The Dance - Theatre between avant-garde and rear-guard

(story to be published in tomorrow’s issue, March 21)

Theodor Cristian Popescu, founder of the Independent Company 777, is one of the few young Romanian directors who managed on their own to connect the Romanian theatre to the international cultural trend. He found an institution opened towards the artistic “ocean” beyond the (mental) Romanian boundaries – the Nottara Theatre and pioneered with the “Angels in America” by Tony Kushner, then DaDaDance, a dance-theatre performance played by actors that had to be specially trained by choreographer Florin Fieroiu for they had little or no ballet experience. Ilinca Goia, Daniela Minoiu, Cristina Toma, Dragos Bucur, Alexandru Jitea are those that “debug” our brains using only a few texts by Tristan Tzara as “movement acessories.” It contradicts the logical order of events and relinquishes the force of the gestures. The supremacy of the spoken word is pushed aside and the signals of the bodies in movement articulate a particular universe expressed by dancing syllables. In spite of the apparently illogical structure and the lack of narration (in the popular meaning of the term), the show acts spontaneously at an emotional level, and the images created by gestures gather like a puzzle on an everlasting theme – man – a poor shape of flesh forever trying to find its content. One cannot describe the story on the stage but the message it conveys is poignantly felt. The intelligence of senses overwhelms for a few moments the rational one and lets you draw your own story – if you need one. The transparent room in which the characters are retreating (scenografy: Lia Mantoc) are perhaps hospital rooms or maybe just domestic “basic society cells” – once known as families. The frontier between fiction and reality is not clearly drawn and this ambiguity is the fact that makes it worth while. The Romanian audience is in need of a few shock treatments that this kind of hybrid production provides. The usual majestic posture of traditionalism may become fatal for a free spirit. In other countries the postmodernist movement is almost running out of new items to show. We have not even begun to assimilate or accept yet the advantages it may bring us. The point is that the esthetic of the fragment has conquered the stage and life and it has already entered the digital era. On the background of this spy glass, the DaDaDance of Theodor Cristian Popescu becomes a normal show, competitive in any European or universal theatre festival and stops being a weird local thing that no one knows where to ban, for it may be conveying an “artistic virus.”