Theater had a realistic slope for many years. It was not until the late nineteenth century when it started to appear a change in this trend, mainly due to the various artistic vanguards and the advent of modernity. So, thanks to advances in visual media through symbolism and abstraction, theater took a step to higher levels of representation, staging and proposals. Today, contemporary drama uses a variety of new resources ranging from video, installation and increasingly minimal and conceptual staging, in which new records interact with aesthetic, political, current and controversial stories.

Perhaps the greatest example of total contemporary theater is the King Ubu by Alfred Jarry, a piece with multiple variations and recurring themes, works both the in stage and the subject matter from a political irony and humor truly amazing for its time. Jarry was a visionary, and as such, a precursor of Dadaism and other “isms” of the time. The curious thing about a piece like King Ubu, is that besides its high sarcasm, questioning the political environment of its time, anarchic and volatile capacity, is structured from the meaning and quite complex language games, in which the reader or anyone who witnesses the piece, simply get carried away by logic staged games. In this work, too, shedding is minimal nature of the staging of contemporary art.

Antonin Artaud took a step forward in creating theater. With his theories on the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Artaud not only proposes new means even more abstract and metaphysical included in the staging. It was after his explorations in Mexico with peyote in the Tarahumara tribes Theatre Artaud understood as a profound exploration of the unconscious, which also reveals a ritualistic nature scene on the set. So Artaud makes plays in their colors appear as substances, or occurrences that increased the volume on stage. What encourages Artaud is not stable look over the world, but rather quite the contrary. Artaud reveals the short depth of human spirit and the horror of the void, the inability to be present or be in the unrecognized breath by breath, no more than a pathetic construction of meanings around us, and that reality invention is also empty, no other culture density that gives, and which confuses us, contra lateral and manipulated.

The Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest has over ten years. During this period, there have been more than a hundred international performances in the festival, which each year continues to cause interest at the Hungarian public as well as internationally. The festival is a very interesting space in which new proposals for theater and performance converse, mingle, and generate new creations. For more information, visit the following website: http://dramafestival.hu/

Alexa Ray

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Translated by: Hans
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If you are traveling in Budapest, do not forget to visit the Ludwig Museum and its current exhibition “Unmistakable sentences”, which shows its collection from a renewed focus between arts and politics.

“Unmistakable Sentences”, is being exhibit at the Ludwig Museum until the 14^th of August. This exhibition shows works of art focused on the troubled, complex and often ambiguous relation between politics and aesthetics. The subject is vast, ranging from individual cases to abstract reflections about the fate of social utopias, the operation of cultural memory and the artist�s role in maintaining a political speech.

The relation between arts and politics in Hungary became too radical because of the extensive censorship exercised by the political power of the former regime, which defined a very direct existential tendency of contemporary production, as well as putting a strong influence on how they later saw this period and the works of the time were shown.

It is clear that production was not independent from the international stage; many works were born from the dialogue with the international contemporary world of arts, or in explicit opposition to it. An important example of this can be seen in World War II, when abstract art was used as a means of political propaganda in the West, and the same happened in Hungary during the Socialist Realism, period in which the artists from this movement were encouraged to take a dissenting position.

In “Unmistakable sentences,” this issue is addressed through a selection of important works from the collection of the museum, instead of presenting the most relevant work of the time, it focuses on recent acquisitions, intending to show to a wider audience. Among these works, many of which are shown for the first time, include the works of the Hungarian artists Tamás Kaszás, Ádám Kokesch, István Csákán and Csaba Nemes and also very well known works of international artists such as Harun Farocki, Simon Starling, Zbigniew Libera, Mladen Stilinović, Goran Trbuljak and Bálint Szombathy.

An interesting aspect of this exhibition, curated by Katalin Timar, is the decision of not to exhibit the works following historical standards or chronological principles, instead of that the exhibition is displayed in an original way that allows us to highlight the thematic and formal aspects of its works. Some of these connections may seem very simple and trivial, but are very useful to give the viewer a different starting point and unprecedented to find new meanings in known works. In fact, “Unmistakable sentences” wants to avoid showing the works in the same old way that often hides deep relations among works that are not directly linked. For this reason, it invites the viewer to actively participate in the show free of existing structures.

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Then, we recommend you to rent apartments in Budapest and get to know the local art from this amazing display.

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Translated by: Hans
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