Soharóza - Jónás Vera: Back-Pack

As humans we come with a heavily packed baggage, we inherit genes, destinies, patterns and identities. The performance ponders on how much of this we can consciously shape, where our individual responsibility lies, can we face what is in our own bag, can we unpack it and rearrange it so that the next person we put it on will carry less.

On stage are the 25 members of the Soharóza choir, Vera Jónás as soloist and the Vera Jónás Experiment. The music and the movements are both performative with Joanna Jaworska-Maciaszek’s playful choreography. The songs – written by Vera Jónás and then further developed by the whole group collectively – are connected by so-called recitativos, which are playful, partly improvised and sometimes interactive musical scenes. The video projection accompanying the performance also aids the audience in immersing themselves deeper into the topic – in this way the performers invite the audience for collective thinking.

The performance was written after a long preparatory process, during which the creators shared their own and their families' stories, the patterns they had brought with them, the baggages they had inherited. In an almost therapeutic process they searched for the common denominators that would later form the skeleton of Back-Pack.

Soharóza is an experimental vocal ensemble, led by Dóra Halas, that has been playing with sounds, different kinds of music, the human body and space since 2008, creating unconventional performances that cannot be classified by genre. The main characteristic of the group is its collaborative composing approach, in which choir members participate in the creation of projects not only as performers but also as co-creators.

Fonogram and Artisjus award-winning singer-songwriter Vera Jónás and her band released their latest album HOLD in April 2022. In recent years, they have toured Asia, the Central and Eastern European region, performed after Santana at the Tauron Life Festival in Poland, while in Hungary they have been invited to festivals like Sziget, VOLT, Művészetek Völgye, Fishing on Orfű, Campus and Örvényeshegy Piknik.