Portrait of Kristóf Szabó by AMAZE
At the heart of his artistic approach is the conviction that the body, the image, and the world should not be treated as separate elements, but as interconnected forces whose interaction gives rise to meaning.
Founded by Kristóf Szabó in 2012, F.A.C.E. Visual Performing Arts is an interdisciplinary performance ensemble connecting visual arts and performing arts.
PRESS: “Kristóf Szabó F.A.C.E. Ensemble: Confusing, unfathomable, thought-provoking, dangerous, electrifying.” — T. Hildebrandt (ha, Cologne, 2019)
What Makes F.A.C.E. Unique?
F.A.C.E. understands perception and knowledge not merely as intellectual processes, but as experiences involving movement, sensation, emotion, and physical presence.
Daniel Defoe – Kristóf Szabó PEST vs. ROBOT 2021 photo by Kristóf Szabó
The distinctive quality of the Kristóf Szabó F.A.C.E. Ensemble lies not simply in its combination of new dance, installation of spaces, contemporary music, video art and theatre based on classical theatre texts. What sets F.A.C.E. apart is how it brings the body, the image, the space the text and the sound together in a unified artistic language—and how this creates new ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Kristófs performances do not simply tell or explain something. They create situations in which audiences can experience relationships and complexities through their own senses and bodies. The entire body is percipient. Kristóf Szabó transforms performance into a form of visual and embodied knowledge.
Rehearsal of John Milton – Kenneth Patchen – Kristóf Szabó LOST PARADISE 2025 photo by AMAZE
Our practice can be described an intermedial research: The entire body perceives—and cognitive understanding goes hand in hand with it. Body and mind have never been separate. No, they have never been separate.
Kristóf Szabó – A documentary by Joseph Vicaire (language: German)
SHOWREEL of works F.A.C.E. Ensemble WORKS 2025
Kristóf Szabó TerritoryNight 2025 photo by AMAZE
The Body Is Not Just a Performer, but Part of an Acting Image
In many theatre productions, projections illustrate the action or create an atmosphere. In F.A.C.E.’s work, the body, movement, video, objects, costumes, light, sound and space function as interconnected elements of a visual composition.
Together, they create acting images: images that do not merely represent something but actively generate meaning and transform the audience’s perception.
For us, the body is part of the world. We therefore speak of environment rather than surroundings. Through the installations in the space —mobile objects, xr-, video- and mapping art – the performer engages with a world.
Kristóf Szabó in Timișoara, directing Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the German State Theatre as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme.
The Stage Is Not an Empty Space, but a World
F.A.C.E. does not consider the body in isolation. A performer enters a space that is already shaped by objects, images, histories, and social relationships.
The performer is not separate from their environment but exists within a network of relationships that continuously shape and transform one another.
This leads to a different understanding of the stage: rather than focusing on an isolated body, F.A.C.E. explores the dynamic interplay between the body, its environment, and the world.
The world is an ever-transforming entity.
OH RUSSIA, OH TERRITORY 2023 by Václav Havel – Georg Kaiser – Kristóf Szabó photo by AMAZE
At its core, the ensemble explores the relationship between the body and the world. The body is not treated as an isolated entity, but as an integral part of an environment shaped by history, society, material objects, and images. Accordingly, the stage is not understood as an empty space into which performers enter, but as an existing world in which bodies, objects, images, and histories interact.
Rehearsal of Václav Havel – Georg Kaiser – Kristóf Szabó OH, RUSSIA, OH, TERRITORY
Through the interplay of movement, visual composition, sound, and space, F.A.C.E. creates complex sensory experiences that challenge conventional ways of seeing and understanding. Drawing on literature, and contemporary social issues, its works investigate human existence, social structures, and the tensions that shape our relationship with the world.
Kristóf Szabó MIDAS 2022 photo by Stagemoments, Collage by Ivó Kovács
Who Is Kristóf Szabó?
Kristóf Szabó is a Budapest-born artist, director, choreographer, and multimedia artist. He began his career in Hungary as a poet and visual artist. Since 2007, he has worked as a stage designer, director, and choreographer. In 2012, he founded F.A.C.E. Visual Performing Arts in Cologne, an ensemble with which he develops interdisciplinary stage works that are presented internationally.
His background in visual art is essential to understanding his artistic approach. He does not work exclusively from the perspective of dramatic narrative or choreography. Instead, he creates situations in which bodies, images, objects, light, sound, and space interact to form a unified artistic expression.
John Milton – Kenneth Patchen – Kristóf Szabó LOST PARADISE photo by AMAZE
Societal, Philosophical, and Existential Questions
Szabó’s work draws on a wide range of sources, including biblical narratives, ancient Greek mythology, literature, and findings from the life sciences. These subjects are transformed into contemporary mixed-media performances.
His interest, however, goes beyond translating a particular subject onto the stage. Instead, these narratives become starting points for questions that reach far beyond their original contexts.
These include, for example:
- How do we understand human identity?
- How do the body and social norms relate to one another?
- How do people deal with suffering, power, and exclusion?
- How does technology change our understanding of what it means to be human?
- How do human beings relate to nature and their environment?
- How can we make sense of a world that is constantly changing?
The artistic form creates a space in which contradictions can remain unresolved. A performance does not necessarily have to provide a definitive answer. It can bring different perspectives into dialogue and encourage audiences to question their own patterns of perception.
Video-Documentations of LATEST PERFORMANCES – (full lenght videos)
John Milton – Kenneth Patchen – Kristóf Szabó LOST PARADISE I -EVA II – ADAM (2025)
Documentation: K. Szabó VENICE + THE DEAD (2022)
Documentation: Aischylos/Marinetti PROMETHEISCHE KULTUR (2020)
Documentation: K. Szabó BORDERS.BIRDS (2019)
Documentation: Lord Byron/K. Szabó KAIN meets LUZIFER (2019)
Trailer Gottfried Benn – Kristóf Szabó GEHIRNE – Tod der Schöpfung
Trailer Showreel F.A.C.E. Ensemble WORKS 2025
“If the world is in your head – where is your head?” (Kristóf Szabó)
Kristóf Szabó Licht 2019 photo by Stagemoments
Not what we experience, but the conclusions we draw, make the difference.” (Kristóf Szabó)
“Yesterday was tomorrow.” (Magó Szabó)
In these days the changes of the world lead us back to the roots of our conflicts. To think in categories like “good” “evil” “me” “you” “we” they” helps to stay alive (as we are a biological species) – but this way of thinking reproduces the structure of the conflicts. Those never melt, but take new forms of appearance. A paradox, which can not be described by words without oversimplification.
We are in arts to create images. We put the image on an analytic, scientific ground, to express the roots and also the leaves (the contemporary appearance) of our conflicts – for we think, that the conflicts are made by Man; they can be solved! We should continue to face them on a structural and complex level.
Our images should touch the ultimate ground – that is chaos: this is the territory we want to explore; They should sum up the complexity of the structure of human living and they should go to the hearth.
Art director-choreographer, Kristóf Szabó, works with freelancer artists of many different disciplines to put images on stage talking, dancing, performing.
Since 2009 we cooperate with Ivó Kovács CV, projection- and mapping artist working everywhere in the world.
Grown up in a post-modern cultural environment, Kristóf heads for an intermedial performing practice without any borders between the arts.
We want to be involved when our new world is about to arise. The conflicts of the XXI. century are very different from the conflicts in earlier days. Some values are (which one – that is to be explored) worth to be kept – the bipolar disposition of human thinking is a trap; we should get over it. How to go further exploring new ways of thinking and living in this century of robotics and artificial intelligence? How to save at the same time values of mankind?
In these days of fear we want to fight for human rights on a very basic level. For the right to bread, the right to eat/drink, the right to fuck, the right to think, the right to speak – and all these things without fear.
PRESS: …TESZT Festival presented a very important show for human rights, diversity, understanding… (Written by (Dieter Topp for Forum Europa about the piece K. Szabó: COMING OUT, first staging 2017.)
PRESS: …With his 10 performers Szabó develops a passionate appeal for Humanity. (…) And an alarm signal for fragile democracies. (Published in Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, written by BS about W. Hasenclever: ANTIGONE, directed by K. Szabó, first staging 2016.)
KRISTÓF SZABÓ: Why do we transform the suffering of man into beauty, instead of into a revolt?
Read more here: Kristóf Szabó CV
Read more here: Ivó Kovács CV
MORE PERFORMANCES:
Documentation: K. Szabó BORDERS.BIRDS (2019)
Documentation: Lord Byron/K. Szabó KAIN meets LUZIFER (2019)
“Melancholie ist implodierende Bestürzung.” (Kristóf Szabó)
Melancholy is imploding panic.” (Kristóf Szabó)
“Es gibt genug Licht für die, die zu sehen verlangen, und genug Dunkelheit für die, welche eine gegenteilige Neigung haben.” (Blaise Pascal)
