Contemporary Drama Festival

This year the seventh Contemporary Drama Festival Budapest will take place during November 21-30, aiming at presenting the newest of European playwriting and theatre to Hungarian and foreign audiences. This year’s guest of honour will be Slovenia with theatre performances, dance theatre, read-outs, concerts and cinema.

Via Negativa will bring two performances, both dealing with one of the seven deadly sins: Would Would Not takes a fresh Slovenian look at lust and Out deals with the subject of pride. The award-winning Fragile! staged by Mladinsko Theatre deals with an up to date subject for all Central Europeans: trying one’s luck in London. The dance performance Expensive Darlings, choreographed by Maja Delak is a good example of Slovenian political theatre. Simona Semenic brings her one woman show I, Victim to Budapest. The festival also intends to provide an opportunity for contemporary theatrical thinking and discourses. Thus a conference will take place to discuss the current situation of Slovenian theatre and alternative ways of producing theatre in Slovenia. The theatre program will be accompanied by a selection of new Slovenian films and a concert by Fake Orchestra which mixes Slavic folk elements with Latin jazz and African tribal music.

Following last year’s The Pornography of Souls choreographed by Dave St-Pierre, audiences this year can see the second part of the trilogy, A Little Tenderness for Crying Out Loud!

Those who are interested in the Hungarian theatre but don’t speak Hungarian can have a chance to see several Hungarian performances since all of them will be presented with English translation. The Hungarian selection includes the Death Trilogy by The Collective of Natural Disasters, who will present their trilogy in one go for the very first time, taking their audience from theatre to theatre on a bus. TÁP Theatre will take you to the trendy guerrilla-club Tűzraktér and show you their much anticipated new performance, The Curators. Victor Bodó and his shiny new company The Sputnik Shipping Company will have the opening night of Council House Stories 0.1. ForteDanse led by Csaba Horvath is reinterpreting the Finnish national epos Kalevala through the power and simplicity of physical theatre.

Ever since 1997 the festival hosts a Visitors’ Programme and organizes various workshops and seminars. This year there will be a symposium called Past Reflection In Post Socialism dealing with the subject of communism in the theatre twenty years after the fall of the regime and the Theatre. Criticism. Today. seminar, dealing with theatre criticism today. The festival will also organize The Playwright of the School. The school of the playwright which aims at introducing the theatre to Hungarian high-school students in a creative and fun way.

See the festival's program in the attached file.

Photos by Dusa Gabor, Marcandrea