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A report from Romanias brand new contemporary dance and performance festival.

Luana Pleşea, 08.03.2014, 14:14

“It’s more than comforting to have such great success! In terms of organisation, budget, quality of the audience, quality of shows…. it’s very good to have the confirmation that you made a good choice, that you thought it out thoroughly and that, eventually, the contemporary dance shows have come to reach a larger audience”.

These are the words the choreographer Vava Stefanescu, the interim director of the National Dance Centre in Bucharest, expressed at the end of the latest contemporary dance and performance festival held in Bucharest. This is an event through which the only cultural public institution that supports, develops and promotes the Romanian contemporary dance has managed to gather a very large, mostly new audience and to create a warm, friendly atmosphere that you can rarely find in a performance room. The team of the National Dance Centre has chosen original, surprising, entertaining and extravagant shows for this festival and today we’ll present some of them to you.

In 2010, Mihai Mihalcea stormed the Romanian cultural scene with a project in which he fictionalised his own biography, becoming Farid Fairuz. As part of the project, his shows launched questions and reflections regarding various products related to culture, capitalism, sexuality and religion. Director of the National Dance Centre between 2006 and 2013 Mihai Mihalcea, alias Faris Fairuz, presented as part of the Like CNDB Festival the show Realia (Bucharest-Beirut):

“It’s a show in which I think I wanted to literally make the audience dizzy by fully overlapping two characters, so that they could hardly discern who is Farid and who is Mihalcea. It’s a show that tells autobiographic stories, and I also touch upon certain topical issues of interest to me such as the civil war in Beirut and many others. Those issues have drawn my attention, have challenged me.”

Another highlight of the festival was an eight-hour performance called “Hematopoesis” by choreographer Madalina Dan, during which, within two one-hour intervals, spectators were allowed to become performers themselves. We asked Madalina Dan what motivated an artist to go in for such a venture:

“My motivation was pretty serious, more exactly illness. I would have never thought of doing such a marathon of movement, but as I had a pretty bad year, I understood what it felt like to deal with physical and emotional pain and what it was like to have a non-functional body. So I thought I had to compensate that through vitality. And this is how the idea of running an 8-hour performance marathon came to me. I’m interested in exploring this area of physical exhaustion, together with the audience, within a timeframe that exceeds the usual ones. Dance performances usually last one hour. So, I am interested in a process with no written script. I call it “an open production”, in that we also have less interesting moments, because it’s improvisation, and also composition in real time. It’s a process of transformation that the audience has to follow and I believe it’s quite interesting.”

The first edition of festival ended on February 27th with two solo performances staged by choreographer Andreea Novac: “Dance a Playful Body”, featuring actor Istvan Teglas and “About Tenderness” with Andreea Novac as the protagonist. “Dance a Playful Body” was created in 2008, but it still brings large audiences to theatre halls. Here is Andreea Novac talking about the show:

“It’s a show in which I play with the idea of body and its representations within the same person. What I liked about Istvan, and what I tried to render in the show, is his ability to go through a whole range of states of mind very quickly. It’s a chameleonic body and he is a chameleonic performer. This is what the show does: it goes through all sorts of stages, in which sometimes our body is just a means of representation and is depersonalised, and also those stages in which the body is vulnerable. It’s a ride through stages, emotions, shapes.”

“About Tenderness” was created two years ago. As Andreea Novac confessed, it started from personal data and it ended by speaking about the tenderness of an artistic act. “I permanently oscillate between reality and fiction, between sincerity and dissimulation, on a brink that I myself am not able to fully control.”