Platform

Today is the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. DunaPart team is working and wants to remind you of this holiday with some good news from Budapest. The preparations of the platform are going according to plan. The crew of already 15 and the nearly 200 participants are eagerly awaiting to meet the group of international professionals. Representatives of many important organisations have already registered. We will be honoured to welcome Loughlin Deegan (Artistic Director, Dublin Theatre Festival), Boo Froebel (Associate Producer, Lincoln Center Festival), Magda Gruzinska (Festival Director, Cracow Theatrical Reminiscences), Anja Dirks (Festival Director, Theaterformen), Frie Leysen (director, Theater der Welt 2010), Samme Raeymaekers (Artistic Coordinator, December Dance / Concertgebouw Brugge) Gundega Laivina (Director, New Theatre Institute of Latvia), Laurie Uprichard (Artistic Director, IDFI Dublin Dance Festival) among our many guests.

Join us to make the millennium’s first Hungarian platform of independent performing arts a truly rich and memorable event. Should you need any help with the practical or professional preparations of your visit, please feel free to contact the international network of Hungarian Cultural Institutes or the platform team directly.

We’ve started to register the individual ticket requests. For those of you who have already registered our colleague will send a program table containing all the performances. Please tick the shows you would like to see based on showtimes, genres and duration of shows indicated in the schedule, and send the form back to us. Your complimentary tickets will be available for collection on your arrival.

We’ve chosen the location of the dunaPart Club. We were looking for a conveniently located cultural centre of a unique character, where we could realise all the accompanying programs and which would be a novelty not only to our foreign guests but to the Hungarian participants as well. AKKU, which opened its gates to the public in the last few days seemed an ideal location. It’s a centre for contemporary arts created in a former transformer station. A team of renowned scenographers and designers start working on the refurbishment of this building, which stands in the yard of the Museum of Electrotechnics in the heart of Pest’s Jewish Quarter. Between the 13-17 November we will open the dunaPart Club on the ground floor. Here we will operate a non-stop information and registration centre, hold professional discussions in the late mornings, while in the evenings the place will give home to a club offering music programs and an opportunity for informal meetings. The detailed program will soon be available on our website.

As usual, we would now like to give you two more brief teasers to help you find your way around the packed program.

Czukor Show, 15th November, 7pm, Merlin Theatre

Director Tamás Dömötör is a man of many talents. A cook by profession, he is also a journalist and studied film directing at the University of Drama and Film. “I enjoy making films,” he says. “I have many ideas for different TV series, including detective stories. I wanted Czukorshow to be a film, for which we got a grant and it’s nearly completed, but originally it was made for theatre.”

Pre-Action, Death-Tours Trilogy, Part III., 16th November, 8.30pm, MU Theatre

The focus of the performance is placed on the reprehensible facts of genocide and assassination. Using suicide terrorists’ notes and other documents, the performance attempts to dislodge us from the safety of our everyday-lives, and to bring us closer to the Other, questioning the certainty of ‘it cannot happen to me’.

Practical

Registration will be open on our website up until the beginning of the platform. However, the special dunaPart room prices at the hotels of the Mellow Moods chain are only valid till the end of the week. One of the four star hotels is already fully booked, so we offer you another top category accommodation close to the River Bank (as we would say in hungarian: on the Dunapart) in the heart of the city. You can find all the venues and locations on the map, which also shows that the theatres are all easily accessible from every hotel as well as the dunaPart Club, either on foot or by public transport.

Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact as at platform.budapest@gmail.com. Thank you for spreading the word.