“Interior/Exterior” – a contemporary dance show

Bucharests contemporary dance scene was enriched at the end of 2022 with a new show: Interior/Exterior directed and choreographed by Oana Răsuceanu, a screenwriter, choreographer and director of the new generation

România Internațional, 07.01.2023, 14:00

Oana Rasuceanu collaborated on the
show with the film director Iulia Rugină. The show proposes an introspective
look into the lives of four female characters and into the world of their
emotions and experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The show is
based on documented interviews conducted by the two artists during the lockdown
period and proposes to the spectators a reinterpretation and an analysis of
those emotions, of our experiences, of everybody’s emotions actually. We spoke
with the director about the show’s artistic concept, about her vision
translated into the show. Here is Oana Răsuceanu:

Oana Rasuceanu: ‘Interior/Exterior’ is a show
that talks about the existence, let’s say slightly shaken, of four female
characters, who end up being trapped in something that we were all trapped in
the period March to May 2020. And I am referring to the state of emergency, the
lockdown, the pandemic, the onset of the pandemic in Romania. My thoughts about
this show were generated by several states, bizarre states, ambiguous states,
anxiety, questions about what it was like for us, all of us, at that time. And
I also thought of how we can actually get back to that period, after these
years that have passed, years which did not erase, though, the respective
experience, but on the contrary. I have had this feeling that what these years
that have passed did to us was to put a magnifying glass on certain types of
scars, which, I think, everyone feels. I also think that some of us decided to
let these scars be visible, becoming aware of them eventually, while others simply
decided that it is better to hide these scars in a drawer and lock them there
for good. The show kicked off from here to further convey this message and
we eventually made it to a point where we actually realized that there is video
that we have. And I am using the plural here, as I speak about me and Iulia
Rugina. During the pandemic lockdown in May last year, we decided to do a
series of interviews via the Zoom platform, as nobody was allowed to leave
their places. So we had a series of talks with various people in our life, some
of them close to us because we felt like documenting that unique moment, which
none of us had experienced before. And that unrefined material proved to be
extremely valuable and I believe its value is going to increase from one year
to another. We used only parts of these talks and some of the interviews we got
from women. We held talks with males and females with ages ranging from 10 to
70 years and from all these we have chosen four females who were to become
active characters in this show intertwined with the live performances of the
four protagonists.

The screenwriter, choreographer and
director of the show has also talked to us about the four performers, their
work and transcending emotions. Here is Oana Răsuceanu at the microphone again:

Oana Rasuceanu: The four performers are Mariana
Gavriciuc, Anastasia Preotu, Teodora Velescu and Eva Danciu and I started
working with them on four scripts I have written for the 4 live female
performances. I felt the need of a common denominator when I started building the
moving performance of these four bodies, beginning with biographic data, states,
thoughts, social status etc identified for each of the four. I felt that the movement and the construction
of the movement phrases should combine the emotional and social trajectory of
those characters until the beginning of the state of emergency. Then it was the
process of their transformation over the two months and the moment it ends and
when they got the false feeling they could simply resume life from that moment on
as if nothing had happened. It was something of extreme falsity and we were quite
captive in that moment of falsehood, which we didn’t realize at first but were
able to see very clearly after a couple of months or years. Since then, I myself
have been experiencing some sort of an anxiety, the need to be always on guard.
Somehow to me, the entire period of the pandemic seems to be a big question
mark hanging over our tomorrow. And I believe this feeling has been pervasive
throughout the entire show because there is this uncertainty of tomorrow, you
know, the feeling that you are in complete darkness. I tried to make this
darkness visible, so to say, but certainly many of us and the four performers
at that, have eventually accepted the situation and there is nothing we can do,
so we must move on. This is the thing I have done, the thing they do, and many
of us have done, a step ‘forward’, no matter where this forward will take us.

(LS & bill)