Category: World of Culture

They have mounted lots of solo exhibitions at home or abroad, they say they’re in love with the region of Valcea, where they live, and they are our guests in today’s World of Culture: Petti Velici, Sergiu Pop and Marcel Dutu. You will get to know them through our programs as well as through their paintings that will be offered to the winners of the Govora contest.

At 18 Petti Velici had his first solo exhibition, he specialized in preservation and restoration, and more than 20 years ago, he settled in Ramnicu Valcea, a town that brings him memories and the peace he needs.

Petti Velici: ”I arrived in Ramnicu Valcea when I was a high school student, in a holiday camp organized by the Fine Arts High school in Craiova, and then I had the chance to get acquainted with the old Ramnic. Meanwhile lots of things have changed, but I would have never thought — conservative as I am — that I would end up settling there. But the resemblance between Ramnicu Valcea and the area where I spent my childhood, with all its peace and quiet, with river Olt that reminded me of the Danube, with its cultural activity, much richer than that in Turnu Severin, all that made me stay here. And this peace is extremely important for me. There may be people who can paint in a railway station, yet I am not that type. I need some sort of intimacy, I need peace and quiet, and this place is exactly what I need. It is essential for everything: for me to find the topic, the color, and the necessary state of mind.”

Petti Velici has expressed his disappointment with the status of the artist in Romania, where artists can hardly make ends meet, and with the authorities’ indifference towards the national heritage. Under the circumstances, painting remains his refuge.

Petti Velici: ”I paint flowers. Flowers bring me peace and quiet. I am also into graphic art, there are works which require all my attention. I also have in mind a series a portraits, I want to make a gallery of portraits. They will feature village people, old people who remind me of my mom and dad, of my grandfather and of my great-grand parents. So far I have just made a couple of sketches and drawings.”

Sergiu Plop was born in the village of Arinesti in Bessarabia and he claims his work was inspired by the Russian avant-garde. He became an inhabitant of the region of Oltenia, in the south, following the success he obtained in the early 1990s when he had his first exhibition staged in Ramnicu Valcea in 1993, jointly with Arcadie Raileanu. He said there are several periods in his painting: a black period — up until 1993, a second period — some sort of pointillism that ended up with all his paintings being purchased by a German collector. Then a green period followed, and now he does mostly figurative painting, but he cannot guarantee he would not return to abstract painting.

Sergiu Plop: ”I was born in the northern part of Bessarabia. You know what they say, northerners are a bit more introvert, while southerners are more exuberant. I admit this is true and when I came to Ramnicu Valcea I had to change. What I like about Ramnicu Valcea is that its people are very active. And I believe that influenced my painting, especially my take on color. My colors are brighter and more cheerful. What matters most is to feel the light in the area. “

There is a great artistic potential in the Republic of Moldova, says Sergiu Plop. That is why, for several years now, he has been trying to promote Bessarabian artists in Romania.

Sergiu Plop: “I have started to promote artists from Bessarabia ever since 2009, when I organized two workshops at the Nicolae Balcescu Museum in the locality with the same name, near the town of Ramnicu Valcea. Later, I started staging events in Ramnicu Valcea, followed by three painting workshops entitled “In Ramnic”. I decided to invite Bessarabian painters because some of them are little known here and because I want to promote the Chisinau painting school. Most of these painters are also teachers at the Arts Academy in Chisinau. I am happy with how these painting events unfolded. There was a time when I used to bring one painter from Chisinau every month, to exhibit his or her works at the Antim Ivireanul Library. Most exhibitions were staged around the National Anthem Day, on July 29th, which is marked in Ramnicu Valcea every year. Last year, the exhibition was hosted by the Arts Museum and it was a success. The Village Museum in Bujoreni was a venue for another two exhibitions and the artists even worked on their paintings here. I have also organized several trips, so that our guests could see why we are so proud of our area. There are many beautiful things to see in Valcea, apart from its landscape. There are also the monasteries and Brancusi’s sculptures.”

Marcel Dutu’s favorite place is his workshop in Draganesti Olt. He is very grateful to those who supported him on his artistic path, such as Traian Zorzoliu and Nicolae Truta. Marcel Dutu:

Marcel Dutu: “My exhibition was entitled “For Nae” because Nicolae Truta played a crucial role in my life. I did not study with him when I was preparing my entrance exams at the Fine Arts Academy, but I met him later, when he was the organizer, better said the initiator of summer art camps. An art camp offers you the chance to get to know other artists, which is something that I like, something that motivates me. The first art camp I participated in was held in Vitomiresti. During my student years art camps were being organized at the end of each university year, and used to mark in a way the graduation and also the debut of a future artist.”

Marcel Dutu describes his painting as “a series of arcades and columns, an explosion of meanings and tendencies, from here to there and also on the vertical”. In short, he is a modernist:

Marcel Dutu: “So many things have happened in the fine arts field that it’s hard to say my painting brings something new. I’m still searching new meanings. But it’s difficult to innovate. My work is atypical though. I’m very interested in tri-dimensionality. I have recently made four new paintings for an exhibition in Valcea. I started from the idea of a cube. More exactly, each painting had a cube in its center. I started from the cube as a perfect shape, versus human imperfection.”

Today we will look at two of the best-selling books in Romania in 2014, two collections of poems, one by Adela Greceanu and another by Bogdan-Alexandru Stanescu, which were among the best-selling titles at the Gaudeamus International Book and Education Fair organised by Radio Romania in November 2014.

“With a narrative structure revolving around situations, characters and ideas that shape a world of their own”, Adela Greceanu’s “Words Are Themselves a Province” “is a poem about loneliness, about being sidelined, about womanhood, but also about language, its limits and frailty”, writes the poet in her foreword to the book published by Cartea Romaneasca. Attending the book launch in November 2014, writer Nora Iuga and journalist Ovidiu Simonca had contrasting views on the book.

Nora Iuga believes Adela Greceanu’s latest book is about loneliness, whereas Ovidiu Simonca claimed the opposite: “I believe this book is about loneliness only to a certain extent. The loneliness part is evident, we have a female character who is the embodiment of loneliness. She keeps herself to herself, she spends the day by the window or enjoys a ride on a packed bus in the evening. But at the same time this isn’t a book about loneliness, and this is very transparent in the concept of the book, which has a picture of the character seen from behind on its cover. The character’s first words are also telling: ‘The small town woman in me watches everything, but there’s no one to watch her from behind, as she stands there with her womanly back firm’. This is the exact image on the cover, and by choosing it, I’m contradicting Adila, the lonely protagonist of this book. Because now everyone looking at the book can see her standing all alone, looking through the window, seeing a woman or a little girl and her long brown hair. It may seem a cliché, but poetry does help us ward off loneliness”.

For Adela Greceanu, poetry helps her manage her relationships with the world and herself and through poetry, she feels she can start all over again: “I believe that through literature, poetry in particular, we have the chance not only not to be alone any more, but also to join the loneliness of others. I think this is one of the few ways of being together with someone. I received a lot of feedback for this collection of poems, both from people whose opinion is very important to me, but also from people I don’t know, and I was impressed. The book seems to have touched many people and it feels as if it was somehow expected. Maybe because before publishing the book, I read many of these poems at the literature festivals I took part in and was glad to see how well they were received.”

Bogdan-Alexandru Stanescu is our second guest today. He is recipient of the Young Writer Award at the 2014 Young Writers Gala, where he was hailed by the jury for his ability to approach a variety of genres. His latest work, entitled “anaBASis”, features 12 illustrations by Laurentiu Midvichi.

Here’s the author telling us more about the book: “anaBASis is connected to another book of poems entitled ‘After the Battle, We Took a Deep Breath’. In fact, it may be considered a continuation of this collection, because the latter was never finished. anaBASis ends this cycle of happy poems, although perhaps ‘happy’ is an overstatement. I am referring to the key images Nabokov used to speak about, images which can give birth to a novel or especially short story, because short prose must start from a key image, even a book of poems. Unlike After the Battle, We Took a Deep Breath, anaBASis is based on the image of the 100,000 mercenaries who passed through the Persian Empire during their travels, through the dessert and the mountains. The moment these mercenaries reached the coast, as the historian Xenophon writes, appears to me as one of the happiest moments in the history of mankind. I felt that this historical moment is linked to my own moments of happiness, that there is a correspondence between the private history of individuals and the history of the world. I am therefore puzzled when some people don’t understand why I feel a connection with the Greeks and Persians. I’m neither the first, not the last poet to start from a historical fact to meditate on his or her own life and memories.”

Literary critic Cezar Gheorghe says Bogdan-Alexandru Stanescu’s books contradict some of most entrenched prejudices of the literary world, such as the fact that you cannot write good literature if you first worked in literary criticism. He believes that Bogdan Alexandru Stanescu writes literary criticism and poetry much better than other authors whose writings are published in almost all literary magazines.

Here is Bogdan Alexandru Stanescu again: “Cezar has a good point. There is this prejudice that if you have embraced a certain literary genre you cannot switch successfully to a different genre, because people will then say you are not consistent. But there are a few of us who approach literature in a different way. Literature comprises everything. You write a critical article about a book of poems or fiction because you like to read. If you like to read and think you have something to say about it, you say it, and you don’t need to be a literary critic to do this. I don’t consider myself a literary critic. I’m not a university professor, I don’t show off my knowledge of literary theory in my articles, all I’m doing is express my views about a certain poem or book in an honest way. Honesty plays an important role in this profession. I don’t think being a critic should prevent me from writing poetry, which I see as an essential part of my existence.”

In 1922 the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Bracusi made a special dance costume for Lizica Codreanu, played a vinyl recording of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies and invited the dancer to do a one-off performance in his studio, among sculptures. Using a rack-and-pinion Thornton Pickard camera, Brancusi captured the performance in seven photographs. In 1996, the director Cornel Mihalache used the images taken in 1922 to recreate Lizica Codreanu’s outfit and proposed to dancer and choreographer Vava Stefanescu an apparently impossible reenactment of that dance performance in the sculptor’s studio, on Satie’s music.

The National Dance Center in Bucharest has recently staged an event focusing on the choreographer and dancer Lizica Codreanu.

The meeting was part of the National Dance Center’s Hors les Murs (Outside the Walls) program, launched in 2014, through which the Center seeks to go beyond the walls of its own building and approach topics off the beaten track.

The event brought together director Cornel Mihalache, researcher Doina Lemny and choreographer Vava Stefanescu, in a talk moderated by Igor Mocanu.

Igor Mocanu: “We devoted today’s edition to Lizica Codreanu, whose outstanding role in the history of Romanian dance was largely unknown until recently, at home or in the Diaspora. The Hors les Murs program specifically set out to focus, through its talks but also through dance shows, on a history that we know little about.”

In 1995, while working on a documentary film entitled ”Brancusi,” the director Cornel Mihalache discovered photographs of Lizica Codreanu’s dance. Mihalache asked Geta Solomon to recreate the costume, and the choreographer Vava Stefanescu to reenact Lizica Codreanu’s dance.

Vava Stefanescu: “I was about 25. I had no idea I was doing a re-enactment and that in the future I would be developing such a strong concern for retrieving major works and personalities in the history of dance. And I couldn’t have known that whenever you try to do research work, all you have is black holes. I was very happy I had little information, because this gave me the freedom to create. I was guided by Cornel Mihalache and Erik Satie. And, as you can imagine, I kept the costume with some sort of religious sentiment, as I had the feeling I was clad in one of Brancusi’s sculptures.“

Two years ago, the Vellant Publishers launched the volume “Lizica Codreanu. A Romanian Dancer in the Parisian Avant-garde,” a book that had already been released in France. Its author was Doina Lemny, a researcher based with the National Museum of Modern Art, in Pompidou Centre in Paris, and a specialist in Brancusi, about whom she has written several books. No wonder that she discovered Lizica Codreanu while looking into the Brancusi archive. The fact that nobody knew who she was captured her interest, and she began looking for relevant documents.

Doina Lemny: ”The research was rather hard to carry out, because in the early 20th Century there was no ballet school that Lizica attended, so I had no one to talk to. I tried to find out more about her life, which for me seemed very interesting from the very beginning, given the relationship between Brancusi and Lizica and Irina Codreanu. The two basically lived all their lives together, so I tried to discover more about them. Two very brave women, who embarked upon an adventure in Paris, with little support, and managed to meet Brancusi. I believe that was the peak moment of their lives, as it was thanks to him that both of them become well connected in the Parisian avant-garde. I used some documents that Lizica’s son and nephew showed me, original posters, photographs and very few letters. Two or three of them were documents from Tristan Tzara. And on that occasion I spotted Lizica in a photograph we can find at MOMA”.

Lizica Codreanu’s career as a choreographer and dancer was brief. It ended in 1927, when she married a brilliant French Intellectual, Jean Fontenoy, whom she accompanied on his mission to China. But when the two broke up, Lizica retuned to Paris. A resourceful personality, she never complained, but opened a Hatha Yoga parlor, under the supervision of one of the greatest yoga specialists. It was the moment when in the early 1930s yoga came to be known in Paris.

Doina Lemny: “Her son tried to talk me out of it, telling me that Lizica did not have a dance career proper. Which is true. She was like a falling star. She used to dance mostly in Brancusi’s studio and caught the eye of very well known artists, like Sonia Delaunay, who at that time was a costume designer. She drew the attention of Fernand Leger, but Lizica did not want to wear an outfit designed by him. Leger designed costumes for ballet performances, but his approach was rather rigid. As for Lizica, once she reached Paris, she quickly understood what was going on in the artistic circles and simply put ballet aside. She never went to a ballet school. Quite the contrary, she took up circus training…she used to chat with artists…She practically immersed herself in a creative atmosphere. An artistic and resourceful personality, she used to train in Brancusi’s workshop, and this fascinated him”.

The book had a tremendous response in France.

Doina Lemny: “My colleagues with the Pompidou Centre, whose research work mainly focused on Sonia Delaunay, on Leger, were very interested in the connection between the costumes Sonia designed, and that artist that nobody knew much about. Apart from the Pompidou center, I have been invited to lots of conferences and debates. I became Lizica Codreanu’s spokesperson, and everybody is impressed with those extraordinary images, with the groundbreaking innovations the artist came up with, in terms of performance, motion and dance.”

The manager of the National Dance Center in Bucharest, Vava Stefanescu, speaks about Lizica Codreanu’s place in contemporary Romanian dance.

Vava Stefanescu: ”It seems to me that she represents something, symbolically speaking. Namely, that kind of fluidity and mobility between worlds, artistic realms, ideas, between perspectives on the body, which I believe is, to a certain extent, what artists today are trying to do.”

Besides the latest releases of already well-established collections of audio books, illustrated books and CDS, at the 21st Gaudeamus International Book Fair, held in November 2014, Casa Radio publishers offered the public a unique event in Romanian literature: Tandem” by Tudor Banus and Serban Foarta. It was a release that turned upside down an unwritten law of international literature, that of big books illustrated by great artists, because the absolute first in that case was the poetic illustration of the works of a visual artist.

Tandem” was born on the pages of Observator cultural”, a weekly cultural magazine. Tandem. 50 poems by Serban Foarta on drawings by Tudor Banus, recited by the author and engraved on a double CD”, is not just an extraordinary visual display of the poems that give life to drawings, but also an audio show. Writer Mircea Cartarescu attended the book launch and spoke about Tandem”.

Mircea Cartarescu: “I believe that through what he did, Tudor Banus actually went beyond Romania’s borders; he is a European artist, an artist that made illustrations for the most important magazines and reviews in the US and France. He is a highly appreciated artist, who combines old painting, engraving and drawing techniques with elements of modernity, a modernity coming from surrealism, from the experiences of Giorgio de Chirico and other avant-garde domains. He, however, remains a classic in nature, just like Chirico did, despite his huge premonitions about the art of the future. I am very happy that Tudor Banus has found time to illustrate Romanian books too, and I believe that this collaboration with Serban Foarta is the right thing for him. They are very much alike, belonging to the same family of artists and to probably the most interesting trend in the history of European art and thinking, namely mannerism, in the very best sense of the word, that of the 1520-1640, which included names like Shakespeare and Gongora.”

Editura Radio publishing house has continued its series called the “Romanian Poetry Library”, launching, also at the fair, the audio book “Mariana Marin, an open letter or Don’t expect me at early hours”, a compilation of poems recited on the radio (1991-2002) and illustrated by Tudor Jebeleanu. Mariana Marin, a representative poet of the 1980s generation, left the poetry stage quite early, but she has remained on the top shelves of Romanian literature. The volume launched by Casa Radio includes, besides poems by Mariana Marin, testimonies and recollections by Romulus Bucur, Mircea Cartarescu, Bogdan Ghiu, Florin Iaru and Ion Bogdan Lefter. Critic Nicolae Manolescu signed the foreword to the new book.

Here is Daria Ghiu, from the Casa Radio Publishers: “This is more than a book, it’s a set including a book and an audio book, with recordings that Mariana Marin made at Radio Romania between 1991 and 2002, more precisely 27 poems read on the radio. The audio book also includes an interview with Mariana Marin, as well as a poem by Virgil Mazilescu, read by Mariana Marin. As I said, this is more than a common book. It is also an art book, because the illustrations are made by graphic designer Tudor Jebeleanu. Whereas Mariana Marin was a representative poet for the ‘80s, Tudor Jebeleanu is the ‘visual artist’ emblematic for that decade. The book also includes a foreword by critic Nicolae Manolescu, and testimonials, texts written by Mariana Marin’s friends and colleagues.”

Here is writer Florin Iaru, talking about poet Mariana Marin: “Mariana Marin—Madi, as her friends used to call her—was a cheerful person, who loved life. She was very passionate about things, and had a great sense of humor, although cruel humor at times. I’m going to tell you some things about Madi, as she was before being a poet. Because all of us, before being poets, were just dreaming of being poets, of writing and of having our works read by people. And I remember we were in Mariana’s one-room flat on the seventh floor, drinking red wine made by her parents, and talking poetry, of course. And we were wondering what to do to make sure our message, our soul reaches the readers. Madi was the most radical poet of our generation, the most politically involved, I know no other Romanian poet with so much interest in politics than Mariana Marin.”

The 120 years since the birth of writer Camil Petrescu were celebrated at the Casa Radio Publishers through the release of a CD-box called “Theatre.” It includes 6 CDs, 3 radio plays taken from Radio Romania’s audio library, performed by great artists like Radu Beligan, Clody Berthola, Stefan Ciubotarasu, Octavian Cotescu, Ion Manolescu, and presented by theatre critic Florica Ichim. In the “Radio-Prichindel” and “Good Night, Children” collections, classical Romanian children’s stories are released in the form of graphic or audio books or of illustrated books accompanied by CDs. Actress Alexandrina Halic plays the characters Apolodor the Penguin, Amedeu the Lion and Ilie the Kangaroo, from Gellu Naum’s “The Second Apolodor Book,” released as an audio book with illustrations by Alexandru Ciubotariu. Another audio and visual performance is the one based on Ion Barbu’s poetry, read by Victor Rebengiuc, Emil Botta, A. E. Baconsky and Romulus Vulpescu.

“Literature is like Achille’s spear, it wounds with the tip and heals with the butt”, said Mircea Cartarescu, in a dialogue with writer and journalist Cezar-Paul Badescu, at the International Literature and Translation Festival held in the North-Eastern city of Iasi, in October. “Literature helps you meet yourself, and meeting yourself is the most terrible thing that can happen to you” — Mircea Cartarescu went on to say. At the beginning of the meeting on the stage of the National Theater in Iasi, Badescu challenged the writer, who has been a favorite for the Nobel Prize for a few years now, to talk about the time when he was leading the Literature Circle at the Faculty of Letters, where, together with his students, he published several collective volumes, including “Family Picture”.

Mircea Cartarescu: “There were two reasons why I became a member and then leader of the Literature Circle. The first, and simplest, was that my generation got something for free, and when that happens, the proper thing to do is for you to pass forward something for free too. We got what we got from a generation of critics, and from many people who defined our existence, without whom we would have been nothing. That is why, it seemed natural to me to take the things I learned from them, both theoretical, and moral and ethical, and hand them down. A second reason why I got involved in the Literary Circle was that I felt like one of you. I felt the same age as you, and the period when I led the circle, those six or seven years, were the most beautiful of my life. For me it was a great pleasure and joy that you accepted me as one of you, even though I was 15 years older. I loved working for our books. I say ‘ours’ because they were collections whose foreword I wrote.”

Asked what he got out of literature, Cartarescu said, quote “Literature has been everything to me, without being able to say that I’ve been only literature.”

Mircea Cartarescu: “It’s like asking me what air means to me. In a letter written by Kafka to Felice Bauer, his eternal fiancée, he said: “After all, I am nothing else but literature”. I’ve very often thought about what that means, through what chemical and psychological process it is possible for a human body, a human brain, to become literature, which is what happened to Kafka, especially towards the end of his life. Before dying, Kafka was no longer a human being among humans, he was a character in one of his novels, he was literature through and through. Of course, very few of us get that far. To get that far, one would have to make colossal sacrifices. It means destroying one’s life in order to regain it in a different way. Nichita Stanescu said at some point: “We all would like to have Eminescu’s body of work, but who would want his life?” It is a great question, who would like to live the life of those who are literature through and through? To choose this would be, in a way, being a martyr.”

Cartarescu said that he could not imagine his own life without literature. “To me, writing means living, that is all”, said Mircea Cartarescu, whom most critics and readers believe to be the most important contemporary Romanian writer:

Mircea Cartarescu: “I don’t know if what I write is therapy. I can’t tell. I have so many anomalies, so many inner wounds, so many oddities, so many set askew and bent within my mind, that I probably could not get cured with the literature of the whole world. However, literature for me is a sort of secretion of a shell, a crust. And I see literature as an organ of my body, just as my skull is an organ of my body. This is literature to me, an organ of my body, rather than a process of psychoanalysis, of sublimation. I have always felt that literature is a part of me.”

As a guest of the Iasi International Literature and Translation Festival, Mircea Cartarescu spoke about the event as well.

Mircea Cartarescu: “It is of the highest level. It is a relevant event not only for national cultural life, but also, as far as I understand, it is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, in Eastern Europe. It is a great achievement”.

Actors, clowns, musicians, dancers and acrobats; accordion music, waltzes, old-time elegiac songs and traditional choirs. That’s how we might describe the show “Donka –a letter to Chekhov,” a joint production of the Finzi Pasca Company of Switzerland and the Chekhov International Theatre Festival, text written by the famous Daniele Finzi Pasca who also stage-directed the performance. Co-founder of the company Maria Bonzanigo wrote the music for the show, also creating the choreography, jointly with Finzi Pasca.

Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”, stage-directed by Robert Wilson at the Craiova National Theater is another show of the National Theater Festival’s 24th edition, which can also be described as an event. Robert Wilson’s stage version of Ionesco’s play marked the closing of the Festival on November 2nd, and most of the guests had to spend a couple of hours on Craiova, in southern Romania. “The new stage version by Robert Wilson in Craiova is a triumph. Wilson understood that it was no longer a play of the Cold War. It was actually a state of mind…”.wrote theatre critic John Elsom.

Young stage director Bobi Pricop was assistant director to Robert Wilson for “Rhinoceros” and will now be speaking about the director’s relation with the theater in Craiova and with Ionesco’s text.

Bobi Pricop: “I believe he was mainly attracted by the actors he knew there, in Romania. He had two big moments where he had encounters with Ionesco’s texts, he even met him in the 1970s. That’s what it was. It has been an encounter, a collision I don’t really know how to describe in theory. It is this very collision between Ionesco and Wilson that breathes life into the show. That’s mainly because at one point Ionesco said he wanted Wilson to stage his plays. And that’s exactly what happened, at last, and I’m happy it happened in our country. I believe it has been an encounter we need to follow. It might as well be the starting point for other performances, but it’s all very clear Ionesco very much served Wilson’s vision and purpose.”

For the first time the National Theatre Festival has had an own production. It’s the famous musical ‘West Side Story’ staged for the festival by choreographer Razvan Mazilu, who has selected 21 young actors particularly for this show. Here is Razvan Mazilu about this musical and the subtitle ‘A Generation’s Manifesto’, an idea by artistic director Marina Constantinescu.

Marina Constantinescu: “We initially set out to do a musical workshop for the National Theatre Festival. But things evolved into something bigger and we eventually ended up doing this project, very dear to me, as it has a special significance. It’s a project about generosity, about giving a chance to a very talented generation, which sadly finds itself kind of being brushed aside in our theatrical world. West Side Story is in itself a manifesto; a manifesto about freedom, about peace, humanity, happiness and, youth. I believe this project fits very well with this young generation; it’s as if it were written for it.”

Romanian journalist Irina Wolf: “It seems a very good idea, in keeping with an international trend. Most of the festivals have a production of their own or co-productions with other festivals. Wiener Festwochen, Salzburg Festspiele have done the same, to mention a couple of the festivals in Austria…It seems that theatres were very crowded, particularly with young people. And I was very happy the youth showed such a keen interest in these shows, which weren’t attended only by students from the theatre faculty. I’d also like to mention the staging as excellent and I was happy to be in the new theatre hall in Otopeni. I would also like to refer to the livestream on adevarul.ro, with its daily broadcasts directly from the theatre hall. As the shows were available on the Internet at reasonable hours, they could be watched by the Romanians abroad, who could thus get a glimpse of the festival.

Organized by the Theatre Union in Romania, the 24th edition of the National Theatre Festival took place over October 24th and November 2nd. We recall that Radio Romania is a traditional partner of this event.