Taking the Train from Reality to Theatre / Being part of art

    I was still in the dreamy atmosphere of Temps d'Image Festival when the city of Cluj was ready to open the wardrobe and wear another elegant and fancy dress; to say it in a less hermetic way the Interferences Festival has just started. This city does not leave space to boredom,  Cluj catches you  in a tight hug, charm and scented that I believe it is hard to resist. Unfortunately I lost the opening of the Festival, this morning I was on the train coming back from Bucharest, with my fingers tipping on my knees, like a child I was so excited about the festival that the 10 hours trip seemed longer than what it was, even if the view that was offered me was as beauty as a living painting. While reading about Interferences program the sweet sound of the train and its lulling captured my attention and drove me inside Romania's heart; I run through her Mountains, her white forests, I walked with the brave shepherd that face the cold with great dignity, I felt the cold on the pink cheeks of the station chief, I felt the desolation in the many dogs I saw trough my windows.

    Thinking about this year theme “Stories of the Body”, I thought as a big number of theatre authors are more and more erasing the edge between real life and fiction. Many, the most traditionalists, could think about this as an exasperation pitch, others perceive it as a great chance to set free creativity, body and of course language. While these thoughts were crossing my mind I started filming the view from my window, a little experiment trying to capture the feeling of life and death that the sounds and the landscape were giving me. I entered the Sala Studio at 7.45 pm, waiting for “The End” to Start, I laughed thinking about  this simple oxymoron, I turned my head around and again my attention was taken by a details, the feet, or better the shoes in which they are wrapped. Each pair was expressing its feeling, each shoe was telling its story. Finally we entered and I was forced to quid travelling with my mind. The End...the light are on, the scene is almost empty, its minimalism symbolizes the complexity of the theme; Death and Life.

The emptiness of the space probably reflects the stark of the soul. On the scene Valeria Raimondi, with the tireless strength of a woodpecker brings the audience in a vortex made of words, mixing up meaningful words and no sense. What sounds as a no sense hides an important meaning, the text dig deeply in our morality, it shows us how big and deeply intertwined our fears are.  The language used is strong, sharp, vulgar and insolent, Valeria Raimondi for 50 minutes shows her tenacity and her strong skills. The first impression is tipped over, the poverty of the scene become a recall of integrity and acceptance of human being nature. The strong provocation becomes as natural as a mother with her child on her arm. The End is a moment of ecstasy, and like in a bad trip my anxiety watched at me straight in my eyes, in the shape of Valeria Raimondi's voice my fears hold my wrist, thigh, hurting and burning the most inner side of my soul. 

BEING PART OF ART

Incredibly fascinating experiences were offered to the audience during the Interferences third day. 

At first there was the opening ceremony of the exhibition “Stories of the Body” set up by Gábor Tompa at the Museum of Fine Arts in Cluj-Napoca. As invited curator and theatre artist, he made a selection among the works of the Museum, creating a private, ideal collection with distinctive, emotional features. He highlighted how theatre artists are always inspired by fine arts and described the process behind the result. Within the collection of the Museum, he discovered works with dramatic content, and by selecting and combining them he tried to create a dramatic relationship between them.

This kind of exhibition, organized by theatre makers, first was organized in Paris a couple of years ago, hence it is an artistic operation experimented now in Romania for the first time.
 

Many of the paintings and sculptures displayed have a special beauty and harmony, both of shapes and colours, through which the subjects of family, nude and maternity are explored. The works mirror the influence of different European artistic movements between 19th and 20th centuries, especially Symbolism, Cubism and Expressionism but many of them have rather a clear Classicist sign. There is a very interesting work, Aurel Ciupe’s “Variantă pentru armonie”, which blends Neo-Cubist shapes with a delicate, sophisticated chromatic range that even reminded me of Dégas, Cézanne and Picasso first period’s colours. The visitors can definitely enjoy aesthetically pleasing colour combinations. 

Death should not be excluded if we think over the topic of the festival The Stories of the Body. Indeed, it is powerfully represented in two big, impressive sculptures of the crucified Christ, which embody the path through life and death of human beings. 
 

After immerging myself in this suggestive dialogue between works of art, I went to the opening of another exhibition, “The Body as a Gift”, with the amazing pictures taken by theatre photographer Mihaela Marin. The beautiful pieces displayed were taken by the photographer on the occasions of various theatre shows. She skilfully captured the moments in which the body expresses itself. The images are extremely evocative and stimulate great aesthetic pleasure in the observer.   

The third event in programme was the Italian play “The End”, written and directed by Valeria Raimondi and Enrico Castellani. 

A woman, alone on the stage, celebrates a sort of private ritual while articulating the words of a text-poem, an authentic flux of emotions, fear, protest and anger. 

She recomposes the body of a crucified Christ which afterwards she lifts high in the middle of the stage. It is an unavoidable presence which forces the audience to deal with death. The performer shoots a gun in the air and says “I want my executioner”. Then she lifts two cut heads, one of an ox and the other of a donkey, on the sides of the sculpture. The traditional iconography of the birth of Jesus is distorted in a way that those symbols of protection, warmth and life seem to become dead icons of a “domesticated religion”. In the end, she expresses her will to live the last moment with her beloved ones, touched “by hands whose shape and callosity I know”. 

What is the sense of this? The text of the play is a clear expression of the awkwardness and anger towards the way modern society tries to forget the simple fact that we, as human beings, all have to die. It is becoming obvious that today, disease, old age and death are not accepted. In fact, people do not care about diseases and death any longer, since they are seen as the exclusive dominion of technicians and doctors. 
 

What seems to be blasphemy is a provocation aimed at offering an image of Christ as a dead man and not as an icon. There is not any offence to religious individual sensitivity, but rather sympathy and humanity towards a suffering body and most of all a constant affirmation of the dignity of life, especially when it is in danger and close to the end.
 

This play was followed by another completely different representation, “Roses”, directed by András Urbán using Ottό Tolnai’s poem “The Rose of Chișinău” as a base.

It was a series of physical actions performed by the actors, who explored their bodies individually and in relation to the space, the objects and the other performers. It gave me the impression of being weird, playful and Surrealistic in the juxtaposition of apparently incoherent objects which actually were stimulating the spectator’s individual perception. Such individual perception was different according to personal sensitivity, memories and mental associations. The performers leave the sign of their transit on big white papers twice, by jumping, walking and slithering their black-painted bodies on them. This reminded me of Yves Klein’s actions during which he painted his models with blue colours and made them leave the marks of their bodies on white surfaces, obtaining, in this way, the sign of a unique moment, a very poetic concept which I was glad to live during the play.