Hakanaï – Closed in a box

Closed in a box, locked in a cage, protecting a guarded treasure – Hakanaï’s performance takes our thoughts into many, sometimes confusing directions, without giving us a real grip to any variant. The encounter between animation and dance is Hakanaï, and under the title of dance performance and digital art, the movement and visual expression offer each other a spectacular possibility to meet.

A minimalist dance floor opens in front of us, a dance floor that is also not large in space: the actual space of performance is covered with transparent textiles: these are targeted by the projectors and actually all magic starts from here. Letters and numbers appear on the wall of the projected box, which turn into grids. The viewer can rightly philosophize about the role of human culture, and in fact, the audience receives little basis for what the deeper meaning is.

In the case of the grids, the horror-thriller reference of the Box is very much at hand, but the spatial visuals on the stage are not threatening: it appears that the dancer interacts in an easy way with the grid, shaping it as she pleases, then loosely shaking it off, just to bring it back after a complex movement.

The projection forms the space in bigger phases: we saw something that evokes the molecular structure and then there was also rain. There is a continuous playing with the point of view: looking at the atomic structure from the top, or becoming part of the covalent bond, hiding in a world’s protected box, or looking the rain from the outside – at the end all boundaries are blurred, and the strongest stimulus remains the experience.

Hakanaï is a coherent choreography compiled with an extraordinary professionalism – with contemporary tools that expand the boundaries of stage expression.

Kiss Bence