TranzDanz, a company organised around Gerzson Péter Kovács, has been present on the Hungarian contemporary dance scene since 1987. Their latest production, Banquet, created with young, prominent and less well known artists representing different style trends in Hungarian dance is a typical Eastern Central European Gesamtkunstwerk in which music, movement and spectacle are of equal importance. It is a pulp fiction with several story threads, a complex soap opera, a folk tale padded out with absurd figures, where the music of DJ Palotai blends in perfect harmony with the world of archaic symbols and elements of modern dance. As the choreographer-director puts it: “Banquet is like everyday life today. Everybody is everybody else’s partner, ally, schemer, enemy, friend and antagonist, lover and seducer”.

Although the dance in Portugal has been flourishing for a long while, we are rarely able to welcome a Lusitanian guest performance in Hungary. Tiago Guedes, a young titan in his twenties working with the RE.AL [Resposta Alternativa – Alternative Reply] production studio of the renowned choreographer João Fibeiro is coming from Lisbon to this year’s BAF and he is bringing two productions. Guedes’s Um solo [A solo] functions like an echo chamber: Guedes awaits and receives the spectator in it. The dancer resolves the magical silence of the objects on the stage by beginning to use them in ways other than intended, creating new meaning for them. In his other production –Materiais Diversos [Various Materials] – the dancer-choreographer meditates on the rediscovery of raw materials and on ways of making them abstract, exploring the interaction of aesthetic and choreographic materials, the connection and basic relationships between them.

There is little need to introduce the Amadinda Percussion Group. It is well known not only that they are participants in the world’s major festivals, including the Budapest Spring Festival and the Autumn Festival, but also that they have a strong affinity to traditional music and to the latest music. For their concert at this year’s BAF they are selecting from the latter: László Vidovszky’s playful Hoquetus, Zoltán Jeney’s “sound ceremony” Pontpoint and the Hungarian première of one of the most recent works by a contemporary American composer, Davis Lang. The So-Called Laws of Nature (2002) by David Lang is based on the statement by Wittgenstein that “at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena”, but an attraction to and scepticism of laws is not foreign to the other composers either.

For a week the contemporary arts, and more precisely Hungarian and international groups of independent artists and representatives of public art invited by leading curators will take over the empty and/or closed display windows and shops, using temporary galleries and the latest art trends to bring life back to the Boulevard that once bustled with crowds of strollers and gazers.

[In the framework of the ARTIST OT THE FUTURE - ARTISTS FOR THE FUTURE supported by the National Cultural Fund.]

Video clips and literary fiction, cultural historical myths and modern commerce, psychology and horoscopes, in short components of our chaotic world mingle in Ágnes Kuthy’s paper, light and shadow theatre. Where Faust meets the Matrix, graffiti meets the Bible, philosophy meets advertising. And various puppet, visual and acting techniques also “meet”. Within their own particular order these different techniques give a picture of what cannot be ordered: our world that we commonly describe as chaotic and baffling. Ágnes Kuthy studied puppet and theatre directing in Berlin, she has directed in Berlin and Slovakia, at the Budapest Puppet Theatre, the Krétakör Társulat, in Pécs, Eger and Kaposvár. Her previous performance, Androgyne, was presented with great success at a number of Hungarian and international theatre festivals and won the main prize at the Fringe Festival this spring.

[In the framework of the ARTIST OT THE FUTURE - ARTISTS FOR THE FUTURE supported by the National Cultural Fund.]