Fine Day

About the work

Fine Day takes its title from Jane’s 1983 song 'It’s a Fine Day'. I was drawn to the atmosphere of the original recording: simultaneously innocent, eerie and hopeful. Its video carries a similar contradiction — a mother and her young son inhabit an almost idyllic world while the father leaves for war and images of conflict interrupt that apparent simplicity. This tension became an important starting point for the work.

The piece grew from the personal stories of the young dancers I was creating it with. Much of the studio process was task-based: we worked with text, personal memories and prompts, and the dancers generated movement material from their own responses. We also recorded them speaking about their lives, concerns and hopes, and fragments of these voices were woven into the soundtrack alongside electronic music by Előd Abonyi.

Childhood and its particular naivety also shaped the visual world. Costume designer Dóra recycled existing theatre costumes and transformed them individually, incorporating details such as the dancers’ own childhood photographs. An old wooden horse and found photographs further evoked an analogue childhood world connected to the era of Jane’s song.

For the video environment, we filmed dance scenes in the vast open fields of the Hortobágy, on the Great Hungarian Plain, using movement that also appeared live on stage. The openness and stillness of the landscape stood in contrast to the screens, accelerated information and constant stimuli of contemporary life.

Rather than defining a generation, the work explored the conditions surrounding these particular young people — uncertainty, technological saturation, changing ideas of identity and belonging — while preserving something of childhood’s playfulness, vulnerability and, most importantly, hope.