On March 7th, as the first hints of spring sunshine filtered through the windows at MOME, we welcomed Réka Gerlits to lead the opening session of our Dance Hack-inspired workshop. As part of our semester-long Reflective Robotics course, this was already the students’ third class—but the first dedicated to movement, motion systems, and embodied experimentation. Réka, who is the Hungarian partner leader of the EU Dance Hack and an integral part of the Central Europe Dance Theatre (CEDT), brought her rich experience and deep familiarity with the methodology, which she learned from the TaikaBox team in Oulu and has been evolving ever since, most recently in Budapest.

Réka guided the students through a three-and-a-half-hour reconstruction of a Dance Hack residency day. The session unfolded in three parts—warm-up, cooperative work, and cool-down—and invited students to shift their focus from theoretical design into full-body exploration. Through rhythm games, partner work, and shared improvisation, participants connected with their own bodies, each other, and with a responsive projection that mirrored their movement. As Réka noted, at first, the relationship between movement and external material was logical and simple—but over time, it evolved into more layered, abstract interactions. A highlight was the cooperative segment using a painter’s foil as a shared object of play, metaphor, and choreography. We ended with the meditative “snail dance,” a gentle group improvisation that perfectly captured the sensitivity and awareness at the heart of the Dance Hack method.

Thanks to Réka’s engaging presence and to Borka Moravcsik (indirectly) the session marked a beautiful beginning to a more embodied exploration of somatic movements and design.