and poetic, reveals various artistic dimensions. Through intense body ceremony, a story of an entire country’s disease and the obsessive search for the cure of freedom is told.