Árpád Schilling

Árpád Schilling (b. 1974) is a theater director and the artistic director of Krétakör. He began staging productions at the age of 19 and set up Krétakör Theatre in 1995, the same year in which he started his directing studies at the Theatre and Film Academy in Budapest. He continued to run Krétakör in parallel with his studies; from 1998 to 2000 he was invited by Gábor Zsámbéki to be a guest director at the world famous Katona József Theatre. He staged "Platonov" by Chekhov in 1999 with students from the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, performing the play at the European Theatre Union festival. The same year he won the Hungarian theatre critics' prize in the "upand-coming professional" category for his production of István Tasnádi's "Public Enemy" at the Katona József Theater. After rejecting several offers to join institutional theatres, along with cultural manager Máté Gáspár he turned Krétakör Theater into a permanent theatre company. The most emblematic of their work is Chekhov's "The Seagull", which premiered in 2003.

In 2008, Árpád Schilling restructured his creative team, moving from a repertory system to project-based work. He also dropped ‘theatre’ from their name, retaining just the word Krétakör. He embarked on large-scale artistic experimentation, focusing on education, social development and nurturing talent. Since 2008 he has been working as artistic director on several cultural and teaching programmes both in Hungary and abroad (Paris, Prague, Munich), moving his projects into schools, small communes and outlying communities in difficulty. He was guest teacher in 2006 at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique (CNSAD) in Paris, in 2009 at the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC) in Châlons-en-Champagne and in 2011 at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Techniques du Théâtre (ENSATT) in Lyon, in 2013 at La Manufacture (HETSR) in Lausanne, in 2014 at École Supérieur d’Art Dramatique – Théâtre National de Strasbourg (TNS). In October 2012 he presented his own work "Noéplanete" at the Théâtre National de Chaillot in Paris, in December staged Verdi's "Rigoletto" at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. In 2013 he staged Mozart’s "Idomeneo" at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt (Austria), in 2014 he staged Berlioz’s "La damnation" de Faust at the Theater Basel (Switzerland). He has won numerous awards, including the Stanislavski Prize from Moscow in 2005, the Légion d'honneur from the French Ministry of Culture in 2008 and the Europe Theatre Prize in the New Theatrical Realities category in 2009.