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Story by Barbara Penny Angelakis
BUDAPEST’S CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL SCENE
Budapest, Hungary’s beautiful capital city is cleft by the mighty Danube River, with Buda on the hilly right bank, and Pest occupying the flat left side. For thousands of years, the lands at the Danube’s bend had been occupied by a succession of conquering peoples until around eleven hundred years ago when the Hungarian tribes migrated from the north into the area and their culture took root. As late as 1873, Óbuda (a two thousand year old Roman outpost in the northern part of the city) Buda, and Pest, were three separate towns. While this ancient ground enjoys a long and diverse cultural heritage on both sides of the river, with the completion of The Palace of Arts, Budapest’s contemporary cultural scene has taken a huge leap into the 21st century.
The Palace of Arts www.mupa.hu is a major cultural complex that was built to display the erupting creative output of not only Hungary, but the international community of performing artists as well. This multidimensional venue showcases music, theatre, dance and art; classical to modern and everything in between. The Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, Festival Theater, and the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art are all housed in the same striking building that was designed by Gábor Zoboki of Zoboki-Demeter and Associates. The building itself makes its own contribution to the visual arts when during the evening it becomes a spectacle of light and color with changing hues of jewel-toned colors emanating from the glass façade and lighting up the night sky.
 Mr. Zoboki spared no expense in designing a flexible and manipulatable environment to accommodate the varying needs of the individual performing arts. Special attention was paid to achieving acoustical superiority along with state-of-the-art technological support systems. The building itself has its own harmonic tone with hand-picked materials of natural stone and wood supporting the vibrational resonance normally found only in the most modern of performance rooms. Here, in The Palace of Arts, you ascend from the entrance up the stairs to the first floor dominated by the soaring and elegant wooden ceiling and columns. You pass through the soundproof anti-rooms into the Concert Hall with its seating arrangement and fabrics selected to create an environment without distraction. And when the performance begins, it is you that the orchestra is playing for, so perfectly in tune with the hall and the music has been your passage through the building. The same is true for the smaller, but no less intense, Festival Theatre. The identical acoustical excellence is achieved with reverberating ceiling chambers. The adjustable height and width of the stage provides total flexibility for diverse productions, be they dance, chamber music, contemporary music, or theatrical performance.
I had the pleasure of attending two performances at The Palace of Arts during my recent stay in Budapest. The first was a striking presentation of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, to a very appreciative sold-out house. There was a full compliment of children’s choir, 200 person Oratorio Choir, Szent István Király  Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kálmán Záborszky, with 13 principal singers plus archetypal man and child. Staged in the Concert Hall and directed by the eclectic György Böhm, the Mass was sung in Hungarian without benefit of an English libretto translation. Since this was the first time I had seen the Mass performed, it was difficult to follow. The other jarring note was that the principle singers were the only costumed performers and having such a large chorus in full view of the audience in street dress detracted from the dramatic presentation of the piece. Otherwise, the staging was innovative and moving. The highly stylized costumes for the male performers consisted of an assortment of gray underwear over which they wore a transparent plastic coat symbolizing their psychic as well as physical exposure and vulnerability to shifting political positions throughout time. The women wore a simple gray-toned chemise covered by the same transparent coat, and both men and woman had blond slicked-back hair and wore kabuki stylized mask-like make-up. The performers were wonderful with strong voices and acting skills that required adopting static poises for long periods.
The next evening I saw the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble www.dancetheatre.hu perform “Sun Legend” and was surprised and delighted by their contemporary approach. The program included such diverse elements as a wailing clarinet and whispered poetry to deep throat-singing - an ancient shamanic practice - along with amazing acrobatic feats and steps that made the legs from the knees down appear as if they were not attached in any meaningful way to the rest of the body. The excellence of the dancer’s performance was as thrilling to watch as RiverDance (an Irish folk dance extravaganza) and left the audience cheering until encore after encore was performed. It was an exhilarating theatrical experience made more so by the perfect setting of The Festival Theater.
The Museum of Contemporary Art or Ludwig Museum is a beautifully designed and lit setting for showcasing popular art and artists. While I was there, featured was a Keith Haring retrospective documenting the artist’s view of his world and times, along with the semi-permanent collection of world-class contemporary Hungarian artists.
The Palace of Arts is not the only platform for contemporary culture in Budapest.  Avant-garde artists looking for a less structured performing venue can turn to Trafó House of Contemporary Arts www.trafo.hu. In an abandoned industrial Art Nouveau building on Liliom Street that was once a transformer house, independent international artists have found their voice and an appreciative audience. Since Trafó opened its doors in 1998, artists have been able to give free range to less orthodox expressions and creative experimentation. While Trafó is for the mature talent that has achieved some measure of international success, it nevertheless also encourages emerging talent under the watchful eye of an advisory council.
During my stay in Budapest, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to experience two icons of the contemporary dance scene at Trafó. Yvette Bozsik, a classically trained ballet dancer, has since the age of 17 been building her own theatrical vocabulary, integrating music and dance with acting and mime for a total innovative experience unlike any other. Yvette’s independent company is called Compagnie Yvette Bozsik.
 Pál Frenák performs internationally and his Pál Frenák Company has existed in both Budapest and Paris since 1999. His choreography is acrobatic and emotional and his themes of interpersonal relationships can be hostile to the point of violence. Often performed in the nude, his choreography shows pure physical form without artifact. His work is more shocking in the character of his protagonists than in the fact that they are undressed and while lacking in abstract beauty there is a powerful visceral reaction to his work.
The Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Education has taken the first steps in positioning Budapest as a cultural hub in the heart of Europe. It is a city of great beauty and modern conveniences with a welcoming multilingual population. There is every reason to assume that the cultural renaissance that The Palace of Arts has initiated will propel Budapest into a richly deserved prominence. For more information, visit the Hungarian National Tourist Office at www.gotohungary.com
© January 2009 LuxuryWeb Magazine. All rights reserved.
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