The internationally acclaimed dancer returns to her childhood with her new production. More than “just” another piece of choreography, The Inner Child promises to be a summation of a rich and long journey that began in Szolnok.
'I’ve had visions all my life'
Yvette Bozsik lived in Szolnok until the age of ten, but it was at her grandparents’ house in Tápiószele that she experienced the boundlessness of nature, which has been an important source of inspiration for her ever since. Humility towards theatre is in her genes. Her parents lived under the spell of the Szigligeti Theatre in Szolnok: 'I was brought up there, nursed by Mari Csomós and Frici Hollósi, I absorbed the air of the theatre with my mother's milk,' she said in a 2013 interview. Her godfather, ballet master Albert Mozsonyi, was another early influence, as he introduced the three-year-old girl to the wonderful world of ballet. 'I’ve had visions all my life,' she said in a television interview, and we have seen these dazzling visions come to life on stage for more than forty years.
From the Ballet Institute to Underground Rebellion
Bozsik arrived in Budapest in 1978, but she counted as an oddball in the residential hall of the State Ballet Institute, where as a teenager she would read existentialist and classical authors at night – in the bathroom, so as not to disturb the others. She couldn’t sleep because she was curious about life. The books she read at the time (and the many more she has read since) provided her with a strong intellectual foundation that is always reflected in her work. After receiving the most rigorous classical training at the Ballet Institute, she worked as a dancer at the Budapest Operetta Theatre for a few years, before co-founding, with György Árvai, the Collective of Natural Disasters, in the late 1980s. This was a period of radical experimentation, when they pushed the bounds of traditional dance with taboo-shattering performances.
It was in this dense creative milieu that she developed an individual voice that soon found broad recognition. 'I no longer feel avant-garde at all. I’m always trying to show my own life, my own experiences, and it may often be provocative, but it’s never so for the sake of provocation itself. I simply try to communicate my emotions and thoughts to the audience, honestly and with a lot of humour. I don’t want to give answers, because I don’t know the answers either. I just dare to ask questions and show parts of me,' she told another interviewer.
Success in Edinburgh, a Joint Project with John Lurie
Bozsik burst onto the international dance scene in 1993, when critics and professionals at the Edinburgh Festival unanimously voted her discovery of the year. One of the most exciting outcomes of this heady period was working with John Lurie, founder of The Lounge Lizards. 'My joint production with John Lurie was entirely self-produced. I’m not complaining, but it cost me a lot of energy and money. But just because I was born here, I shouldn’t lose heart. I’m always doing things that tax my energy and means, but that’s all right, that too is a way of doing it. And I transfer the constant pressure into my work,' she revealed at the time.
In the Shadow and Light of Pina Bausch
Pina Bausch, the German revolutionary of dance theatre, has been one of the most important points of reference for Bozsik throughout her career. She saw her not only as a master, but also as a kind of spiritual mother. Bausch’s art showed her that dance could be more than technique: it could also be a raw physical confession. 'I’ll never forget when she came to see my production, Cabaret… in Paris, and then came into my dressing room and told me I was brave, and then as a further gesture invited my whole company to one of her stage rehearsals at the Théâtre de la Ville,' the dancer recalled in 2018.
Bausch continues to be the most seminal artist for Bozsik, and she dedicated her Death and the Maiden to her, a dance production based on Schubert’s music. In a beautiful twist of fate, the Tanztheater Wuppertal will perform Bausch’s Vollmond (Full Moon) at this year’s Bartók Spring, on Friday 10 April 2026.
Every Award under the Sun
Bozsik was only 36 years old when she was awarded the Kossuth Prize, and her exceptional work has been recognized with over forty international and Hungarian art awards. In 1993, she founded the Yvette Bozsik Company, which has been touring the world with great success while doing much to make contemporary dance as widely known as possible in Hungary. She was appointed a professor in 2009 and is now head of the Choreography Department at the Hungarian Dance University.
As a teacher, Bozsik finds that her students do not know themselves, 'when, in fact, they have all the knowledge ‘in there’,' she said in an interview she gave when making her film, Dancer under the Table (directed by her husband, Marcell Iványi). In another recent interview, she said something that applies fittingly to the new show: 'So if we don’t engage with the child within and don’t give them what they didn’t get from their parents, we’re left with a lot of traumas. Throughout my life, I’ve been slowly coming to terms with those traumas, so I can finally resolve them in love.'
