During the last few years, Hungary’s contemporary dance scene has been hit especially hard by funding cuts: many artists have left the country or stopped working in the field altogether, and many venues that used to present dance shows can’t afford to any more, let alone to co-produce or commission new work. Pretty much the only remaining bastion for young and emerging artists is Trafó House, which, after a long reign of founder-director György Szabó and his colleague Beáta Barda, received a new leadership at the beginning of this year. Thanks to Trafó being run by the Municipality of Budapest rather than the government (which notoriously appoints theatre leaders based on political bias), the application process went fairly and smoothly. Although Szabó and Barda’s achievements are unparalleled and highly valued, for a while it has felt like Trafó could use a breath of fresh air, and many hope that the new executive director, Katalin Erdődi, a curator, dramaturg and writer with an impressive international portfolio, can bring along just that.
At the beginning of March, Trafó presented the fifth edition of Nextfest, a mini-festival for emerging artists and experimental forms. Five celebratory days full of theatre and dance performances, workshops, parties and side programs – for five days it almost felt like independent artists were doing just fine in Budapest. Almost. My focus was naturally on dance, and just how small the scene has become was also indicated by the amount of overlap between the creators and performers of the festival’s dance shows. Unfortunately, not only is the number of artists getting less and less: contemporary dance’s shrinking audience is also a sign of deeper, systemic problems.
Three of the festival’s group dance pieces follow a structure that has spread like an epidemic in recent years in contemporary dance. Viktor Szeri’s I Quit Ordinary Dancing (IQOD), AHA Collective’s Sweat Set and Willany Leó Improvisation Dance Theatre’s ripples in silence, The misty waltz all start with an extended period of inactivity (lying, sitting, standing or posing) and/or slow-motion, which later, very gradually develops into a more dynamic, sometimes even cathartic dance feast. Szeri’s previous piece, fatigue, was also a marathon of slow-motion, but there it felt reasonable: the slowing down of movements and time made the central topic of the piece, burnout, tangible in our own bodies. Apart from that very specific case, this type of dramaturgy can be very tiresome, especially when seen for the umpteenth time. Yet it could be instinctive or intentional; maybe this numbness is the youngest generation’s reaction to all the madness around us.
