Category: World of Culture

On the centenary of Monica Lovinescu’s birth, Casa Radio Publishing House released an album dedicated to the most important female voice of the Romanian exile during Communism, journalist and literary critic Monica Lovinescu. After graduating from the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest (1946), Monica Lovinescu collaborated with various cultural publications. She obtained a scholarship from the French state in 1947, and went to Paris under risky conditions. Immediately after the forced abdication of King Mihai I, she asked for political asylum in France. After a period in which she directed some avant-garde shows, she devoted herself to the radio, starting in 1951. Starting in 1962, she started working with Radio Free Europe, where she had two weekly shows: Romanian Cultural Current Affairs and Theses and Antitheses in Paris. These shows had a strong influence in Romania, both in the cultural circles and among the general public. Monica Lovinescu wrote articles and studies about Romanian literature and communist ideology in numerous publications: East Europe, Kontinent, Preuves, L’Alternative, Les Cahiers de L’Est, Témoignages, La France Catholique. The album released by Casa Radio Publishing House includes a book and two Cds, and is entitled MONICA LOVINESCU. And I chose the microphone. Interviews on Radio Romania (1993-2004). The album features a presentation by journalist Anca Mateescu, producer at Radio Romania Cultural, who is also the author of the interviews on the two Cds.

Here is Dorin-Liviu Bîtfoi, producer at Casa Radio Publishing House, about Monica Lovinescu and the album released by the publishing house.

“We could say, perhaps quoting a cliché, but with a lot of truth in it, that she is the voice of dignity and the voice of free conscience, both for Romanians in exile and very much for Romanians in the country, who listened to her assiduously on the radio. They listened to her to find out how to live in the free world, but also to be aware of the abuses in the closed world, the world in Romania, the communist world. I really enjoyed working on this book because it is very current, it is very current for those who want to learn about the recent past and its effects, because the effects are still being seen today. It is very interesting to read this book, but also to listen to it, because, as you know, the album also includes an audiobook. The two CDs that include the interviews with Monica Lovinescu are the result of an admirable documentation and consistency, I would say very rare in that period. That’s why I admire the journalist Anca Mateescu, for the tenacity she showed.

To mark one hundred years since the birth of Monica Lovinescu, the Humanitas Aqua Forte Foundation and the Humanitas Publishing House have proposed an exercise of admiration with a rich agenda of events held throughout the entire year 2023 – THE YEAR OF MONICA LOVINESCU. The writer Ioana Pârvulescu, president of the jury of the first edition of the Monica Lovinescu Award, was present at the launch of the album published by the Casa Radio Publishing House.

“This little book has a voice. You’re going to tell me that all books have a voice. Of course, all books have a voice, but this book has the voice of Monica Lovinescu. It is a book that was born from the meeting of two journalists, and I will say here bluntly that I admire Anca Mateescu. She is an extraordinary journalist who, in addition to preparing, asks questions that stimulate you. Asks questions that show she knows what she’s talking about, not questions that clip your wings. Anca Mateescu has this gift of asking the right question, the question that stimulates you, in this book as well. The first interview in this book of interviews with Monica Lovinescu was made when Anca Mateescu was 27 years old, at the beginning of her career as a journalist, and, as the presentation shows, it was not easy for Anca Mateescu to get close to Monica Lovinescu, but in the end she succeeded. And what resulted is an extraordinary testimony. I am convinced that this book will increase in value with each passing year. I was saying that I was particularly interested in the interview in which Monica Lovinescu talks about her father, the critic Eugen Lovinescu, whom she certainly saw as a father, but whose public image she had to accept, that of a literary critic. The interview about Cenaclul Sburătorul, conducted by Eugen Lovinescu, is worthy of literary history, and I will probably recommend it to my students, in this way they will learn more about the literature of the interwar period.

In the dialogues with the journalist Anca Mateescu, the moments that marked Monica Lovinescu’s destiny are recalled: leaving the country and going to Paris, her beginnings as a director in Paris, the meeting with Noël Bernard, journalist, director of the Romanian Service at Radio Europa Liberă, her career in literature , the assassination of the mother, Ecaterina Bălăcioiu-Lovinescu. Also, personalities from the country and from exile are evoked: her father, the critic Eugen Lovinescu, Ion Barbu, Camil Petrescu, Dan Petraşincu, Eugen Ionescu, Ştefan Lupaşcu, Emil Cioran, Ion Negoiţescu, Ion Omescu.

At the beginning of year, the film “Frère et soeur”/”Brother and Sister”, directed by Arnaud Desplechin, was screened in Romanian cinemas. Part of the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, the production features renowned actors like Marion Cotillard and Melvil Poupaud. Alice (Marion Cotillard) and Louis (Melvil Poupaud) are brother and sister in the film. She is an actress and he is a teacher and poet. They havent seen each other for more than two decades, but the death of their parents makes their reunion inevitable. The cast of the film “Frère et soeur” also includes Romanian actress Cosmina Stratan, awarded in 2012 in Cannes for her exceptional performance in the film “Beyond the Hills”, directed by Cristian Mungiu.

In the new film, directed by Arnaud Desplechin, Cosmina Stratan plays the role of Lucia, a Romanian immigrant who Alices best frind. Arnaud Desplechin had also cast Cosmina in his film, “Tromperie”, but due to the pandemic, the collaboration did not materialise. Cosmina Stratan: “We were left with a feeling of regret that we did not manage to synchronize, especially since it doesn’t happen often that a director you admire to offer you a part in one of his films. But Arnaud Desplechin understood that my absence was motivated. I had the feeling that he made room for me in this new film, from the beginning. That is why I was less nervous than usual – I knew it was a character created for me. As for the role Im playing, I cant say it was too difficult, because I am a fan of Marion Cotillard anyway, so it wasnt difficult for me to show it on screen. What Ive noticed about my favourite actors and partners that Ive worked with so far is that they get over the normal initial awkwardness very quickly. It is not very easy for us either to overcome this barrier at the beginning. We are people who meet for the first time on a film set and it is impossible to ignore this distance that separates us. At the same time, we have a common goal, to get to understand the character that we are playing, so that we can explore the situations in the film together. With Marion Cottilard this process was natural. She also wanted to overcome that distance and we collaborated very well. We synchronised and that helped a lot, especially because it’s much more difficult to overcome your emotions when you are working with someone you really admire.”

Originally from Iasi, Cosmina Stratan studied journalism and worked at the Student Opinion magazine. In 2008, she was admitted to the Acting Department of the University of Theater and Cinematography in Bucharest. After acting in several short films, the actress played the role of Voichița, a young mother who sees her childhood friend again, in Cristian Mungius film, După dealuri (Over the Hillls), a role for which she received the award for female performance at the Film Festival in Cannes. French director Arnaud Desplechin stated that he chose Cosmina Stratan for the role of Lucia in Brother and Sister after noticing her in the production Over the Hillls. Cosmina Stratan:

“It was a role that I consider a turning point, even if it came up at the beginning of my career. A turning point, in the sense that Over the Hills was my first major film, and also my first paid job in this business. I say the first paid job because in college we, the actors, do all kinds of practice with our colleagues from the directing department, but those are roles for which we are not paid. In my case, everything happened at once, the first paid job, and the first leading role, and the Cannes Performance Award. It was somehow a confirmation that I was looking for, because acting is a job where you can also have insecurities. I needed feedback, an answer that I was in the right place, and because before acting I had tried other jobs, acting was the second option for me, and the role in Over the Hills was a great help. This recognition, due to the visibility of the film and the character, helped me continue my career and gave me hope that I would act in other films. Somehow this story reassured me, it assured me that something else would follow, because I had that anxiety that many actors have at the beginning of their journey, especially if they are on their own and are not employed in a theater. At the beginning it is quite complicated to imagine the future.”

Cosmina Stratan also played a role in the short film “Intercom 15”, written and directed by Andrei Epure, selected in 2021 in the La Semaine de la Critique competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Simeza Gallery in Bucharest presents in November the traveling group exhibition Andezit 10. The exhibition had a route through several galleries in Romania, the exhibition in Bucharest being the end of its journey. 10 established visual artists present works closely related to the Via Transilvanica – The Uniting Road, the long-distance tourist route (on foot, by bike, or on horseback) (1400 kilometers) that crosses Romania diagonally, from the Putna Monastery in Moldova (north-east Romania), to Drobeta-Turnu Severin (south-west Romania). Some kilometer markers of the route are made by artists out of andesite (igneous rock resulting from a volcanic eruption).

At the opening, we spoke with the initiator of the project and one of the exhibiting artists, the sculptor Maxim Dumitraș, about how the exhibition at the Simeza Gallery was born and how the team of creative sculptors of the exhibition was formed:

This exhibition was born from a Via Transilvanica monumental sculpture symposium, where each artist made 5 or 6 milestones. They are all members participating in this symposium. We used andesite as a raw material, and each artist proposed their own projects, which I think will be done in time and will be monumental. I built the team knowing that the artists work in andesite. It is a very hard material, more so than granite. Naturally, you have to have experience with this material, and this is how I selected the artists. We made 6 milestones, as I said, each with one’s own project. This exhibition traveled from the Museum of Comparative Art in Sângeorz-Băi, to Baia Mare, Sighetu Marmației, Bacău, Iași, and now we end a one-year cycle at the Simeza Gallery in Bucharest. We worked on Via Transilvanica, on the hills, after which we exhibited them along the route. We built the exhibition to fit the hall.

Maxim Dumitraș gave us some details about how to work with andesite, a hard and difficult material to process:

It’s a special technique, there are special rotary tools, you can’t play with just any material. It’s tough, but it’s fantastic when the sculpture is finished. I used it for the first time in the sculpture circuit about 10 years ago, a lot of work was also done in symposia. It is a type of stone very resistant to time and weather. And what’s interesting is that you can give it a finish from a rough surface to an ultra-finished surface, close to the level of the glass.

Visual artist Bogdan Pelmus, present in the exhibition with sculpture works, spoke to us about the Andezit 10 project:

I didn’t graduate sculpture school, I graduate painting, actually, but I found it interesting to work with objects. I work with objects, with video, with several media. And I found the material very interesting, because it’s very hard, and you can get the exact opposite out of it. It depends on how you play with it.

We asked what works Bogdan Pelmuș exhibited in the Simeza Gallery exhibition.

There are two pieces, they are called Flight, and two drawings, somehow complementing the idea of duality, search, interior, treasure, childhood. Meaning the way can you maturely bring ideas out of your personal self.

The President of the Union of Fine Artists (UAP), the artist Petru Lucaci, present at the opening, told us:

“It’s wonderful what’s going on here. It is a challenge both for the sculptors and for us to witness such a deployment of force, because we can even speak of force here. Andesite is a very hard kind of rock. I have met the sculptors in symposia, and I was impressed by the kind of effort they make to identify in a stone block an image, an idea, a form, or a message. The works are interesting, the group is at the same time homogeneous, but multiple personalities are identified here, because they are artists with experience in creation camps, and in working with such materials. It is an original material, with an impressive expressive force. We are used to working with white stone, it is a softer, more malleable, easier to master limestone. When it comes to andesite, it’s a terrific challenge, and the effect is absolutely impressive.

Petru Lucaci also talked to us about how he sees this project from a curatorial point of view, the project being curated by the exhibiting artists themselves:

It seems to me that the exhibition makes sense, it is unitary and it has strength, because those who have gathered here know each other, they know each other’s potential, they know the potential of the material they work with, and I think they have found a very good formula for putting their ideas into action.

How did 2023 look from the UFA perspective? What does the Union of Fine Artists prepare for lovers of beauty? Here is president Petru Lucaci:

For now we are trying to take stock of the National Contemporary Art Show, which I say was far-reaching. It took place in 15 different spaces, some of them quite large, those at the Fine Arts Complex, where we have 8 galleries that I think are impressive in size. There are the former warehouses of the complex, which have turned into a cultural hub, probably the biggest in Romania, and where things happen on a different scale than we can manage in the galleries in the city, which certainly have more domestic, more human dimensions . We are preparing another event now, soon. We finished the new building, the headquarters of the Union of Fine Artists, which also has an art gallery on the ground floor. So we are trying to show to the world the exhibition that we organized there in a more official context, that of the inauguration of the Union headquarters. It is the first time that the Union has its own home, which is extremely important.

The FILIT – Iasi International Festival of Literature and Translation workshops, organized by the National Museum of Romanian Literature of Iași in collaboration with the Ipotești Memorial – Mihai Eminescu National Studies Center, preceded the Iași International Festival of Literature and Translation – FILIT, reaching the 9th edition this year. Lora Nenkovska from Bulgaria, the guest of today’s World of Culture, is an excellent translator of Romanian literature, a lecturer of Romanian language and literature at the University of Sofia Kliment Ohridski who participated in many editions of the FILIT workshops. We spoke with her about the importance of the FILIT workshops, which aim to support cultural cooperation, heritage promotion and contemporary creation at an international level:

First of all, I would dare say that events like this are vital for us as translators. It is very important to meet and talk about our projects, about the problems we come across. By translating, we learn all our life, it is a process that never ends, as is my career as a university lecturer, we are still a kind of students who do not stop studying all our lives. And that is our choice, to learn, to search, to read. For me, it is very interesting to connect with what my colleagues from abroad are doing, because everyone comes with their own taste in literature, with the translations they are working on, with what they have discovered new, and that’s how we get to have some very interesting discussions. Furthermore, what I really like about these workshops organized by the National Museum of Romanian Literature of Iaşi in collaboration with the Ipotesti Memorial is that we also benefit from some very interesting lectures, such as those given recently by writers and critics such as Bogdan Crețu, Doris Mironescu, Florin Bican, Ioana Both and Radu Vancu. There were lectures that would interest anyone who reads or studies Romanian literature. Most of these conferences were rather theoretical and were aimed at giving us a deeper understanding of Romanian literature. Bogdan Crețu talked to us about the scholar Dimitrie Cantemir and for me it was a very interesting lecture, especially since I really like his book dedicated to Cantemir, ‘The Unicorn at the Gates of the Orient’. As I have said, it is vital for me to connect with what my colleagues are doing, to their translation concerns. It is very important to exchange opinions, to talk about the books we are translating, about what we have discovered in Romanian literature. We are like a small international society that speaks Romanian and discusses Romanian literature.

Lora Nenkovska has translated into Bulgarian works by Matei Vișniec, Petru Cimpoeşu, Mircea Eliade, Dan Lungu, Claudiu Komartin, Elena Vlădăreanu, Simona Popescu, Ioan Es. Pop, Max BlecherandAndreea Răsuceanu. In recent years, she has also translated excerpts from the novels of the writers nominated for the Sofia Nădejde women’s award for literature. We spoke to Lora Nenkovska about her passion for Romanian literature and its good reception in Bulgaria:

I came across Romanian literature quite by chance. In 2003 I arrived in Romania on a scholarship. I was studying Balkan languages at the time, Greek, Neo-Greek, Albanian, Serbo-Croatian and Romanian. At that time, it was almost impossible to leave Bulgaria to study a language abroad, but an opportunity arose and I got to go to Timișoara, where I spent a month, studying under the writer Adriana Babeți, which was a wonderful experience. I would spend most of that time at university, but I was also lucky to catch a theatre festival for students so I ended up going to lots of performances. It’s at that festival that I first came across the plays of Matei Vișnic and I remember thinking that if this country can produce such a great playwright, then I must find out more about its literature. So I bought lots of books, I must have come back with an entire library. That’s how I began to read Romanian literature, which I think is very alive and diverse, and which I am constantly discovering. I also like it that it pays great attention to social problems. As a translator, I am also very interested in this aspect, namely the subject of a book, and I don’t look at a text only from a stylistic point of view. I’m also very interested in literature written by women.

The most recent book translated by Lora Nenkovska into Bulgarian is Andreea Răsuceanu’s novel Vântul, duhul, suflarea [The Wind, the Spirit, the Breath], published by Polirom in Romania and by ICU Publishing in Bulgaria. The translator is also working on an academic paper about traumas in Romanian contemporary literature written by women.

A road-movie, but also a drama, a comedy and a satire, but also a montage film, plus a digital avatar, anecdotes and music – all these characteristics can be attributed to the new film by director and screenwriter Radu Jude, Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World. It is Romania’s proposal for the Oscars, the American Academy Awards in 2024. Actress Ilinca Manolache and non-professional actor Ovidiu Pîrsan play the main roles.

The film Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World premiered at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Leopard – Special Jury Prize, Mention from the Ecumenical Jury and First Prize from Youth Jury.

Radu Jude is one of the most appreciated contemporary directors nationally and internationally, winner of several awards, among which we mention the Berlin International Film Festival in 2009, with his debut film, The Happiest Girl in the World , the Silver Bear, in 2015, with the film Aferim!, and last but not least, the 2018 feature film I Don’t Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, the first Romanian film to be awarded the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary Festival.

In October, the press conference announcing Romania’s proposal for the Oscars was held. The creative team talked about the digital avatar that appears in the film, avatar created by the lead actress herself. Ilinca Manolache and Radu Jude tell us more about this topic:

“It started out of me wanting to vent my frustration with this kind of dynamic that I was and still am encountering very often in our society. And I took on the idea, and when I invited Ilinca to play in the film, with Ilinca collaborating for a smaller role in other films and wanting very much to make a film together with a bigger role. I took over the avatar, her creation, because it seemed to me, on the one hand, a very intelligent and very edgy way, with many contradictions and with many asperities, to formulate a criticism, let’s call it that. Because the film spins or goes in several directions, explodes in several directions, one of the directions is related to the very definition, or the attempt to understand what a character means, what it means to create a character, and I thought it was really interesting to have a character that is played by Ilinca, and that character creates another character that is this avatar. As well as what is a mixture between the creation of Ilinca Manolache, the creation of the character, the creation of the platform. And then, there’s something else that interested me, maybe even more than that: what does an image mean? What does the construction of an image mean in relation to reality? What is lost with the appearance of these types of virtual images, and now with AI, this whole story is even more complicated. There’s an energy in these platforms that sends us back a little bit to the beginnings of cinema.

We asked director Radu Jude how he built the road-movie part of the film, including the montage part inserted into the film, made in black and white style:

“Regarding the black and white part, things were built step by step, because the script, so to speak, or the project, was built step by step. This idea of creating a montage in which to enter on the side of the main story, the story of Ilinca’s avatar, and then the images from Angela Moves On, by Lucian Bratu, and so on, all this was added later, step by step. We decided to shoot not just in black and white, but we shot on 16mm film, black and white, maybe out of a kind of desire to experiment with a sport that’s almost on the verge of extinction, in a way.

How did the lead actress Ilinca Manolache receive the offer of this role and how did she create it? Ilinca Manolache told us:

For me, the most important thing was to be very attentive to what Radu asked me to do, to be super focused on what had to be done during the filming. When I read the script, I said this before, I felt super-represented, so it wasn’t, I didn’t feel this character very far from me, that’s clear. It’s something I’m so proud of, and it represents me so much that I ask myself the question: What am I going to do next? Because something that maybe equals what we did here might be harder to come by.

In the end, the non-professional actor Ovidiu Pîrsan wanted to specify:

“I want to tell you that for me it meant a lot, I mean I think it was the most beautiful experience of my life, so to speak, for the first time doing this thing. The role was kind of… it wasn’t hard for me, because I don’t know if you all know, I’m actually in a wheelchair. I told myself, just tell the story, in another version.

From September until
the middle of November, the Bucharest City Museum is playing host at its
headquarters in the Suțu Palace, in central Bucharest, to an exhibition that
takes visitors back, in the city’s past, entitled Bucharest’s outskirts in the
inter-war years. The inter-war period is defined historically as the 21-year
period between the two world wars, 1918 to 1939. The Romanian capital Bucharest
is the country’s most important industrial and commercial centre as well as its
artistic, cultural and media centre. In 2011, its population was around 2
million inhabitants, not counting the people transiting the city or those
living in the surroundings. Bucharest was first mentioned in historical records
in 1459 and it became the capital of the United Principalities of Wallachia and
Moldavia in 1862. The curator of the exhibition, Cezar Petre Buiumaci, tells us
more about the history of the Romanian capital and other details about the city
in the inter-war period:

Cezar Buiumaci: The exhibition seeks
to showcase the development of the capital city throughout time, the
transformation of the city during its biggest horizontal expansion, which
occurred in the inter-war period. Bucharest at that time was an open, welcoming
city, despite frequent attempts to limit its geographical and demographic
expansion. Bucharest’s becoming the capital of Wallachia, and then of the
United Principalities and of Greater Romania worked as a magnet for people from
other parts, who brought along their own cultural heritage, transforming the
city into an exciting metropolis. Most of the people who arrived here were not
wealthy and would settle in the cheaper areas of the city, on its outskirts, thus
contributing to its geographical expansion.

The collection of the
Bucharest City Museum contains photographic records of the city’s outskirts,
the areas that were about to be expanded, and which disappeared in the second
part of the 20th century. Curator Cezar
Buiumaci tells us what the
exhibition seeks to achieve:

Cezar Buiumaci: I have tried, and hopefully
achieved to showcase the urban outskirts of a developing city. Bucharest’s
dynamic is unique in Romania, its growth has been constant, which is why we are
constantly witnessing changes. Whereas in the 17th Century it was
limited to the University area, in the early 19th Century it reached
today’s Athenaeum building, and by the end of that century it had reached
today’s Victory Square, or rather it followed a circular road on a route
connecting the city’s main railway stations. In order to understand the city’s
geographical growth, we must take a look at statistics, and also at the
following demographics: in 1831 Bucharest had around 60,000 inhabitants, but in
1859 the figure was double. At the end of the 19th Century its
population reached some 230,000, and in 1930, in the middle of the inter-war
period, 640,000 people were living in
Bucharest; in the mid-20th Century its population reached 1 million, and the figure
doubled in the 1980s.

What can
visitors see at the exhibition in Suțu Palace? Here is Cezar Buiumaci:

Cezar Buiumaci: The exhibition presents the outskirts of the
city, following the road mentioned before, but it features what could be seen
at that time beyond this peripheral road, the areas scheduled to be demolished,
which were photographed by the best photographers of the times at the request
of the local administration. There are 60 photographs, depicting various
aspects of life at the outskirts. The public may see what neighbourhood pubs
used to look like, what some of the streets looked like before being paved, or
areas like the so-called Valley of Tears, which are unrecognisable today. They
can see people going bathing and in the same image animals or cars being washed,
ice being taken out of the river during the winter to be used for cooling the
food in the summer, sheep grazing on what is today Plevnei Road, or horses
being shod. These are photographs shown for the first time, commissioned by the
City Hall, and depicting the outskirts. (CM, AMP)

A new volume of theater plays signed by Saviana Stănescu, “For a barbarian woman”, recently appeared at the Tracus Arte publishing house and was launched at the Cărturești Verona bookstore in Bucharest. At the launch of the volume – translated from English, with an introductory study by Diana Benea – the director of the National Museum of Romanian Literature, Ioan Cristescu, theater critic Oana Cristea Grigorescu and director Andrei Măjeri took the floor. Actress Adelaida Zamfira (who played in Saviana Stănescus first show, “Did you know that trains tell stories with children?”) read some monologues from the book.

“In the last twenty years, Saviana Stănescu has become an emblematic figure of American dramaturgy, an exponent of the intersection between East and West, between different cultures and theatrical traditions, between Eastern European absurdity and carnivalesque, and American psychological realism. If the authors entire activity can be contained in the metaphor of the bridges she generously builds between continents, cultures, languages and artists from various spaces, then the current edition hopes to strengthen such a bridge towards the Romanian public, through a selection of recent plays, edited and published mainly in the last decade.”

This is what Diana Benea writes in the introductory study of the volume “For a barbarian woman”. Saviana Stănescu won the UNITER award for the Best Play of the Year in 2000. Her first plays in Romanian (Infanta. Means of Use; Countdown) were staged by directors Radu Afrim, Theo Herghelegiu, Anca Maria Colțeanu, and Tudor Țepeneag. On the occasion of the launch in Romania of her new volume of theater plays, Saviana Stănescu spoke about the pendulum between the two spaces, the Romanian and the American, and about the transition from a literature marked by Eastern European realities to a global writing.

“These bridges between the two cultures, this In-betweenness, this experience between two worlds, between two continents, between two languages, and between many other Betweens have left a mark on me lately. Therefore, the way I write tries to capture this swing between identities, cultures and continents. I joke there in America, saying that I have been an American writer for 22 years, because I came to America in 2001 and started from scratch. Thats when I started writing in English. So, in a way, Im only 22 years old as an American writer goes. Sure, I have many more years as a Romanian writer and playwright, but it was important for me to reinvent myself, to start from scratch. As said here at the launch event, I have a curiosity that is kept alive, every day I am interested to see what is happening in the world. Maybe it comes from my journalistic background, maybe it comes from the fact that Ive always liked to explore different subjects. I have always been interested in various fields, from mathematics to literature, from information technology to dance. And for me, all of this is found in the way I try to write theater. I am a curious person by nature, it seems important for me to capture these realities of the day in a play. I think its important to create a dramatic situation, to create a story.”

If in her early days, when she wrote plays in Romanian, Saviana Stănescu was mainly interested in the area of the absurd, but since she arrived in the USA, her texts have acquired a wide socio-political resonance. Saviana Stanescu.

“When I arrived in the United States, I encountered a reality of the emigrant. It was hard for me. It was hard for me to start from scratch, it was hard for me to be different, to see that I am not recognized, that I am not considered on the same level as the writers there. So I started again from scratch, I tried to show what I can do, I tried to learn from others. Somehow, this new reality I encountered made me understand that in Romania I was spoiled. In Romania, I allowed myself to explore the zone of the absurd, to escape into various worlds. In America I ran into financial difficulties, I had to face a tougher world, especially in New York. As I said, I started from scratch. I became a student, although in Romania I was a recognized writer. There is something powerful about starting all over again. As Diana Benea writes in the preface of the volume For a Barbarian Woman, we also went through some important socio-political moments. And in America, another theme was added to my writing: power relations between countries. Because I realized that it is a different power ratio, we cannot compare the perception of the USA with the perception of Romania. And I realized that I am in another world, a world of power, a world of economic domination, a world with problems of racial and gender discrimination, a world with different economic problems than those in Romania. I had to adapt, I had to get into a different kind of rhythm. Naturally, these new realities appeared in my plays. Being an empath, if I live in a place for a while, I will write a play that reflects the problems of that place and the environment there, hoping that my text will also speak on a larger level, resonate globally.”

Currently, Saviana Stănescu is a university professor of dramatic writing and contemporary theater at Ithaca College, after teaching for 8 years at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts.