Urania Interdisciplinary Academic Journal

The drama of the Pre-Expressive

2025-02-18T13:46:20+00:00

The article analyses Theodoros Terzopoulos’ staging of Waiting for Godot at the National Theatre, using the perspectives of theatre anthropology, focusing on how the work can be perceived as a performance of waiting. The paper discusses the definition of ritual, cultural performances, performativity, and describes the pre-expressive, explaining Eugenio Barba’s terminology, comparing it to the set of tools of the performance.

Review of the art institutions associated with Károly Somossy in terms of communication

2025-02-18T14:18:46+00:00

This paper is an edited version of my thesis defended at Károli Gáspár Reformed University, Faculty of Arts Administration and Arts Management. I undertake the task of examining the communication of the entertainment institutions created by Károly Somossy, a highly influential figure of the time, from the time of the Compromise to the turn of the century after the Millennium celebrations (1867–1903). In my paper, I will explore the importance of communication, PR and marketing in the modern sense of the term, the tools were available for this, who used them and how, how much audience appeal they had, and whether it is plausible to say that the printed press was the most important communication tool of the period and, if so, how it was used by the entertainment industry. The research method I chose was to compare the popular press products of the time, the advertisements and advertising concepts of the various art institutions, after clarifying the basic concepts of communication. I have preserved the spelling of the period in the quotations. For reasons of space, I compare the data and communication of the largest and best documented institution, the Somossy Nightclub (Mulató)[1] and the Budapest Operetta Theatre, which still operates these days in the same building. This is the building which, for almost ten years, from 1894 until Somossy’s death in 1903, defined our understanding of nightlife, entertainment and amusement, and paved the way in Hungary for the uneducated child of the muses, operetta, to take off on its world-conquering journey.

[1] Since there have been several Somossy Orpheums over the decades, it is important to note that although our greatest operettas were performed in the former New Somossy Nightclub, later the Király Theatre, I am relying on the data of the Budapest Operetta Theatre at Nagymező Street 17, because this institution is still in operation and we have comparable data.

The poetics of agon

2025-02-19T09:17:45+00:00

The case study explores the poetics of judgment, suffering, competition and the reversibility (or irreversibility) of fate in poetic theatre through Attila Vidnyánszky’s production of Agón. The director places brutality, death and confrontation with the sins of humanity at the centre of the performance, using the means of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, based on the music and text by Péter Pál Józsa. Through the use of a language that he calls poetic theatre, Vidnyánszky depicts the historical and moral struggles of humanity: the collective sins of mankind, events of war and history, from antiquity to nuclear catastrophe. The Gesamtkunst staging is inspired by the spirit of Lucifer’s rebellion, the desire to destroy man, to eradicate himself, integrating both the martyrdom of the Forty Martyrs of Sebeste and the burial of Christ, which is typical of contemporary thinking. The performance can also be interpreted as a Madách paraphrase, because at the end, next to the man and woman entering the stage, there is a child who (perhaps) can bring about the reversal of humanity’s fate, and who (perhaps) will be able to build a cathedral from swear-words.

Productions directed by Alessandro Serra and Savvas Stroumpos in Budapest

2025-02-19T09:46:49+00:00

The subject of my paper is two performances that were presented at the 11^th Madách International Theatre Meeting (MITEM):[1] one is the closing event, Tragùdia – The Song of Oedipus,[2] directed by Alessandro Serra, and the other is The Seagull,[3] staged by Savvas Stroumpos. In addition to analysing these performances, I explore their cultural and theatrical context and attempt to approach them from the perspective of Theatre Anthropology.

[1] The festival was held between 6–28 April 2024 at the National Theatre in Budapest, https://mitem.hu/program/eloadasok (last visited: May 2, 2024).

[2] Co-production performance – Sardegna Teatro, Teatro Bellini di Napoli, ERT Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, Fondazione Teatro Due Parma. The online playbill of the performance: https://mitem.hu/program/eloadasok/tragedia-oidipusz-eneke (last visited: May 2, 2024).

[3] Zero Point Theatre. The online playbill of the performance: https://mitem.hu/program/eloadasok/siraly-2 (last visited: May 2, 2024).

Cinematography practice as Project Pedagogy

2025-02-19T08:46:06+00:00

In this article, I contrast the effectiveness of the presentation-based teaching strategy (frontal instruction) with project pedagogy, another teaching strategy derived from the constructivist learning theory. Furthermore, I point out that the traditional cinematography practice used in the training of cinematographers since 1949 is based on modern pedagogical ideas, i.e., it mostly corresponds to a project pedagogy-based teaching strategy formulated on the constructivist learning theory.

Contemporary dramas and their authors at the 15th jubilee DESZKA Festival

2025-02-19T10:54:42+00:00

DESZKA Festival, which has focused on contemporary Hungarian drama since its inception in 2006, was held for the first time since 2019 in an interpersonal and reorganised form, welcoming theatre-makers and the wider audience for the fifteenth time this year at the Csokonai National Theatre in Debrecen. The more than one-week-long event series, which took place between 9 and 18 May 2024 and featured thirty-one performances and numerous accompanying events, examined, in the spirit of rethinking, the situation of contemporary Hungarian drama from perspectives not used before.

Off we go again

2025-02-19T11:22:04+00:00

At the end of September 2024, the career of István Szabó K. as a director arrived at his third adaptation of Godot. By staging Samuel Beckett’s legend of waiting, the Jászai Mari Prize-winning director maps and tracks the changes in the world and in his view of the world every ten years: what one could—or could not—hope for two decades ago, and ten years later, and what might—or might not—give reason for optimism in the present situation, viewed from the here and now.