Commonplace offers a sweeping stage mix about encounters, escape tricks and prejudices. About how we are not at all as special as we would like to believe, and that this is all right.

We stand in the doorway and look at the by-passers carrying their stories locked inside. Each day is an expedition. We step outside and join the endless transport of human stories.

Some of the rehearsal took place in a rehearsal room; other parts were rehearsed in public areas. The creators kept Moszkva square in Budapest and its passers-by under close observation. The performance consists of an extended and stratified reading of one minute of contemplating a public area, with ourselves as the point of reference. The personal stories of the five actors are intertwined with the stories of public-space pedestrians the same way a DJ mixes his different sound samples. When invited to other cities, the stories and characters of the local public places can be intergrated into the piece.
We are in search of ourselves in the crowd. We aren’t only witnesses of the change but part of it. Let’s dance.

The performance searches for a common ground beyond commonplace, where we can get closer to understanding another human being through the stories we tell about ourselves. This search is cast into the form of dance and text with lots of music and contribution by a DJ, all in a style that humorous and self-ironic, as well as hyperrealistic without discounting abstraction. The members of the audience may easily recognize themselves in the gestures, movements, and stories on offer, as they would in a pop song.

Commonplace is an artistic collaboration between The Symptoms and director Petra Ardai / Space Theatre (NL). The collaboration started with the short performance I don’t remember being raised like this in 2012, a piece of human statistics and subjective inventory. We spare no effort in relentlessly continuing to chart relationships between the individual and the community. What are moral values anyway? How does one avoid indifference?

The Symptoms is a performance collective organized around the Hungarian dancer and choreographer Réka Szabó. Originally a mathematician, Szabó has been building her company with dancers and actors since 2002. The members of The Symptoms are not simply performing artists but fully involved contributors, whose personalities, creativity, and team spirit fundamentally define every work of the company. 

The Symptoms pieces are carefully thought through, intellectual, and humorous creations mixing dance with text-based acting and movement. They typically use commonplaces as a jumping board, transforming them into grotesque, ironic, and often touching collages. The troupe works in a variety of formats, producing pieces for the stage as well as performances and free improvisations for public spaces and galleries. 

The company recognizes no generic boundaries, handling text, movement, music, and visual effects as ingredients of equal rank. Fond of special technical solutions, they treat of everyday problems that preoccupy all of us, addressing these themes in a deeply personal language. In recent years in Hungary, social apathy has presented an increasingly pressing problem, forcing The Symptoms to change the audience’s attitudes of passive reception. They employ special tricks to dislodge spectators from their cozy roles and move them to thought, even action. All of this is wrapped in a vision that is grotesque, self-ironic and poetic at the same time.

The repertoire includes genres as diverse as a dance performance informed by interactive video technology, a piece of political dance theater, and “life-disco”, as well as street performance and an interactive fairytale of a play for kids. 
Over the years, The Symptoms have been invited to various festivals and venues in Europe, including The Place in London, the National Theater of Prague, the Schauspiel in Köln, the Tanzlabor in Bielefeld, the Savoy-teatteri Helsinki and the INFANT festival in Novi Sad. In 2014, their show Apropos 2.0 was invited to premiere at the Alexander Kasser Theater of Montclaire University, New Jersey. 

Performed by: Emese Cuhorka, István Gőz, Valencia James / Rafaela de Sousa, Réka Szabó, Dániel Szász, Vince Varga
Special thanks: Dóra Furulyás, Péter Kárpáti, Music, sound, noise: Vince Varga, Costumes: Luca Szabados, Lights: Attila Szirtes, Choreography assistant: Adrienn Hód 
Directed by Petra Ardai
Supported by: Ministry of Human Resources, National Cultural Fund, Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Open Society Foundations, FÜGE, MasterCard