Hungarian Festival in the Works for 2009

BUDAPEST, Hungary — László Jakab Orsós, the charismatic director of the Hungarian Cultural Center, is not your typical cultural diplomat.

In Budapest, he was a newspaper columnist, a lecturer in screenwriting at the Budapest Academy of Film, and half of a rather notorious pair of restaurant critics, who wrote under the pseudonym "The Wittman Brothers."

It is easy to imagine Mr. Orsós, who goes by Jakab, relishing the mischief that the restaurant column occasionally got him and his newspaper into. At 44, impishly handsome, with a relaxed bearing and a habit of taking off his shoes at every opportunity, he is a high-spirited ambassador for a culture that has had more than its share of suffering and gloom.

In three years, Mr. Orsós has transformed the Hungarian Cultural Center from a staid, backward-looking institution, which existed primarily to serve Hungarian émigrés, to one that sees its mission as engaging all New Yorkers with Hungarian historical and contemporary culture.

Now, in collaboration with the Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture, the center is planning its largest undertaking yet: a festival of Hungarian music, art, film, food, and literature to take place at venues in New York and Washington, D.C., throughout 2009.

The festival will open in January with a two-week series of concerts at Carnegie Hall, including the New York début of the composer and performer György Kurtág, and a performance by Beáta Palya, a young singer whose influences include Hungarian folk music, Gypsy music, and jazz.

The filmmaker Péter Forgács will have an exhibition at the Jewish Museum based on his documentary film "The Danube Exodus," which depicts two historic voyages on the Danube River: an exodus of Jews escaping down the Danube in 1939 and a "reverse" exodus of Germans fleeing Soviets up the Danube one year later. (Remarkably, both voyages were steered by the same captain, who was also an amateur filmmaker.) The Hungarian Cultural Center has also commissioned a new documentary from Mr. Forgács, about Hungarian immigrants to America from the 1890s to the start of World War I.

Hungarian chefs will visit the French Culinary Institute; Lincoln Center Festival will present a series of Hungarian plays; and the filmmaker Béla Tarr will have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. There will be exhibitions of design, photography, and Modern and Contemporary art; fin de siècle-style cabaret performances at Café Sabarsky, and "salons" on Hungarian culture at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO. A concert will juxtapose the musical traditions of Hungarian Gypsies and black Americans. Among the quirkier events will be a two-month-long mustache-growing contest, the winner of which will get a trip to Hungary.

(The festival is receiving support from two of New York's most prominent Hungarian émigrés, George Soros and Kati Marton. The Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture paid for a handful journalists, including this one, to visit Budapest recently to get a preview of the festival's programs.)

Before he arrived, Mr. Orsós said in a recent interview, the Hungarian Cultural Center offered little contemporary programming; its émigré audience was mostly interested in programs related to the culture of the 1950s and 1960s — in other words, of the Hungary they left. In his application for the job, Mr. Orsós proposed that the center turn outward, to find a niche in New York's rich cultural landscape by offering programs that connected the various strains of Hungarian modernism with their counterparts in American culture.

"Even New York is getting a little nostalgic" for its edgier days, Mr. Orsós said in explaining why he thinks the center can fill a gap in arts programming. Exhibitions, performances, and talks that explore how Hungarian contemporary culture is rooted in late 19th- and early 20th-century modernity — from Art Nouveau to the music of Béla Bartók — "can be fruitful and inspiring to New Yorkers," he added.

Among the events that the center has presented or co-presented in the last three years have been a sold-out performance of Gypsy dancing at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University; exhibitions by contemporary artists; and appearances by Ms. Palya and the novelist Péter Esterházy at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. The center also drew attention for two large billboards it rented in Times Square, in 2006, to commemorate the anniversary of the 1956 uprising against Hungary's Stalinist government.

Like many Hungarians, Mr. Orsós has a complicated background. He grew up in a village near the western border of Hungary. His parents were Roma, or Gypsies; his father was imprisoned in a Russian labor camp from 1943 to 1947.

In Budapest, he seems to know almost everyone, from the best chefs, such as Tibor Rosenstein of Rosenstein Restaurant, to artists such as Ms. Palya and the dancer Andrea Ladanyi. He speaks about the city with a mixture of enthusiasm for its attractions and frustration that the inhabitants of the city don't take fuller advantage of them. Although the squares and cafés seem lively to an outsider, to Mr. Orsós they appear subdued.

As for next year's events, Mr. Orsós said that he's fully aware of "how lame and boring" cultural festivals can be. Among the decisions he made early on was that the center wouldn't rent any venues, but would only do collaborations — ensuring that the festivals wouldn't simply be buying their way in. "That doesn't seem like the way to have a dialogue," he said.

He said that he has already asked to extend his four-year term at the center by one year. Although he sometimes has to fight for his ideas against more conservative elements in the Hungarian government, he doesn't mind expending his political capital. "I'm not a career diplomat," he said.

And what will he do when his term is up? Will he go back to Budapest or stay in New York?

"I don't know, that's a huge question," he said, noting that he sees this uncertainty as a consequence of how much he has immersed himself in the job. "I lost myself," he said with delight.

What he does know is that he would like to do produce some independent art projects. "I think there is a huge potential in public art to talk about painful topics, like poverty and hatred," he said.

For the moment, he is enjoying his current role as diplomat-cum-impresario. "I'm waking up every morning with thousands of new ideas," he said. The job has "become me," he said. "It's become my art."

Correction from July 1, 2008: The Hungarian Ministry of Education and Culture paid for journalists, including a staff reporter of The New York Sun, to visit Budapest in anticipation of a festival of Hungarian culture in New York next year. The source of the trip's funding was misidentified in an article on page 17 of yesterday's Sun.