Lábán Prize goes to Anna Réti, Csaba Horváth

Anna Réti in the solo performance Soul Without Pullover  Photo: Andrea Nehéz/MU Theatre

The MU Theatre awarded a Lábán Prize and a HUF 500,000 purse to Réti for her piece Soul Without a Pullover and The Trafó House of Contemporary Art presented the prize and a HUF 1.5 million purse to Horváth for his piece &Echó. The awards were presented by the film director János Szász and the poet Krisztina Tóth.

 

The winners were picked from twelve finalists. The finalists were chosen by a jury from 150 Hungarian dance premieres in 2006. The jury included dance historian and critic Lívia Fuchs, critic Tamás Halász, journalist and editor Zsolt Koren, editor and dance critic Csaba Kutszegi, writer Ádám Mestyán, theatre critic István Nánay, dance critic Márta Péter, university lecturer András Rényi, art historian László Százados and journalist Szilvia Sisso Szilágyi.

 

The list of 2007 nominees has been posted at www.kultura.hu/labandij and the spring issue of Parallel, a professional journal published by the MU Theatre, will be dedicated to the awards.

 

The first Rudolf Lábán prizes went to productions by Pál Frenák, Gábor Goda, Csaba Horváth, Gerzson Péter Kovács, Attila Kun, Andrea Ladányi and József Nagy.

 

Rudolf Lábán (1878-1958) was among the most important innovators of modern dance in Europe. He was born in Bratislava, then a part of Austria-Hungary, and spent much of his youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Lábán set up the Choreographic Institute in Zürich in 1915 and later founded branches in Italy, France and Central Europe. His greatest contribution to dance was his 1928 publication of Kinetographie Laban, a dance notation system that came to be called Labanotation and is still used as one of the primary movement notation systems in dance.