Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest
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
Get apartments in Budapest and enjoy the best in current drama.
Translated by: Hans
Contact Me
Crosstalk: Video-Art Festival in Budapest
Video art is one of the most used ways of artistic expression in today´s world. From the first experiments that took place at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s by people like Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol or Fred Forest, the use of the video as a way of support, it has been used as well as an undisputed catalyst of images and resolutions, colour textures and moving figures, as an entrance so that sound can be more relevant in galleries and museums, chained to the image, in which way it became essential in performances, facilities and exhibitions. And, of course, despite cinematography and television already being audio and image united as issuers of meaning, on the other hand, the video gives any camera user enough potential to become the generator of visual and sound realities and the possibility of telling a story or changing history. The experience of the apprehension of the video is completely different. It´s not cinema, it´s not TV, it´s video!
That way, the democratic encounter with the video, is in understanding the rest of the possibilities that it holds and will hold. Today, all of us are potential video artists, from our multiple webcams, computers and webpages. The visual consumer of this time isn´t passive and shouldn´t stop being so. Recently, via YouTube, we´ve been able to be aware of peaceful, political movements in different countries, thanks to tapes that were uploaded onto the net in real time, informing a public who is ever-desiring for fresh information and, above all, with the will to want to “share” images, sounds, videos, art, etc. It´s funny to acknowledge that in the first experimental experiences with video, there are the first traces of video games, digital animation, 3D, current advertising and pornography.
And thus, the information unfolds around the world quicker and quicker and more precisely all the time. What we call “sharing” from social networks, is closer to a viral or contagious process, where information can´t stop and runs it´s course. Video art, with all of its potential and the tradition that it represents, has contributed during the last twenty years to create better communication and serving platforms, from its experimentalism to developing better information transmission methods on the net. The video art culture, it has to be said, comes in the same way with the sounds of electronica, digital curiosity and mass media. All of these phenomenons, discussions and projections of the best European video art, can be found at Crosstalk Festival of Video Art in Budapest, which will take place in July. For more information on the event, as well as timetables and presentations, visit this website which will shortly be updated:Â Â http://crosstalk.hu/
Alexa Ray
Nothing better than renting apartments in Budapest and getting to know the best European video art. Have a great time, also, in one of the cities with more history and beauty that remain on the old continent. Art is always the best excuse to find new friends and problems.
Translated by: aleixgwilliam
Contact Me
