Four Decades of Romanian Dance

A collection of articles by former dancer Liana Tugearu reviews the recent history of dance in Romania.

Luana Pleşea, 27.07.2013, 13:00

Released in late April, the volume “A Whole World Made of Pieces. 1972-2012 Dance Reviews” by Liana Tugearu, in fact a collection of articles published mostly in the Romania Literara (Literary Romania) magazine, is the equivalent of a dictionary of choreographic art or of a history of dance. A former student of Elena Penescu Licu and Floria Capsali, after a few years of dancing on stage, Liana Tugearu kept on devoting her life to dance.

Liana Tugearu: “Dance has been a major part of my life, because my very existence has always been linked with the world of dance. I used to dance, my husband has danced or has done choreography and I’ve been always in touch with everything that has happened in the field, be it here in Romania or abroad.”

Liana Tugearu’s book was released on the opening of the new hall of the National Dance Centre in Bucharest, an institution that published the volume in cooperation with the Coresi Publishers. Here is choreographer Mihai Mihalcea, the director of the Centre:

Mihai Mihalcea: “We thought it was common-sense and a necessity. It was an emergency, so to say, because this volume speaks of 40 years of history. Mrs. Tugearu is that rare dance critic that, with patience and generosity, has accompanied all phenomena, all shows, all dance events, be they classic, contemporary, the work of young artists or well-established dancers and choreographers. It’s been an incredible companion along 40 years of Romanian dance.”

“A Whole World Made of Pieces. 1972-2012 Dance Reviews” has 900 pages. Here is dance critic Liana Tugearu speaking about this huge volume of reviews and images.

Liana Tugearu: “ I realized it makes up for the lack of a dance history of the past 40 years. It’s a sort of critical, live history recollecting each and every event. And I also realized it perfectly matches my other book “Experimentalism in the Romanian choreographic art in the 1960s-1990s” and that dance has always been in a crisis area. Proof of that is that we did not have a stage or a rehearsal room for two and a half years and it’s only today that we’ve managed to inaugurate this oasis. Romanian dance has been faced with many difficulties for 40 years, also before 1989, when contemporary dance shows were hosted by museums, some theatre halls that were willing to host such shows and even by private homes. Anyway, rehearsals were always held in private spaces. So, there is continuity between the difficulties of the Romanian dance before and after 1989. However, we hope we’ve put an end to that with the opening of these new premises.”

We asked Liana Tugearu how the book begins and how it ends:

Liana Tugearu: “The first review dates from 1972 and the last from 2012 and both of them are dedicated to two outstanding figures of Romanian culture. The former is about a performance inspired by the work of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi designed by the choreographer Alexandru Schneider, while the latter is about a performance by Gigi Caciuleanu inspired by the playwright Ion Luca Caragiale.”

“A World Made of Pieces” also documents some of the work produced by Ioan Tugearu, Liana Tugearu’s husband and a well-known ballet dancer and choreographer. Here she is again:

Liana Tugearu: “I collected all the reviews that have been written about him. I archived them and added photographs to the texts. This was my starting point. My intention is to publish an entire volume dedicated to him alone, including reviews, his works, photographs of his own performances and performances for which he created the choreography.”

Liana Tugearu is the author of dance librettos for a number of performances staged in Romania, including the National Opera House in Bucharest, the Oleg Danovsky Ballet Theatre in Constanta and the Opera House in Iasi. She also curated the choreography section of a 1996 exhibition entitled “Experimentalism in the Romanian art in the 1960s-1990s” and in 2004 published the book “Experimentalism in Romanian choreographic art in the 1960s-1990s”. In 1995, she received a lifetime achievement award for her activity as a ballet critic from the Romanian Union of Performers, Choreographers and Music Critics.