I am at the beginning of this journey, and articulating my artistic desires and the aesthetic of Creature feels fragmentary, much like what it feels like to relate to my ancestors. And as the child of Magyar immigrants three times removed, I know that I am also blinded by nostalgia, the feeling that I'm an impostor, even though I have seen pictures and documents of my ancestors. The schism of these feelings, especially as a former runaway who has both longed for home and run from it, feels resonant to me. And though Magyar has no pronouns, it is a highly gendered society. With Viktor Orban’s ‘illiberal democracy’, a government gleefully removing trans rights and inspiring US Republicans “Don’t Say Gay” bills, learning the the legényes feels visceral, a profound reconnection to my ethnicity as a genderqueer body rebelling against prevailing binaries. Creature will be an allegory for these complexities; integrating into the work of queer elder Count Sandor Vey, literature and ethnography to create a cohesive piece.

- Tanya

Creature (in-development)

A performance work rooted in lived experience, studies of Magyar folk dance and literature, as well as relation to land, language, and my attempts to reconnect with these roots, Creature is a fierce mucking about with vulnerability to get at life as a former runaway, third generation Magyar settler, and genderqueer.

While writing and creating in residence through Tender Container’s Residency Do Trans People Dream of Electric Sheep at Theatre Calgary, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Brick in Manhattan, and at Arts Quarter Budapest in Hungary, I trained in the Magyar folkdance legényes (Lad's dance) with collaborators Gergö D. Farkas, Balázs Oláh, and Julcsi Vavra, as well as collecting research, writing, and creating in the studio with dramaturge zavé martohardjono. Currently, the piece is a conglomeration of archival research, oral stories from family, my own writing, Magyar dance, ethnography and queer history — particularly from scholar Anita Kurimay’s book Queer Budapest and scholarship on 19th century transmasculine Magyar writer Count Sandor Vey.

Legényes is a man's dance, a way to bond with other men, embody and celebrate masculinity. A ‘living dance’, peasants would perform for each other in social settings — at celebrations, in the streets, or in the pub. My training in legényes will be fodder for sections of Creature, textually describing how this embodied practice reconnects me ancestry and Eastern European transmasculinity. In 2024, Balasz, Gergö, Julci and I will continue workshopping, and in summer 2024 I will return to Hungary for a month of rehearsals.