In Márk Bartha and Emese Cuhorka’s immersive concert-performance Entering the Limbo, the audience sits among ten musicians and ten dancers. The space is shaped by acoustic instruments, live electronics and movement; the performers improvise within defined structures, while music and choreography develop with equal energy, responding to one another. The performance is a new stage in Bartha’s electroacoustic project Ensemble in Limbo, extending musical experimentation into the realm of movement.
Limbo is a state of both waiting and transition: something has already passed, and what follows has not yet taken shape. Slow shifts, drawn-out sounds and gradually evolving common rhythms define the tempo of this liminal state. Grief and remembrance create community through being together: Entering the Limbo transforms personal loss into a shared experience, a kind of contemporary ritual. (Léna Szirmay-Kalos, dunaPart7 curator)

Entering the Limbo is a new large-scale concert-performance within Márk Bartha’s Ensemble in Limbo project, transforming the distinctive industrial space of Arzenál club into a shared field of perception. The production brings together 20 performers – 10 musicians and 10 dancers – and was created in collaboration with choreographer Emese Cuhorka, with whom Bartha explores the relationship between sound, movement, the body and architectural space.

Ensemble in Limbo functions as an open, site-specific artistic platform: each performance grows out of the acoustics, atmosphere and history of the given location. Entering the Limbo unfolds through slow-building musical processes, repetition, silence, moving sound sources and inner impulses taking shape through the dancers’ bodies. Rather than entering a conventional concert or theatre situation, the audience is invited into an intermediate, suspended state, where sound, light, movement and presence gradually merge.

Through the performers’ continuous presence, mutual attunement and spatial movement, the performance becomes a ritual-like process of collective listening, in which performers and audience members become participants in the same transforming space.