Category: World of Culture

Besides the large number of books, organizers prepared some 300 cultural events, including book launches, public debates, conferences, screenings and interactive workshops for adults and children, Q&A sessions with famous authors. This year’s highlights included encounters with well-established authors that have unfairly been excluded from the contemporary literary community.

Here is poet, novelist and translator Nora Iuga: ”I believe I am the last of a generation of writers who personally knew certain lady poets who passed away. This year we will celebrate 100 years since the birth of Maria Banus, which is why I’ve been invited to all sorts of events to give lectures about her. Nina Cassian is another such writer. Sanda Golopentia has approached me recently, giving me a book called “Our Life”, a novel where she speaks about her mother, Stefania Golopentia. She was my teacher back in high school. I loved her a lot and it is owing to her that I became a poet”.

Maria Banus made her literary debut in 1937 with a poetry volume called “The Land of Young Girls”. The book immediately arrested the attention of literary critics, including G. Calinescu, who wrote about it in “The History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present”.

Here is Nora Iuga again: “I met Maria Banus at a time when she was being shut out, it’s harsh to say this, I know, but it’s the truth. No one ever wanted to talk to her, everyone turned their back on her. It was 1971-1972, right after the so-called “cultural revolution”. Her sons had left the country, moving to the West. This was every man’s dream at the time, and Maria Banus took a heavy toll for their departure. Those were harsh communist times, and Maria Banus was one of the pinnacles of Romanian literature. I’ve always thought it must be terrible to fall into oblivion after being a great writer. Maria Banus must have known great sorrow. When she turned 75, she was in Romania, and I wrote an article about her in Romania Literara magazine, saying she was the only Romanian woman poet worthy of the title “the great lady of Romanian poetry”. I was often criticized for commending her”.

Poland was the guest of honour at the 9th Bookfest International Book Fair. Under the slogan “ Quo vadis Poland?” Towards the next Nobel”. the Polish Institute prepared a series of events meant to promote Polish literature and enhance the Romanian readership’s interest in Poland’s contemporary authors, as well as in Polish classical authors.

More details on that – from poet and prose writer Ciprian Macesaru: ”I participated in two book launches at the Bookfest Fair. The first one was the launch of a Wislawa Szymborska anthology, hosted by the Polish Institute. The second one was the launch of a novel by a Polish author we were happy to meet at the book fair. His name is Janusz Wisniewski, and the title of his novel is “ Loneliness on the Internet.” The well-known poet Wislawa Szymborska, was the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1996. The novelty point of the anthology is that it includes poems from the author’s recent volumes, which are indicative of the renewal capacity the Polish poet’s language had. She manages to speak about the same universal topics, looking closely at problems which are easy to spot nowadays. There is an extraordinary poem about 9/11 2001. There is a poem dealing with the issue of racism. There are poems about what we’ve got, about what we’ve been given , about the things we need to come to terms with. With Szymborska, there’s always a parallel between man’s frailty and the infinite Universe, unfathomable, always silent. The second launch l attended was of a totally different kind of book. The author comes from the world of science. Wisniewski creates computer programmes for chemistry. He started writing rather late, “Loneliness on the Internet” being his maiden novel. However, the book enjoyed a remarkable success. If we tried to find something similar in Romania, we couldn’t find it. In Russia alone, one million copies were sold, now in its 11th edition, the novel has already been adapted for stage. In Poland, the book has been brought to the screen!”

Visitors had free access to the “ Bookfest” Book Fair. Films were screened, which had been were awarded prizes in international festivals, and which were offered by the Hungarian Institute in Bucharest, the Embassy of Norway, the French Institute in Bucharest, as well as the Polish Institute.

“Milita Petrascu’s sculptures are, first and foremost, an act of resistance to the destruction of image. Her work retains both the features of snapshot images and the rules of classical composition, a combination not uncommon in early 20th century art. This prevented her, in the long period she spent working with Brancusi, from being tempted to imitate her mentor and make an attempt at the simple gesture of abstraction”, said Dan Brudascu about Milita Petrascu. Constantin Zarnescu, who collected and published Brancusi’s aphorisms, tells us more about the encounter between Petrascu and Brancusi in 1919, an encounter that was to influence both artists.

Constantin Zarnescu: “A few years before, Brancusi had been invited to take part in two group exhibitions of European avantgarde art held in New York. He exhibited a version of his sculptures The Kiss, Mademoiselle Pogany, Sleeping Muse and Head of a Child. Milita was impressed by the geometric purity and the essentialisation of the human form in his works. She learnt about sculpture from Brancusi. Brancusi taught her and other young female sculptors who had just arrived from Romania how to use the chisel, telling them they had chosen a male profession. He taught them about the importance of a block of marble, which, he said, you are not allowed to destroy. Sculpture is about thinking first and foremost and is not an art for the young, Brancusi also told Milita Petrascu in a conversation witnessed by the American poet Ezra Pound.”

Milita Petrascu was the one who convinced Brancusi to give up major projects in France and come back to Romania to build the famous compound in Targu Jiu, dominated by the Endless Column. It was the period in which Brancusi posed for Milita and she made her first portrait in bronze of the artist, which is now displayed in Bucharest’s Dorobanti Square. The ease and handiness with which Milita was making her works, be they in the classical or modern style, drew Brancusi’s admiration, who told her “You are so good at working the way you want, in a figurative or abstract manner, and this is very good.”

Constantin Zarnescu: “In 1927, after the Latin Press Conference in Bucharest, Milita Petrescu was praised at international level. What is interesting is that Aretia Tatarescu, the president of Women’s Association in Gorj, invited Milita to build in Targu Jiu a monument devoted to the memory of the soldiers killed in the First World War. Milita had already made Ecaterina Teodoroiu’s monument and was a personality in Gorj County. Milita refused Mrs. Tatarescu’s offer, saying that Brancusi was the best man to do the job. That was the moment when the two started writing to each other quite intensely, and in 1937 Brancusi went to Targu Jiu with the intention of making just one work.”

Thanks to Victor Craciun, we can read what the two artists wrote to each other back then, connected by both art and a beautiful friendship. A friendship that lasted since 1919 until the death of Brancusi. Milita Patrascu learnt a lot about the precepts and dimensions of modern art, and Romania got its cultural heritage enriched by the compound in Targu Jiu.”

Constantin Zarnescu: ”In 1946 Milita wrote to Brancusi: ‘Me and my friends are preparing to send you food”. It was the time when crisis was engulfing most of Europe. It was also then that Milita informed Brancusi about each and every article about him. She told him about what Petru Comarnescu wrote about him, that Ionel Jianu had written about him in the “Light and Colour” review and that his theories about art were being carried by the press; and also about how she could not forget that 20 years before he had said so many things about the new modern sculpture, things and thoughts that were now being proven true.”

In 1934, upon opening a joint exhibition with Marcel Iancu, critic Petru Comarnescu said: “The main feature of Milita Petrascu is the foundation of her sculptures, her cult for rounded forms, for space and light”. The Artist doesn’t seek to depict the expression of her subjects, but rather focuses on the small details that make up their personality. The half-nude sculpture of actress Elvira Godeanu, is naturalistic and discreet at the same time, blending both contemporary audacity with an unconventional approach to the classic typology of the armless bust. The marble portrait of another well-established actress, Agespina Macria, wife to Victor Eftimiu, exhibited at the Official Salon of Fine Arts of 1934, also trespasses contemporary conventions, which clearly stipulated that no well-known individual, especially an actor, should be represented nude.

However there is nothing frivolous about this remarkable sculpture, its monumentalism and static aura being reminiscent of classic antiquity, where nudity was commonly accepted.

The five masterpieces Head, Mademoiselle Pogany II, Head of a Child, Sleeping Muse II and Fish. were acclaimed by the public, art critics and collectors alike. No wonder that most works by Constantin Brancusi are currently exhibited in museums and collections in the US. Collectively and individually, they testify to his signature style admired by New Yorkers since 1913, and exemplify a sophisticated expression of perfected simplicity. With these sculptures, Brancusi shattered the paradigm of abstraction in sculpture and radicalised the idea of purity in form. Simply stated in the words of Jérôme Neutres, “Brancusi changed the way art was made.”

Art critic Catalin Davidescu: “Most of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures are displayed in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art and The Gugenheim Museum. There are also famous museums in Pennsylvania, Atlanta, and Philadelphia where the Romanian sculptor’s works are exhibited. Then there are university museums, such as the one in Berkeley, that own sculptures by Constantin Brancusi. Of course, some of Brancusi’s masterpieces can also be found in Europe. In Paris there is the George Pompidu Museum of Modern Art that hosts Brancusi’s atelier, several museums in England, such as the Tate Gallery and the Modern Art Gallery at the Oxford Museum. The Kunsthalle Museum of Zurich is another example. In Romania there are only two museums where works by Constantin Brancusi are on display: The National Museum of Art, in the capital city Bucharest and the Art Museum in Craiova. The museum in the capital city has 11 sculptures on display, while one of Brancusi’s most important works, The Kiss, can be admired in Craiova, alongside another five works by the same author. There is also one of his earliest works, a masterfully rendered ecorche – a statue of a man with skin removed to reveal the muscles underneath, a jewellery box and a chair sculpted while a student at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts.”

Many of the works created by Brancusi had a troubled history, as Catalin Davidescu has pointed out:

Catalin Davidescu: “I must say that it was the Americans who truly discovered Brancusi due to the famous trial with the American customs in which he was accused of shipping metal to the US. The piece of metal in question was in fact a work of art. Brancusi became famous as a result of this trial and his works started selling in the US, and his European fame came much later. His works only started being sold for huge sums of money, for tens of millions of euros, in the second part of the 20th century, even towards the end of the century and the beginning of the 21st century. Unfortunately, although he was very fond of both Romania and France, these countries did not promote his work very strongly. Starting with the Armory Show and the start of the 20th century, his work was mainly promoted in the United States and it was only later that he started making an international reputation.”

Some of Brancusi’s sculptures have been recovered in very special circumstances, says art critic Catalin Davidescu:

Catalin Davidescu: “I am familiar with the story behind the recovery of Vitellius, a work created by Brancusi while he was a student of the Fine Arts Schools in Bucharest. The sculpture was found after 1944 in Dolj Prefecture building’s attic by a Romanian expert in Brancusi’s art, namely Vasile Georgescu Paleolog, the one who wrote the first monograph about Constantin Brancusi. He is the one who talks in his monograph about the works in Craiova, namely the Kiss”, two heads of a child and The Thigh”, which are now at the Art Museum in Craiova. They were found in Ostroveni commune, in the house of land owner Victor Popp, a collector and friend of Brancusi’s. In 1949, after nationalization, his properties were seized by the communists and Brancusi’s works were later found by those who established the farming cooperative in that house. The Kiss”, for instance, was used to hold down the lid of a sauerkraut barrel. Recovering those pieces was not hard, because the president of the cooperative had no idea they were works of art. As V.G. Paleologs says in his memoirs, Ego” and Head of a Boy” were found somewhere on the mansions’ terrace, near some grapes left to dry.”

It is a well-known fact that to sculptor Constantin Brancusi home was the world entire, just like his works are now spread all across the globe. Wherever I look I see Brancusi’s power and influence. He still is the most modern of the modern sculptors” said Pal Kasmin, whose gallery hosted last year the exhibition called Brancusi in New York 1913 — 2013”

“Short reel can say more than a book of recent history or a newspaper”, said the director of the NexT International Film Festival, Ada Solomon. The long reel After the Night, the debut film of the winner of last year’s edition, Basil da Cunha, opened the festival at the Studio Cinema in the capital. Ada Solomon added: “I believe the public has to be respected, and I believe this is one of the foremost rules among filmmakers: to try to give the audience as much as you can. NexT is about what follows, it means freshness, youth, courage, challenge, each step is a challenge for each of us, and thus we try to offer a variety of recipes, versions for all tastes.”

“It is also a selfish statement, because NexT Festival recharges my batteries, for me it is extraordinary the desire of the filmmakers and young team members to do something so professional. It is the festival that helps you see better what is around you. From the inside, the great revelation for me at this edition is the market of short reel projects and the meetings aimed at working together, held for the first time. 14 projects were submitted. We started from The Pitch, organised by Shorts TV, under which 15 filmmakers presented their projects and made very short films with this aim, their pitches. The audience was invited to vote, and in the end the jury gave out the 5,000 euro award. Starting from that we organised a project market in its own right, where European producers were invited to meet the project makers. We had the joy of having a numerous audience one Sunday morning, and see 14 filmmakers who presented their projects in an extremely creative and convincing way. This show proved to me that things are going well in cinema. When I say I want to offer the public as much as I can, that does not mean that we offer something accessible or easy. We try to change the general perception of cinema, to delight spectators, and not just entertain momentarily.”

The selection committee made up of Irina Trocan and Andrei Rus chose, from among 1,000 festival entries, some of the most provoking short films produced recently, so that the public were delighted to see innovative works and stories from around the world, from UK and France to Kyrgyzstan. Here is Ada Solomon, the director of NexT International Film Festival:

“For several years now we have been receiving around one thousand entries every year, but what matters most is what kind of films they are and who is interested in participating in NexT. A lot of the films submitted for selection here have already gained appreciation in prestigious international competitions, and if they find their participation in our festival important, this means that NexT is indeed important. It means the festival has a good image abroad and people want to be part of it. Another novelty in this year’s edition, and one that I am very proud of, is the national competition. The two critics in our selection committee, Andrei Rus and Irina Trocan, made this national selection whose standards were quite high. Fourteen of the around 100 Romanian entries were selected. They varied a lot in their approach, and ranged from student films to independent films and even projects that have received funding from the National Cinematography Centre. This Romanian showcase, which featured established directors like Adrian Sitaru and Igor Cobileanski, as well as young graduates or directors at their first film, was quite interesting and gave us an idea about the future of the Romanian film industry.”

Here is critic Andrei Rus with more on the productions in the festival:

“They are very different because this is what we wanted: variety. Through this selection we intended to show the viewing public how complex cinematography can be and how many facets it can embrace. We have mainly selected filmmakers who are still searching and questioning things, rather than filmmakers who thing they have all the answers. The films we have selected cannot be easily associated with one particular genre or another but they mostly reflect our choices, Irina Trocan’s and mine. As far as I’m concerned, I prefer a film which has weak points but cannot be easily labelled over a well-made production, but less ambitious. I prefer a film you would see twice to one you see only once and understand everything from the very beginning.”

The festival’s line-up featured some of the best short-reels launched last year in two of the most popular sections: Short Matters and Semaine de la Critique. So NexT Festival has premiered ten short-reels in Bucharest, which ran in Semaine de la Critique section in the Cannes Festival, including the Discovery Award Winner, Daria Belova’s Come and Play. This black & white production features the adventures of a young man who plays with a gun in a forest and passes into another dimension. The 2014 NexT trophy went to an Azeri-German co-production, The Swing of the Coffin Maker directed by Elmar Imanov, a story full of local details that has a universal appeal, a beautifully shot production full of warmth, intimacy and humanity, as the jury has described it.

For nearly two weeks, the National Dance Centre in Bucharest hosted two dance shows, representing momentous achievements for Polish contemporary dance. The shows were presented to the public as part of the Days of the Polish Dance Festival, under the slogan “Yesterday. Tomorrow. Today”.

The Days of Polish Dance kicked off with the performance of “Unreal Duets”, a show staged by the Dada von Bzdulow Theatre in Gdansk, a dance company founded by Leszek Bzdyl and Katarzyna Chmielewska, in 1992. The show is focused on the meeting between a man and a woman, and everything that entails. Many of the shows staged by the two Polish artists have a literary layer. While the two artists use their bodies to tell the story, short texts are screened in the background, adding a second narrative line to the show.

Responding to the invitation of the Commune//Warsaw Independent Theatre in Poland, dancer and choreographer Mikolaj Mikolajczyk paid homage to Henryk Tomaszewski, one of the leading figures of Polish Theatre, who was also his mentor. The show “RE//MIX Henryk Tomaszewski” was staged in Bucharest as part of the Polish Dance Festival. Mikolaj Mikolajczyk says that, unlike his mentor, who valued aesthetics and technique to a great extent, for him the most important thing is the relation with the audience and the emotional layer of the show.

Mikolaj Mikolajczyk: “I am largely myself in the show, although without Tomaszewski, who is my artistic mentor, this show wouldn’t have existed. My professional life began when Tomaszewski instilled this passion for dance onto me. And this is exactly what I try to depict in the show: the fact that I embody Tomaszewski’s passion for dance. On the other hand, I’m trying to break away with Tomaszewski. 20 years ago he invited me to join his theatre. He took my hand and set me free. This is what I want my audience to experience: the same emotion I felt 20 years ago, when Tomaszewski invited me to join his theatre”.

Commonly seen as the father of Polish contemporary dance, although largely neglected by dance historians, Vaslav Nijinsky wrote in his journal: “Deep inside I am God. Everyone shares the same feeling, it’s just that no one uses it”.

The journal underlies the dance show “Nijinsky. The celebration of dreams”. Staged by a team of three artists, the show is grounded on an idea put forth by stage director Slawek Krawczynski, who drew on process-oriented psychology theory developed by American-born therapist and writer Arnold Mindell.

The Days of Polish Dance came to an end with two solo shows staged and performed by two young choreographers: Agata Maszkiewicz and Agata Siniarska. The shows are representative of the current status of contemporary Polish dance, at present facing severe under-financing and many of the choreographers choosing to perform their own shows. Held under the slogan “Yesterday. Tomorrow. Today”, the festival was organized by the National Dance Centre in Bucharest in agreement with the Polish Institute. This year’s edition highlighted the relation between Romanian and East-European contemporary dance.

The Romanian programme, themed “Future Books, the Future of Books”, included debates, book launches, and conferences with the participation of editors, writers, translators and journalists. No less than 22 writers attended the 34th edition of the Paris International Book Fair held between March 21st and 24th.

Romania’s stand held exciting debates such as “Avant-garde and Modernity”, “The Esoteric and the Sacred in Today’s World”, “Future Books, the Future of Books”, “French Books, Romanian Readers/Romanian Books, French Readers”, “Reality and Fiction in Sports, Another Kind of Writing” and “Contemporary Romanian Painters in France”.

Journalist and writer Adela Greceanu attended the event, and said she believed that Romania’s stand was animated, with a diverse programme, met with interest by foreign readers and journalists. Adela Greceanu:

“In the last five or six years, the fair has become once again one of the major events on the book market in Europe. This year, the guest of honour was Argentina, with an absolutely impressive stand, dominated by the Julio Cortazar experience, on the occasion of his birth centennial. For me, it was an extraordinary gift for Argentina to be guest of honour, allowing me to see exquisite photos of Julio Cortazar, and especially a book of notes for Hopscotch, exhibited in a glass case in the middle of the exhibition, which can be perused digitally. As for Romania’s presence, it was important for me to see Romanian books in stands other than the Romanian ones. My impression is that Romanian literature is better and better known. For instance, Gabriela Adamesteanu’s books were on the shelves of Gallimard Publishers, Razvan Radulescu’s The Life and Deeds of Ilie Cazane was on sale at the Zulma Publishers stand, while Actes Sud was selling Alexandru Vona’s novel Walled Up Windows.”

One debate that attracted a large audience was “Prospects for Moldova’s European Integration”, attended by Moldova’s ambassador to France, Oleg Serebrian, writer Gheorghe Erizanu, head of Cartier Publishers of Chisinau, historian Matei Cazacu and writer Emilian Galaicu Paun. Oleg Serebrian spoke about his country’s efforts to join the European Union:

“Starting in 2009, the process picked up speed. We achieved a lot, we signed the Free Trade Agreement, which was an important step for the Moldovan economy. The effects will only be felt in a few years’ time, and will be beneficial”.

In her turn, writer and journalist Adela Greceanu said:

“After the debate, I interviewed Emilian Galaicu Paun and I asked him about EU integration. He told me that it was very important for them that Romanian language writers from Moldova participated in the Romanian stand at the Paris Book Fair. For them, it is a recognition of the fact that they are already a part of Romanian literature, part of the European Union.”

Florica Ciodaru Courriol presented at the fair the French version of Marta Petreu’s book Home on the Fields of Armageddon, published by Polirom in 2011. L’Age d’Hommes Publishing House, which brought out the novel in Florica Ciodaru Courriol’s translation, is not at its first meeting with Romanian literature. They have already published at least four major Romanian writers. Florica Ciodaru Courriol told us about this novelty on the French market:

“I love the novel. It is a novel with autobiographical overtones, with passages that make the skin crawl, such as the father’s post-mortem. In short, it is the story of a family of Transylvanian peasants, spanning a century. In parallel with this story, we see the shaping of the young narrator, who has a lot of similarities with writer Marta Petreu. It is interesting for Westerners to see how a region of Romania had evolved before WWII. The novel describes how the Russians marched through Cluj, how the father deserted from the army, collectivisation, Marxist education in schools, the religious problems in Transylvania. In fact, Marta Petreu brings the narrative to our days, where she deplores the collapse of the economy and the wanton destruction of the environment. The novel has several layers, so it can be analysed from several points of view. In the foreword to the French edition I referred to it as a metaphysical novel.”

Florica Ciodaru Courriol told us her impressions on this edition of the Paris Book Fair:

“The Romanian events were great, especially after last year’s edition of the fair, when Romania was guest of honour, and was received with pomp. A lot of attention was granted to poetry, and I think that is good, because poetry is a lot of times neglected, both in Romania and in France. As for how Romanian literature is received in France, we are still awaiting the echoes.”

The Paris Book Fair is an event for both professionals of publishing and the public at large, and is the event most covered by the French press. After being a guest of honour in 2013, over 20 new novels were introduced to French readers, names that are already famous in Romania.

The biggest art event marking the end of spring and the beginning of summer season in Romania’s capital city is the Bucharest Contemporary Art Biennale. Very popular with art lovers, this 6th edition of the festival is staged by Pavilion, the Centre for Contemporary Art and Culture. While the early editions of the Biennale lasted for a month, the time allotted to this event has doubled since 2010. So, this sixth edition takes place between May 23rd and July 24th and will be curated by Gergő Horváth, who also established the theme for this year’s biennale.

“This year’s theme is ‘Apprehension. Apprehending out of Apprehension.’ In English ‘apprehension’ has a double meaning: it’s the anticipation of adversity or misfortune and it also means understanding. This year we are focusing on the relationship between understanding and fear, on how fear can be managed and used for our personal development. Fear is present in our lives, it accompanies us all through our life and for this reason it deserves a deeper analysis.”

The artists attending the event this year have been selected depending on how they managed to reflect this theme of apprehension in their works and not for their entire activity. Among the 20 Romanian and foreign artists invited are Erwin Wurm from Austria, Chiara Fumai from Italy, Janos Sugar from Hungary as well as Adrian Dan, Matei Arnautu, Dan Beudean and Zoltan Bela from Romania. The entire list of participating artists will be made public in early April. Their works will be on view at four different venues: the Pavilion headquarters, which will also serve as an information centre for the Bucharest Biennale; the Institute for Political Research, which also contributed to the latest two editions of this event; the Romanian Peasant Museum; and the Fine Arts and Crafts Association. The Faur plant will also host a series of additional events related to the biennale. According to curator Gergő Horváth, the focal point of this sixth edition is visibility, something also to be achieved by a number of additional events:

“This year’s edition will be very visible in Romania as there are also many additional events. We’ll be running partnerships in the field of art and design and a string of four other big events will unfold concurrently. So in addition to the Bucharest Biennale, we’ll have the Long Night of Museums, the Romanian Design Week, the Long Night of Art Galleries and Safari Art, which is the first art fair in Romania. Design Week is an event allowing young Romanian designers to introduce their works to the public. The biennale as well as the other events are as many opportunities for young and old artists alike.”

The Bucharest Biennale is the right place for artists to manifest themselves and engage in dialogue with the public. Curator Gergő Horváth explains:

“These are events that speak to everybody, both professionals and people who are just interested in the field and want to see something new. Contemporary art asks questions about major social and political issues, therefore it is a very good educational tool. People can come and see, in a certain context, things that are important and affect us all.”

The 6th Bucharest International Contemporary Art Biennale also aims at bossing solidarity among artists. Curator Gergő Horváth again:

“I think that this Biennale will slowly bring Romanian artists together, as there are many animosities among them that need to be solved. Such a big event is a good opportunity to do that. The artistic field needs solidarity, because the state shows little to no support for the arts, and it is not even aware that such a thing as contemporary art exists. The more projects and art spaces we create, the bigger the interest in arts and, maybe the state will realise eventually that contemporary art is an important pillar of culture.”

Gergő Horváth is an artist and cultural manager. He studied music and is now studying photographic art at the Cluj University. He is also the coordinator of the Pavilion and Reform projects in Cluj and Timisoara. He has recently participated in an exhibition titled “The Affluence of Working Class from Differentiation to Collectivism”, whose curator is Razvan Ion, the co-director of the Bucharest Biennale and one of the founders of the Pavilion Centre of Contemporary Art and Culture.

A pavilion, with a pair of happy newlyweds under it, surrounded by relaxed and happy people… 10 years on from her wedding, Elisabeth wonders if happiness can be held in place and tries to replay the party. This is the premise for the play ‘The Pavilion’ by Justine del Corte, staged by Radu-Alexandru Nica at the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea. Justine del Corte is one of the most appreciated playwrights in Germany, and this text, written in 2012, was put on for the first time that same year by the most produced German playwright nowadays, Roland Schimmelphennig at the famous Burgtheater of Vienna.

Radu-Alexandru Nica told us what had attracted him to the text of the Mexican-born playwright, the second he staged in Romania: “I was very much attracted by the philosophical implications of the text. It’s OK to see a bit of philosophy in a show. It doesn’t seem to me at all untheater like for the characters to philosophize once in a while. The text has something Chekhovian about it, it also has a bit of Arthur Schnitzler, and this mixture, focusing on the contemporary world, seemed to me very attractive, having a lot to offer me as a director. It also has a lot to offer the actors. Most of the characters have very complex roles. There aren’t many secondary characters. It is a show with some ten main characters. The writer deals with the theme of happiness — how happiness can still be obtained. That interested me most as a human being. As a director, I was attracted to the idea of play within a play, which I carried farther than in the text — we turned the repeat of the wedding into a theater rendition of a real event. In this way, the play became more than a meditation on time, it became a meditation on the way in which theater may or not elude time.”

Director Radu-Alexandru Nica had his first job with the Iosif Vulcan troupe of the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea, which has an average age of below 40, made up of 15 actors. Radu-Alexandru Nica: “I discovered a troupe very eager to act in another type of theater than you encounter here generally. Lately, there have been a lot of musicals, there has been a commercial trend, and there is nothing wrong with that, because theater halls are full once again in Oradea. Now I believe the time has come to offer the audience texts of a different sort. I have the feeling that this text, even though difficult, is not easy humor, these are not easy themes, it is not so hard to swallow.”

The building of the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea also houses the Szigligeti Hungarian language theater, and is one of the most important heritage buildings in Oradea. The design was a product of the famous Fellner and Helmer firm of Vienna, and it was carried out in only 15 months, between July 1899 and October 1900. The exterior blends seamlessly the neoclassical style, dominating the façade, with neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque styles, while the interior finishes and decorations have a distinct Rococo style. For five years, ending in 2011, the building was under renovation. The Queen Marie troupe inaugurated the renovated building with the famous musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, which won two nominations for the Romanian Theaters Union Best Set Design and Best Supporting Actress awards.

Daniel Vulcu, director of the theater, said: “We want to follow this niche path, less trodden by other theaters in Romania, the musical, obviously not exclusively, but we want to be the mouthpieces of this genre, and we have the strength to do this right. According to our managerial strategy, every other year we stage a large-scale musical, and the rest of the time we do smaller scale musicals. I think we’ve managed to prove that we can achieve high performance in this genre, but we will never forget we are a drama theater, so we will be staging that kind of plays as well. We plan to work with top directors. The collaboration with Radu Nica bodes well for us. We worked with other leading directors too, such as Mihai Maniutiu, who proposed a musical version of a classic text, ‘Leonce and Lena’, without our asking him to do that.”

Oradea is a city with a little over 200,000 people, and the Queen Marie Theater manages to sell out every one of their 10 to 15 shows they do every month. Here is theater director Daniel Vulcu again: “We have about 15 shows that we keep rotating all the time. There is plenty of demand. We always get a bit scared as the Short Theater Festival gets close, we increased the number of days from seven to ten days. Last year we had about 50 shows, all best sellers. As a result, I believe there is a lot of potential in Oradea. We have an audience, people who love theater, and I may be so daring as saying that we’ve made theater fashionable. At the beauty salon, in banks, in hospitals, people talk about the theater, they ask each other about one show or another. They urge each other to go to the theater, and we actually have a regular audience. One very interesting phenomenon occurred, at the Short Theater Festival last year, when we had scheduled two shows performed by our troupe and two shows performed by troupes from Bucharest, and we were the ones who sold most of the tickets.”

Reaching its 20th edition this year, the Short Theater Festival organized by the Queen Marie Theater in Oradea is the only festival dedicated to one act plays in Romania, and one of the longest lived: its first edition was held in 1976.

After writing film reviews for the last ten years in the most important cultural publications, in 2013 Ileana Barsan started a series of cinema workshops for kids. As the journalist and film critic put it, ‘Cinema is the most popular art form, but the least present in children’s lives. Cinemas, unfortunately, are limited to the list of recent animated films and entertainment films, television channels don’t have dedicated programs for kids containing cinema and visual arts, and schools don’t have on their curricula classes dedicated to cinema education.

This is how Ileana Barsan explained she got the idea of holding workshops for kids between 7 and 14. In addition, this is not her first such experience. She was a trainer in an original project called Image Education, run by the French Embassy in Bucharest, Next Cultural Society, and French filmmaker Vanina Vignal. Image Education started in Romania in 2009, and managed to bring high school students closer to cinema through screenings and discussions about landmark movies. One other program important for Ileana was EducaTIFF, initially called the Program for Media and Cinema Education, launched at TIFF, the Timisoara International Film Festival. Here she is telling us more:

“Since I’ve been writing about film for years, at some point expert cinema reviews went on a downward slope, and I thought that there aren’t many people with whom you can talk about film. Film criticism is discredited right now, not just in Romania, but pretty much everywhere. The magazines in which I could have written about film have disappeared, and viewers are not flocking to movie theaters, and in fortunate cases we have 200,000 viewers at the most for a film, so that I realized that viewers have to be somehow educated. Of course it is a long-term plan, we are talking about children who are just starting to watch movies, to develop an interest for this kind of stories by filtering them through their own experience. I realized this would be a solution, educating viewers who see cinema as an alternative to storytelling, capable of making correlations between cinema and other arts.”

Ileana Barsan next told us how a workshop usually goes:

“The introductory module is five weeks long, with one session a week on weekends. The screening and discussions take about two hours. In the introductory module I present parts of movies, parts no longer than 10 minutes. Then children try to understand the moving pictures, the acting, the role played by the set, the role of lighting, really basic things in cinema. We don’t theorize, they discover the movies by simply watching them, how the story is built, how a set is put together, what the contribution of the actor is, as well as that of the director, how they see themselves reflected in the story. They also discover editing as part of the introductory module, they learn how a photo is processed, edited and finally integrated into the film. I can say that they were very happy to discover that they are capable of thinking in images.”

These workshops, however, stemmed from a less than professional experience:

“I realized their usefulness by looking at the kids, especially my eldest, my daughter, who is almost 13. Cinema is an extremely efficient and quick means of communication, you have an almost instant reaction when watching movies, this is how ideas are born, this is how dilemmas are born. Children not only react immediately, but their reaction is earnest. They don’t refrain from expressing what they feel when they see a story. Aside from teaching about filmmaking, these courses stimulate children’s creativity. They come up with their own ideas right away, they analyze what they see on the screen, they come up with different versions, they stir up a debate, and in the end they question even themselves. This is very important.”

Some of the questions asked by Ileana Barsan during the workshops are ‘What are movies good for in terms of memory, imagination and story?’ as well as ‘Who tells the story and what follows?’.

“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.”

Today’s edition of WoC is devoted to the ongoing contest on RRI, and it features fine artists from Prahova County, in southern Romania. This county links the Bucharest area to Transylvania, and is a land of rich folk traditions. The fine artists of Prahova County have been trying to revive the specific elements of the old village communities.

Larisa Iftode is 90, she lives in the town of Urlati and makes masks representing imaginary characters from the Romanian folk tradition, as well as glass icons.

“I used to go to Bucharest and visit all the art galleries and exhibitions there. In one of the art galleries I saw a glass icon representing Saint George. I didn’t have much money back then and I found the price of that icon rather high. Taking a closer look at the icon, I saw that Saint George was represented killing a fish with his spear, and that puzzled me, because Saint George was known for slaying a dragon. I figured I could make a better icon than that. It took several years before I decided to try making glass icons. I started with masks instead. I made hundreds of them, I had them displayed in exhibitions and I received diplomas for that. One day, in my sixties, I decided I would make icons. I had no training as an icon maker; I simply put to good avail the talent God has given me. I have made lots of icons that I exhibited in France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Russia.”

In her icon painting art, Larisa Iftode is inspired by the natural landscapes of her native region, and passion for beauty and art has been her long lasting friend. Irina Mihaela Popovici, another amateur fine artist from Ploiesti, the seat of Prahova County, has a similar story. She is passionate about folk costumes:

“I inherited my talent from my mother, who is also a fine artist. I am specializing in traditional dolls, because I’m convinced that the specificity of the Romanian folk costume can be best showcased by means of doll costumes. All of my dolls go abroad, since there are many foreigners interested in these miniatures. By means of these stylized costumes I advertise the Romanian traditional costumes as much as I can.”

Every detail is very important to Irina Mihaela Popovici when she makes her collection dolls.

“I focus on the Moldavian and Transylvanian folk costumes, although I also use those from Arges and Valcea counties, in southern Romania. All my dolls wear Romanian peasant sandals and hand-woven, woolen stockings. The staples of the Moldavian folk costume are the peasant vest, the bag, the fur cap for men and the head scarf for women. The Transylvanian folk costume stands out through its specific hats and bead necklaces. Given the size of the dolls, it’s difficult to recreate the complete costume with its thick winter coats. Therefore I have decided to create stylized peasant blouses that include all the decorative elements specific to a certain region. The dolls’ hair is made of wool and their heads are covered by woolen caps or head scarves.”

Valentin Nicolae is another amateur fine artist from Ploiesti who works as a fireman. Fire, as a vital element that has fascinated him since childhood, together with his passion for art resulted in a special artistic style that can be noticed in the decorative objects he makes. Valentin Nicolae:

“I make my decorations in Gothic, medieval style. The raw materials I’m using at present are glass and wood. I’m actually using waste glass and wood, which I decided to turn into decorative objects. I paint these objects in black and golden colours”.

Ion Ionita is another talented fine artist from Prahova County, who makes pictures out of straws, in an attempt to evoke Romanian traditions from Prahova region.

“Historian Nicolae Iorga used to say that the identity of a nation does not mean only the language and the space identity. A nation’s identity also includes traditions, history, the past, the present and the future, the customs, traditions and folk costumes. I have always been fond of Romanian traditional houses, even houses in towns and cities that combine tradition with urbanism. Churches also fascinate me, because rural communities have all been built around churches. Churches preserve the tradition of the Romanian people. I wanted to recreate all these things in my art and share them with those interested in discovering the Romanian traditions”.

Oainter Laurentiu Dimiscas own works have been displayed in prestigious international events, while in his native Romania he staged large-scale outsider art events. His latest project is a creative studio located on the 1st floor of the Tandarica Animation Theatre in central Bucharest. This is the first gallery in Romania and this part of Eastern Europe that specialises in outsider art, New Figuration, naïve art, folk art, visionary art, schizophrenic art, Raw Vision and contemporary art from around the world. Art critic Marius Tita explains:

Marius Tita: “The creative studio founded by Laurentiu Dimisca in Bucharest may be considered the headquarters of outsider art in these parts of Europe. Laurentiu Dimisca has been known for a while as a promoter and talented producer of outsider art. He is himself a painter and a graduate of the High School for Fine Arts and the Fine Arts University, not to mention that he also holds a PhD degree from the Arts University in Cluj Napoca. The creative studio he has founded is a continuation of the great exhibitions Laurentiu Dimisca held in Bucharest, at the Parliament Palace and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. It is also a permanent centre where visitors can find out more about outsider art, come in contact with producers of outsider art whose works are part of notable collections in France and attend events dedicated to all these forms of art that are outside the boundaries of mainstream art. Outsider art is a type of art that defies all conventions. It implies complete openness on the side of artists who choose this art form to express himself or herself.”

The creative studio founded by Laurentiu Dimisca is the realisation of one of his dearest dreams, that of creating an international centre for fine arts. Laurentiu Dimisca himself told us more:

Laurentiu Dimisca: “I even bought an old school building near Piatra Neamt to host this centre. I changed my mind, however, and instead decided that I would first assemble the collection over time, through exhibitions and other events. So here I am today, having my own studio in the centre of Bucharest, in a superb venue, the Tandarica Theatre. The place is open for everybody, but people who wish to see the temporary and permanent exhibitions, as well as my own collection, are advised to call ahead of time to make sure I’m there. The permanent collection includes works belonging to the foundation, while the temporary collection features works that are only displayed for a short period, such as the works being part of the third edition of the International Outsider Art Salon, which are currently on display. Our next temporary exhibition features the self-taught artist Aurel Cogealac, followed by Mimi Revencu, again a self-taught painter herself. In the run-up to the International Women’s Day on 8th March, I‘m planning to launch a collection of jewellery together with the artist Andra Margine. The works will later be shown at the Village Museum, the Museum of the Romanian Peasant and the National Library. Each new exhibition will feature different artists. We will also hold a seminar for outsider art, now in its second year. My intention this year is to hold solo exhibitions of outsider and contemporary art.”

The painters Laurentiu Dimisca, Aurel Cogealac and Mimi Revencu and the photographers Andrei Baciu and Sorin Onisor, as well as the National Village Museum in Bucharest were the special guests of an exhibition entitled “Romania between Tradition and Modernity” held by the Romanian Consulate in the French city of Lyon last autumn. Laurentiu Dimisca explains that the creative studio he has founded provides visitors with the chance to become acquainted with outsider art:

Laurentiu Dimisca: “Apart from giving people the rare chance of visiting an artist’s studio and even watch artists at work, the project also has an educational purpose. My plan is to introduce children and adults to painting and stimulate their creativity and imagination. I have done something similar in France, where I was involved in a number of outsider art festivals and worked with over 300 children from nine different nursery schools in Pays d’Auvergne. I also helped organise the Itineraires Singulaires festival in Dijon for people with disabilities, so I have a lot of experience working with people with problems such as alcoholics and people suffering from schizophrenia. It’s all about the relationship between the artist and the public, in this case people who have never worked with an artist before. My approach is optimistic and I have some beautiful projects to stimulate creativity and imagination.”

Around 300 works are currently on display in Laurentiu Dimisca’s studio. Most of the 50 artists who created them are French, thanks to the cooperation with the Association for the Promotion of Contemporary Folk Art in France. There are also works by Romanian, African, Cuban, Argentinean and Norwegian artists. As for Laurentiu Dimisca’s own artistic production, some of his latest works go on display this spring in The Hague, at the famous Carre d’Artistes gallery, a brand that has galleries and stores around the world. What is unusual about these galleries is that the exhibiting artists are required to contribute small size works that any buyer can afford. Regardless of who the artist is, the price does not differ from one piece to another.