The National Theatre Festival is under way in Bucharest
Local and international productions are part of this year's edition.
Roxana Vasile, 23.10.2023, 13:40
Romanian and foreign plays, debates, exhibitions and theatre book launches – all are scheduled as part of the 33rd edition of the National Theatre Festival (FNT) in Bucharest. Part of the offer of this year’s event, which started on Friday and ends on October 30, are also reading performances, creative workshops, presentations of institutions and cultural projects, meetings with guest artists, radio shows and online events. The curatorial team of the festival, made up of theatre critics Mihaela Michailov, Oana Cristea Grigorescu and Călin Ciobotari, opted for artists with different aesthetics and varied theatrical languages, choosing productions that they consider relevant for this year’s theme: RNTF, the Laboratories of the Sensitive. This means that, for 11 days, the public can see 30 theatre productions from Romania and 3 foreign shows.
The local selection was made from among 150 shows, staged in the 2022-2023 season, produced by state and independent theatres in Bucharest and other cities. The guest performances, “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, a production of the National Theatre in Lisbon, Portugal, had the honor of opening the festival on Friday. Part of the NTF is also an exhibition dedicated to the late French man of culture of Romanian origin, George Banu, a theatre critic, researcher and professor with a number of European and American universities.
At the Odeon Theatre, in downtown Bucharest, the exhibition Chairs, signed by Marius Damian, includes over 200 works collected during the years 2020-2023 and is dedicated to people who work in theatre, such as actors, directors, set designers and critics. The Austrian Cultural Forum presents, within the festival, two exhibitions, while Radio Romania offers listeners the radio dramas The King, the Jester and the Rats, directed by Mihai Lungeanu and Bucuresti – Underground, directed by Toma Enache. The festival also includes a book fair organized for the launch and presentation of new publishing products in the field of performing arts.
In conclusion, this 33rd edition of the National Theater Festival is a special one, aiming to reflect the transformations in the present-day theater, a place of meetings between generations, as the president Romanian Theatre Union (UNITER), Dragoş Buhagiar, said. (EE)
