The name Gigi Căciuleanu is synonymous with contemporary dance, both in Romania and worldwide. Alongside his teacher, Miriam Răducanu, he built forms of expression through movement at a time when Romanians lacked freedom. He then amazed huge names in dance, such as the Soviet ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.

He founded the first National Center for Contemporary Dance in France in Rennes and led the Santiago de Chile National Ballet.

He has lived in Paris for 50 years but has also left his mark on contemporary dance in Romania, both before and after the Revolution.

I met him in the French capital, in the Montmartre district where he lives, and I discovered fascinating stories, from his departure from Romania and periods of financial insecurity, where he ate only jam on dry bread for three months, to career-defining encounters with Pierre Cardin, Astor Piazzolla, Jean Michel Jarre, and Maya Plisetskaya.

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In June 1940, when Romania was ordered to cede Bessarabia as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Gigi Căciuleanu’s grandparents and parents caught the last train to Bucharest.

“My grandmother didn’t take any jewelry, nothing; she only took the Bible and a cactus. If I were to write all my memoirs, I would title it The Bible and the Cactus. She had the Bible since 1900; she would read from it when we were children and she cherished it very much. The way my grandmother read to us made the Bible seem like an adventure book.

We all lived in the basement of a house on Eremia Grigorescu Street, and I was lucky to grow up between the two gardens, Icoanei and Ioanid. In my day, Ioanid was called Pușkin Park. We used to swim in the pond there.”

Gigi Căciuleanu first came into contact with dance when he was only 4 years old. It happened at a ballet school on Frumoasă Street in Bucharest, near George Enescu’s house.

“If you were to look through the keyhole into Alice’s Wonderland, you would see something. You know it’s Wonderland, but you don’t know exactly what it’s like. Dance is not just dance; it’s a necessity. It’s a visceral necessity, just as poetry is a necessity. And for me, poetry and dance and drawing lines are very connected.

My mother took me to ballet for two reasons: one – I was terribly mischievous, and two – my mother would have wanted to be a ballerina, but it was not considered appropriate at the time in our family for a girl to be a ballerina; ballerinas were considered unserious. Unable to be a ballerina, my mother became a botanist. She was very in love with plants. A plant is a dance. It is a line that develops, blooms, has a story. A blade of grass also has extraordinary strength; it comes out of the asphalt without any problem. Put me under the asphalt to see if I can get out. No! I don’t know how the blade of grass makes its way through.

Dance fascinated me in the sense that it hit me on the head; I was very scared because there were all kinds of young ladies who knew much more than I did. I was 4 years old; what does a child know at 4? I started to cry, and a blond, beautiful, very intelligent teacher, Nuți Dona, took me in her arms, and I asked her to marry me. Haha. Then she started training me.

She said: ‘Forget the figures and look: I’m here with you, you’re in an empty lot, you’re playing with a ball, you break a window, the neighbor whose window you broke comes out and scolds you, you answer him, and you are between the ball and the one who scolds you. You dance however you want.’ I don’t know what I danced for her, but I really liked the idea. That was freedom.”

He then continued to go to the dance school, and the meeting that was to decisively mark his artistic path was with the dancer and choreographer Miriam Răducanu.

“Miriam became our teacher when I entered the second cycle, which means at 14 years old. And suddenly, some subjects were added, one of which was called The Actor’s Art. I really liked it; at one point, I wanted to quit dance and become an actor, I realized I could do more things as an actor, and I really liked the idea.

She gave us dance classes, but it was not allowed to say “modern dance”; jazz was frowned upon as modern music. She told us: ‘Look, you are allowed to improvise, but not chaotically, but with some very precise tasks, just like jazz musicians do, she already pronounced the word jazz, which was taboo. Or like very talented musicians do in a Mozart symphony; they have a moment of freedom where they deviate from the written symphony and are allowed to add some nuances that are their own. I want to work on these nuances with you, in which you have the right to be free, but going through the experience of improvising with some very precise tasks.’

With Miriam, I realized that dance and the art of acting do not exclude each other but blend very well. She was the first dance-actor I met.

Together, the two created the famous late-night shows, which took place at the Țăndărică Theater in Bucharest in the late ’60s. The Nocturnes combined music, dance, poetry, and acting, and the interdisciplinary construction was something revolutionary at the time.

“She worked a lot with the theater, with Gina Patrichi, with Virgil Ogășanu. Virgil Ogășanu was part of the first Nocturne we did. He performed a monologue from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, which he had worked on with Andrei Șerban.

Many of the dances I did with Miriam came out of improvisation. Before the Nocturnes, we danced a lot in people’s homes. Whoever had a bigger living room would welcome us. People would sit on chairs as if at a theater.

How was this freedom possible in that regime where Romanians lacked precisely freedom?

“Romanians are Romanians; jokes saved us. Don’t forget that we are in a country of jokes, even if some people would turn you in for this. We always laughed at many things, and Romanians have always been very Latin. No matter how much they try to restrain us, we remain Latin.

Inspired by Brâncuși, Miriam had at one point created a dance called Flight; it was very static, only on an oscillation, the body only had some inclinations. And she was criticized by her colleagues at the opera, who said, ‘What kind of flight is that; in flight, you flap your arms.’ And I went to her and said: ‘Madam, you should know that I am very upset by what people are saying about your dance.’

And she told me: ‘You ask them where the feathers are on Brâncuși’s Bird. Don’t argue with them; just present artistic arguments.’ Miriam is very different from me. Miriam polished her dances, just as Brâncuși polished his sculptures. And I was very much about the immediate moment; I could change a dance in three seconds. During the Nocturnes, I always said that she was the pretzel, and I was dancing, sneaking through the holes of the pretzel.”

When the Nocturnes, theater plays, concerts, and opera shows ended, young people from Bucharest who were interested in the courageous side of art would gather at Preoteasa, the Students’ Cultural Center. There, great Romanian artists would give free rein to their imagination and improvise in a captivating way for the audience.

“We improvised crazily; all kinds of jazz musicians would come, the Berindei brothers, Jancy Korossy, Johnny Raducanu. It was a dialogue where I didn’t care about the way they played and what that was called in music, and they didn’t care what the movement we were doing was called. The audience would come like crazy for this. A lot of young people would come,” Gigi Căciuleanu now recalls.

Alongside Miriam Răducanu, Gigi Căciuleanu participated in the first international festivals. When the Bulandra Theater, with Liviu Ciulei as director, presented Hamlet at the Edinburgh Festival, Gigi Căciuleanu was dancing in the festival’s underground: “one day, we saw Marin Sorescu and Ion Caramitru come in and join us, in a good way, and they created a moment within our show. It was spontaneous and fit perfectly.”

Poetry, painting, and dance have always had echoes in Gigi Căciuleanu’s dance. He fell in love with the paintings of Kandinsky and Aivazovsky, which gave him the courage not to impose barriers on himself, to build forms in continuous motion, without a contour.

“What is choreography? It is a combination of movements that you invent. You invent the movements and their combination. I make a big distinction between a choreographer and an arranger. It’s like in music; there are people who invent things and others who arrange them. A lot of choreographers call themselves choreographers without being choreographers. They take things from here and there and glue them together.”

Gigi Căciuleanu left Romania in 1973 and settled in France, after a journey through Russia, Germany, Greece, and Belgium, refusing an invitation to move to America.

His meeting with the great German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch gave him the confidence that he could start over in a new world.

“After leaving the country so many times with Miriam, I told myself I couldn’t wait for visas for who knows how long. I was convinced I had something to say, and I couldn’t say it at the opera, where I had to do what I was told. I didn’t want to go to Moscow, but Miriam told me, ‘Go, boy, to the Russians, and learn the trade!'”

And did you go to the Bolshoi Theater?

“Yes, I stayed for one season, but that was enough for me; it was an extraordinary technical apprenticeship. It was classical, academic dance, but with more freedom. I had three extraordinary teachers; if a double jump was done, we would do a triple. I absolutely loved this technical challenge. And we had the opportunity to sneak in to the soloists, we would open the door and slip in. Maya Plisetskaya, Ekaterina Maximova, Vladimir Vasiliev were there; you couldn’t even touch them.”

He was not interested in staying in Moscow and continued to see the world through international competitions, along with his dance partner, Ruxandra Racoviță.

“We won the only contemporary choreography competition in Germany at that time. I won once, I returned to Romania, and Ruxandra told me: ‘Căciu, let’s do another competition, so we can get out again, so the world can see us.’

And we did a Romanian Bolero, the two of us with a third acting character, Dan Mastacan, who had some acting passages, and Raluca Ianegic, who presented a kind of flamenco, a symbol of death, as I was reading a lot of Lorca at the time. That dance piece won first prize a second time. It had never happened before that the same people would win in a competition two years in a row.

Pina Bausch had been the laureate of the same competition a few years earlier. I said that if I won the prize a second time, I would stay there. Dan Mastacan left for Paris immediately and had an extraordinary career in the world of film.

I stayed in Germany because Pina invited me to join her company. She was the director of the Essen School of Arts. She proposed that I work on choreographies with the people she had, her students, some of whom would later become very well known. Susanne Linke was there.

I had the extraordinary chance to work with those people; I created ten pieces with them. And those productions went on tour. Pina combined them with her pieces and my pieces. So I had moments when I wasn’t dancing and I would watch what she was doing, and she did the same.

That’s when I saw what a great dancer Pina was, and every time I went and said: ‘Pina, you are a divine dancer,’ even though she was like an animal, a combination of Salvador Dalí’s dinosaur and a giraffe in flames.

In the meantime, I convinced Ruxandra to return to Germany, and we left with her for Greece. We bought two boat tickets, without having anything to eat.”

The projects in Greece did not materialize, so Ruxandra Racoviță returned to Romania, but Gigi stayed for another 3 months in Greece, on the island of Hydra near Athens, where a Romanian woman they had met owned a house.

“In 40-degree heat, I ate nothing but dry biscotte with orange marmalade for three months, which Mrs. Ralu Manu had in the house, as she was on vacation. I literally exterminated that cupboard of biscotte—some slices of dry bread. And I would spread a little marmalade on it to make it last. Since then, I can’t stand to see biscotte; I can’t…”

He finally managed to get to Paris, a city that continues to captivate him today, after 50 years.

“When I arrived in Paris in June-July, the last thing on my mind was America. I even slept on benches by the Seine many times; it was possible back then, it’s not like now. Dan Mastacan had left to make a film in Germany, and I had nowhere to stay. But I said that I wasn’t leaving here.”

Now he met us in the Montmartre district, near the Sacre Coeur church, where he lives. He is 78 years old, and dance, cats, and poetry are now his main interests. He perfectly remembers the adventure of settling in France, without any source of income, trying to work at a cabaret while having just requested political asylum.

Ruxandra Racoviță joined him in this madness, and the great American ballerina Rosella Hightower, director of the Nancy Theater, gave them a chance: “she told us she had only one position for a dancer, but she would cut it in half, and we would split the salary. That’s how we got to Nancy, where later, she gave me the direction of the ballet there. Dan Mastacan was my assistant. And Ruxandra was a star dancer.

I stayed there for 5 years. From that company of 30 people, I selected 10 with whom I worked at night, and we then went on tour through France. Unpaid, that’s what we wanted. That’s how the French Ministry of Culture got to know us. And, at one point, I said, ‘God, I really want to do only this; I’m not interested in doing those ballets anymore, which, in fact, I didn’t even know how to do.’

The Ministry of Culture offered me Rennes or Montpellier. I wanted Rennes because it’s closer to Paris. I always gravitate towards Paris. I love Paris, no matter what it’s like. I got to Rennes and stayed there for 15 years. That’s where I founded the first National Center for Contemporary Dance.”

Through the actor Dan Mastacan, who had become the assistant to the famous designer and cultural figure Pierre Cardin, Gigi Căciuleanu received a proposal from Cardin to go on a world tour.

“I was on tour with a show in London, and Pierre Cardin came into the theater and saw me. He said he wanted me. I came by bus and showed Pierre Cardin what we were working on clandestinely at night in Nancy, and he said: ‘I’ll take you with this show.’ And that’s how he gave us tours all over the world: Japan, China, the United States, and a lot in South America.”

Pierre Cardin also connected him with one of the greatest Soviet ballerinas in history, Maya Plisetskaya, whom the young Gigi had only secretly watched at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

“Pierre Cardin calls me and says: ‘Don’t you want to meet Maya Plisetskaya? I’d like to introduce you to her and have her see you dance.’ And I said, ‘Of course, I’ll take the train immediately.’ I go, I arrive at the theater in Paris, and I dance to Ray Charles’s music. Maya likes it very much; she even wrote in her diary ‘I met a brilliant Romanian.’ She says: ‘Don’t you want to teach me some movements?’ I say: ‘Madam, these movements are not learned in three seconds behind a door.’

Years passed since then, and Pierre Cardin called me again: ‘I absolutely want to make a gift show for Maya, and I thought of you.’ Among the proposed titles, I chose The Madwoman of Chaillot; it seemed to fit my personality and hers the most. We were going to put on the show at his theater, Espace Cardin, in the heart of Paris; for me, it was a huge deal. And I said, ‘But how?’ And he said: ‘Maya will come to Rennes, and you will work there.’ And Maya came.

I was late at the station. Rennes is towards the ocean, 80 km from the ocean, so there were many seagulls.

I arrive at the station, the platforms were empty, like in the paintings of Delvaux (n.r. Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux), who drew stations with traffic lights, where there are some naked ladies.

‘Maya, please forgive me, I had rehearsals, let me help you with your luggage.’ She was silent, nothing, she just stood there with her braids in the wind. Then she says: ‘I know how it is. But please show me the movements you have thought of for me.’

And the improvisation starts again, of course. You come huffing and puffing, sweating, because it’s the huge star right there and you’re late? And I start outlining it for her on that platform; I had absolutely nothing prepared, but, anyway, I had Miriam Răducanu’s training. I put on the tape with The Madwoman of Chaillot and danced for her. She didn’t say a word. She let me go through hell on that platform, I stopped at one point because I couldn’t go on, and she says: ‘Yes, I liked it. But I have one single request. Don’t you dare do it any other way than how you did it here.’

Were you able to reproduce it then?

“The hell I was! No, but it didn’t even matter anymore. She didn’t want to see what I had. She wanted to see that my joints would hold up, because otherwise, she could have gotten on the next train and left.

We did the show at the Bolshoi, we did it in Japan. When we arrived at the Bolshoi, it was exactly the day the Russian White House was burning; the government building was on fire, everything was closing on the streets at 9, and Yeltsin gave an extraordinary dispensation so that Maya’s show could be performed at 4.”

In 1993, he founded the Gigi Căciuleanu company in Paris, with Dan Mastacan and Ruxandra Racoviță. At the same time, he returned to Romanian soil as a guest and contributed to the growth of new generations of Romanian dancers.

“Vava Ștefănescu, Răzvan Mazilu, Ștefan Lupu, Arcadie Rusu, Ioana Marchidan, Lari Georgescu – they all were part of my company, and now they are all something.

First and foremost, I taught them that they had to be themselves. That no matter how strict the choreography is, and I work very strictly on choreography, the choreographies are written precisely so that from this writing you can burst out when you want to. But you must have a thought-out foundation. Take a Mozart symphony. Yehudi Menuhin’s genius is not seen because he is interpreting something else, but because he plays it the way he plays it. To be free to be who you are—that is the great art.

To be ‘authentic,’ I was even called ‘Mr. Authentic,’ because I used the word often.

The choreography of the sea is written. There are physical laws. You don’t play with them. But look at the sea; you can stand all day long and you don’t get tired of looking at it. Or the fire in the fireplace. And yet, there are very clear physical laws that direct those things. That would be choreography.

What does Romania mean to you?

I don’t make a distinction between Romania and France. If I stayed in Paris, it’s because it looked a lot like Romania. It seemed to me that I had come home.

But what were the similarities?

There is a certain freedom of thought. There were also our connections with France, Cioran, Ionesco, Enescu. And it seemed like a terribly natural connection, and I spoke French from a very young age.

Romanians are very French, in fact, and the French are very Romanian. There are differences because we had different destinies.”

This article is part of the “France Week” series, an initiative by Cultura la dubă supported by BNP Paribas. So far, within this project, Cultura la dubă has presented the stories of 22 Romanian artists and cultural figures based in France.

The post Gigi Căciuleanu, a life dedicated to dance: “Dance is not just dance. It’s a visceral necessity.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

_{foto: Bogdan Iordache, Cultura la dubă}

We met Mădălina Constantin in the foyer of the La Colline Theater in Paris, one of the 5 national theaters in France. She was greeting the people working in the theater and she led us through the back rooms of the theater as if it was her home.

She is an actress and is playing in the most recent project put together by one of the most appreciated directors in France and the director of the La Colline Theater, Wajdi Mouawad. The show “Racine carrée du verbe ȇtre” has a 6 hour duration and is inspired by the originally Lebanese director, who is known for writing the screenplay for Incendies, directed by Denis Villeneuve.

For Mădălina it has been a challenge and an overcoming of her own limits, but especially fulfillment. 

“Life is in motion, it is important to listen, to see where you feel good, where life blossoms in you.

When I’m up here, on stage, I feel it blossoming and that I am where I belong.”

Born in Câmpina, a town of 28.000 inhabitants, she has always been attracted to acting and only now, at a mature age, has she understood why.

“I have wanted to do this as a child. I would watch many old films, with divas, I wanted to be like those characters, I found them much more interesting than the women I knew. It all started with this fascination.

”And I was stunned that my parents knew actors from the television.

It is obvious now that it was a vital need of expression for me.

I was a pretty introverted child, perhaps even slightly shy, I carried something of a burden, a sadness, I notice it now when I see photos of myself as a child.

I think that acting has helped me , because it is easier for me to express myself when I’m on stage or working on a part.” 

At 17 she left to Bucharest, despite her parents’ opposition, and went with the flow.

“My parents thought that I could follow any profession I wanted. My desire was to study acting, and my father didn’t agree. In the 11th grade, I moved to Bucharest to go to the theater, to the cinema. Those days, Câmpina had only one cinema and now even that one is closed. There wasn’t a theater.”

She was admitted to UNATC, in Ion Cojar’s class, and in her fourth year she made her stage debut in Cătălina Buzoianu show, “2001 Odyssey”, at the Bulandra Theater. She was cast again by the great Romanian director in “Lolita” at the Small Theater. 

Two years after graduating, Mădălina was accepted to a one year stage at the Paris Conservatory, taking one of the 5 spots for 2000 candidates. 

“When I arrived at the Conservatory, I had a culture shock. It is very different from UNATC. 20 years ago, Romania was even further away from France than she is now. It was very hard to adapt, but I learned a lot and managed to keep up with them.”

I learned to appreciate Romanian education even more after that.

At first I felt from a different picture, a foreigner. I kept some of that, I don’t know if it’s because I wanted to or that I could not have done it differently.”

In Paris she has worked with many young directors, and a certain meeting would leave a mark on her career – with the Romanian playwright and director, Alexandra Badea.

“Alexandra’s freedom inspired me. She is someone I admire greatly. It was love at first sight with her, we were compatible in many aspects, we were unseparated for a few years, we made a theater company together, and I acted in her first shows.”

Her role in Solitude, the short film written by Alexandra Badea, has brought Mădălina an award for acting in the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival.

She then started having more important collaborations, acting in Fanny Ardant’s first feature film, Cendres et Sang. Although she was initially more drawn toward cinema, she started to love the theater just as much. An important role in this sense was played by the Russian director Anatoly Vasiliev.

“I have seen this man do miracles. I met him while working with one of his students, then I went to Rome for a month and worked on Chekhov plays with him. To work with a Russian director on Chekhov is amazing.”

I saw actors decomposing and recomposing themselves in front of me. Then I understood a lot about acting and identified with working with him.”

She played in the Avignon Theater Festival and in one of Arnaud Despleshin’s films, Deception, with Léa Seydoux. But she doesn’t think that she has reached a peak in her career, she is reaching for more.

“I have never seen the limits of this profession. I never set a certain goal, to be an actress at Bulandra or anywhere else. I just believed that I have to do my job at the highest level. I’m still on my way, I don’t feel that I’ve reached a peak, I’m still evolving.”

I try to go through life without consciously and rationally deciding what I want and what I will do. I believe that we are connected to things on another level, not just rationally.

My life would have been different if I had stayed in Romania. My life here would have been different if I had met other people.”

Settled in Paris for 20 years, Mădălina Constantin has done more acting on the stages and film sets of France than Romania, not because she wanted it this way, but because that is how it turned out. She would love to have more work in her home country, but many times, she is dealing with labels that limit her activity.

“Today I like saying that I’m a Romanian, I’m not French. My husband says “You’re French, that is what it says on your id card.” I say “no, I’m Romanian.” Maybe I like playing with this. But there is a painful part about it, when I go to Romania, many people I know call me French. Or if I go to an audition, they say “oh, you’re too French.” Still, I don’t have an accent in Romanian, my soul is Romanian.” 

She became a French citizen, but she visits Romania as often as possible. In Bucharest she meets her colleagues, and in her hometown she takes her daughter, who is 8 years old, to see her grandparents. 

“It is important for me that she speaks Romanian and she is very attached to holydays in Romania, our food, our culture, but, I have to admit that here she has other opportunities, she hears things, we see museums, she is much more stimulated intellectual and artistically because we are living here. Even the street itself is so diverse in Paris.”

Ever since she has become a mother, Mădălina’s perspective on life has completely changed. And her struggle for her career has been harder.

“I hit a dimension of life that I didn’t have before. To be a mother is something completely special, for which you are, actually, never prepared and you can’t imagine it before it happens.”

When I was pregnant I almost didn’t get any work, there were physically demanding projects, and when they found out that I was pregnant, They didn’t cast me.

Then, her first year, I took my daughter with me everywhere, on the set, with her nanny. For four years, I have dedicated myself to her.

Then I started to make order in my thoughts and say “now I am 100% an actress and I am fully here”, when I am with my daughter I am 100% mother. A harder thing is to be divided at home, between being a woman, a wife and a mother, it’s been hard for me to separate things.”

She is married to the French actor and director Frédéric Fisbach, but she didn’t get a citizenship for her marriage, she only got it later, for professional reasons.

“I was proud to get my citizenship based on my work, not the fact that I was married. The file was based on my career here.”

When she is not with her child or working on a part, Mădălina commits to her writing and she dreams of the day when her screenplays will become film projects. SHe is especially dedicated to psychology and the woman’s condition in society. She is inspired by Paris life and she enjoys it every time she can.

“I love taking walks in Paris, observing people or just sitting at a terrace and observing behaviors, imagining what is beyond them. Everything about human nature interests me, it is fascinating.

Here I learned to wash away my preconceptions, I try not to judge, I think that judging is the first thing that can block your mind. I believe that it is a part of our work as actors, to try to understand human nature as much as possible and see where a reaction or decision can start.

Acting is a life profession, you can’t separate it.”

• Do your thoughts come in Romanian or in French?
• In my mind, the things concerning the soul are expressed in Romanian and everything else in French.

• Do you ever miss Romania?
• All the time.
• What do you miss?
• I miss specific things that you cannot find here, no matter what. In the air that you breathe, the humour. There are things that are funny only to us. That is what I miss. I feel Romanian. I’m a Romanian in Paris.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Mădălina Constantin, actress: “In Paris I learned to wash away all preconceptions.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

RO Version

Ami Barak is an important figure in the world of contemporary art. Few know that he is, originally, from Romania.

For 6 years He was in charge of the department dedicated to the Art of the City of Paris and coordinated the first editions of Parisian White Nights.

He is a contemporary art curator and an ex college professor, in a permanent search to discover new talented artists, the one who binds ideas and artistic concepts in the form of an exhibit. 

He was born in Bistrița Năsăud, was raised in Baia Mare and studied Art History in Bucharest. In 1974 he was leaving from under the Ceaușescu regime and starting a new life.

“My leaving happened miraculously. Nobody thought that it would happen so quickly. In those days, when you submitted a request to go abroad, it took years. And most didn’t even get to leave. I left after 3 weeks. Only after it happened did I find out how it was possible.

Ceaușescu was waiting for Nixon’s visit that year and an American Democrat senator wrote an amendment in the Senate, through which The Clause of Favoured Nations, which Ceaușescu wanted, was conditioned by the opening of emigrations.

And Ceaușescu, as a sign of so called good will, opened the gates for three months, a period in which tens of thousands of Romanians migrated.”

He perfectly remembers the day when he submitted the departure documents. It was the 15th of may.

“All my close ones called me suicidal, they said that they’ll send me to factories or the army, that they will harass me and I will miss everything. My mother cried for a week. In fact, I thought they were right, I felt that I was doing something suicidal.”

The approval came exactly one month later, on the 15th of june. The pretext was that I was visiting some relatives in Israel. I had never seen those relatives. They were a sister and a brother of my father, who had left in 1945 with a ship from Constanța, ended up in Cyprus, were locked up in a camp, then another camp in Palestine.”

With a chemist father, from Piatra Neamț, his mother a bank clerk from Târgu Neamț, Ami Barak has been attracted to art even as a child, without any artistically inclined models in the family. Some art albums fell in his hands and he discovered another world apart from the grey, industrial one in which he was living.

“I saw art history as a refuge from a world where everything was fake. Fake was a five year plan.”

He got to Tel Aviv, where he did two years of master’s degree and had his first exhibits. And in 1982 he left for Paris, where we met him today. 

“It was hard, but not very hard, because I came with a scholarship for a doctorate in Sorbona. I had also been accepted into Columbia and Toronto Universities, but they didn’t offer me a scholarship. So I chose the French.

When I came here, I was seen as an Israeli although I wasn’t one, I was Romanian.

In fact, I have the exact profile of a wandering jew even now.

Even if I have Romanian origins and have kept professional connections with Romania, I don’t have Romanian feelings. The same with Israel. In 1998 I felt like a French person for the simple fact that when France had won the World Cup, I was excited and very happy.”

As he studied more and got in direct contact with the world of art, doing an internship at The Museum of Modern Art in Paris, he became more and more interested in contemporary art. 

“For me even leaving Romania was a thing of the here and now, of contemporaneity. One of my desires in art was to be interested in what is happening today and less about what has happened in the past.”

There weren’t any art historians interested about the present back then. It was frowned upon. Actually, this craft of a curator who is interested in the history of the present, this is a new craft. It was born in may 1969.

There was an exhibit in Bern, Switzerland, curated by a strong figure, Harald Szeemann. The exhibit was called When Attitudes become form. It is considered the event that gave birth to this profession.

There was a concept at it’s basis, and the curator was the one who had the ideas and requested artists whose works were an illustration of that concept.

In the world of museums, exhibits were about historical phenomena, for example, the Dutch scene of the 17th century, or artistic figures seen chronologically – the youth years, mature years. The exhibit phenomenon was not seen as a gathering of ideas.”

“The curator is mindful of what the artist is doing, interprets it and understands the work of an artist and others, that together form a tendency, a movement. This is square one. Then he sets up an event, an exhibit, a festival, etc.”

In 1992 he ran for an institutional position and became the director of a contemporary art museum in Montpellier, in the south of France. 

He was there for 9 years and left for Paris when he received the proposal to organise the events celebrating 20 years of the French efforts to buy contemporary art with public funding.

“I organised 14 exhibits in all of France with works from the collection. The event was called Trésor Public and I worked tirelessly for these exhibits.

After that I was scouted by a recruitment office and that is how I ended up in the Paris City Hall and handled every art project in public space, but also the Contemporary Art Municipal Fund. ”

He curated the first edition of Paris White Nights, an event that would open the doors of contemporary art to the public.

“In the first years of my career I had 100 people to an opening and I thought that was amazing.

At first, in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and even ‘90s, contemporary art was something confidential. We were used to there being a few people, a sort of closed circuit, we didn’t expect a lot.”

-How do you explain the world’s interest in contemporary art?

In the early 2000’s there was a generational shift. Children that were taken by their parents to museums have become adults. At the same time, there was a democratisation of art.

It’s a complex answer to this question, I have even made some studies with sociologists.

It’s true that contemporary art has passed from a confidentiality phase to a mass phenomenon. 

My bet at the time with The White Night was that we would have 20.000 visitors in one night, which would have been huge. The Museum of Modern Art in Paris was rounding up about 20.000 visitors to an exhibit in two months at that time. So it was a bad bet, I was certain that I was about to lose a bottle of champagne.

The shock was that on that night, RATP had a million riders during the night rides. At the spot, it was full of people. 

Today, at an opening, first of all, you can’t get in. Then, even the privileged ones queue for two hours. Thousands of people come to an opening. 

At the Tokyo Palace there is a one kilometer queue.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. The Louis Vuitton Foundation, that has mainstream exhibits, had an event with masterpieces from Russian museums, a phenomenal exhibit with over 200 masterpieces one next to the other – Monet, Gaugin, Van Gopgh, Pissaro, etc. At that exhibit, the audience was white. They had over 1 million visitors, I’ve seen it a few times and they were all white. 

Go now to the Warhol – Basquiat exhibit, also made by Louis Vuitton. Most of the visitors come from the outskirts. The audience is mixed. Sure, Basquiat was african-american, but it’s a contemporary art exhibit.

So contemporary art has also changed the social profile of the audience and its openness. That also explains the growing interest on an international level.

Then, the actual event part had a part in it, the fact that there are performances, installations, a sort of involvement of the audience in the art.

There is also the fashion aspect. 

There is a market, before there wasn’t one, contemporary art didn’t have any value on the market.

As of the ‘90s, contemporary art started to have a much higher market value than some classical works. Adi Ghenie is worth more than a Rubens or a Rembrandt. It’s super-interesting.

It’s also cool to be seen at these kind of events. I know people who save for a half of year to buy a Louis Vuitton jacket or a Pharell Williams thing.”

When he speaks about the world of contemporary art, Ami Barak shows a big smile, he is passionate and full of humour. To understand better the phenomenon behind some of the artworks to which the public reaction is “I could have done that”, the curator explains what is considered relevant in art and what the difference is between an artist whose works are sold for tens of millions at auctions and others whose works are exhibited in museums, but don’t sell as well.

“Up until a certain point, there is no connection between artistic value and market value. Museums buy a work based on a series of criteria, and market value doesn’t play any part.

Museums consider to what extent a work is ahead of its time, in a historical context. How does it represent an important contribution to a historical unfolding. It’s important that it is unique, it is special.

The market, because it didn’t exist, was formed by the first collectors who learned from artists and from those gallery owners who went head first in promoting contemporary art. These gallery owners taught the collector, who didn’t know anything.

Then the first generation of contemporary art collectors was formed, who were going to exhibits, fairs and started to know what they wanted.

“After that there came the collectors from the world of finance, fashion and advertising, people with a lot of money. And it’s typical for people with money, to them it’s important what they like, they don’t worry if the market value is equivalent to the artistic value. And the more expensive it is, the more they are prepared to pay more. As with Michael Jordan shoes. ”

I had an incredible experience regarding market value, that totally changed my perspective as to why people pay so much money for something I don’t think is worth so much.

I was in Seoul and I went to an auction with a Coreean colleague. THe auction was not selling works of art, but boulders, rocks. When I say boulders, I’m not exaggerating. There were rocks, of different dimensions, smaller, bigger. THere were some things that I found extremely ordinary. The highlight was a small boulder of about 10 kg, that looked like it was from the street.

• How high do you think the auction went?
• Tens of thousands of euros?
• 3 million dollars. Then I realised that what is being spent on and how much is being spent is a completely different planet.

Then, regarding contemporary art, is it fair to say that an artist can be ranked high at auctions, but not as visible in great museums or galleries?

It’s frequent. But it’s works the other way around. If it’s seen by a museum, at some point it will intersect with the market.”

Even in our times, although contemporary art is a worldwide phenomenon of wide interest, it continues to spawn strong controversy and amazement sometimes. And it is normal that it does, we learn from the vastly experienced curator.

History will give us clear answers and help us understand the present, how we got, for example, from Renaissance art to NFT’s. In 2021, the artist Beeple became the third most expensive artist living, after his work, “Everydays: The first 5000 days”, a digital collage made out of 5000 illustrations, sold at an auction as an NFT for 69 million dollars.

“In 1913, a French artist called Marcel DUchamp, decided that a work of art can be an object that was not made by the artist. The first ready-made object was a chair on which he put a bicycle wheel. So the artist didn’t create the object, he chose it.

Duchamp gave a definition “who is an artist? The one who makes the art. And what is art? It is what the artist makes.” It’s tautology. Why do I mention this?

In 1913, the roads split. The field of definition of art changed. When you speak about Leonardo and Duchamp, you don’t speak about the same artistic field. It’s clear that you can’t be understood.

If a granny says that this is not art, she is right, you can’t even argue with her.”

She knows that art can be one way, we know that it can also be in another way.

In contemporary art we have painting, sculpture, but we also have ready-made, installations, artificial intelligence, multimedia.

And another thing happened when photography was invented. Something that can be multiplied infinitely has no market value. And we come today to the digital world. To give it a market value, the NFT was created. It becomes, then, unique. The non-fungible token is just for you. But a photograph without it being an NFT, can be multiplied infinitely.

And the speculative character raises the market value.”

While contemporary art events all over the world are evolving along with technology, public museums in Romania look like in the 19th century, says Ami Barak, former president of the International Association of Contemporary Art Curators. In the Romanian language, the word curator has not even been included in the dictionaries.

Ami Barak was part of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest’s board for 9 years, but in the last years, he has only worked with the private sector.

This year he is curating several events in Timișoara, European Capital of Culture, an exhibit in Cluj and is closely following the artistic scene in Romania.

“The first museum in Romania that functions on a model of modern art museum is MARe. In Romania, private centres, unconventional spaces, they work very coherently.”

His time is split between work, exhibits and travel, and in Paris he enjoys concerts conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, musical director at the French National Orchestra, regarded by the French as a superstar.

He is the father of two, his daughter following his passion for contemporary art, while his son, film school graduate, has become a butcher.

He lives in the heart of Paris, close to Place de la Bastille, where he met us, at the end of a work day, in which he had met several young artists.

One of them asked him what should he do to be noticed. Ami Barak answered this:

“When I go to an exhibit, I immediately know that this work belongs to this one. How do I know? Because I have seen before and it is a specific thing of the artist, a signature, a style. It’s him and nobody else. That is what I told him: Make it so that when I walk in to an exhibit and see one of your works, I will know iti is yours. It doesn’t mean that you will be rich, but that you will have your place in the history of your time.

Van Gogh only sold one work in his lifetime, he died a poor man and today he holds records. For a work to be valuable, at first it has no value. Picasso said the same thing. The idea of speculation only works this way.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Ami Barak, curator: “Contemporary art has gone from maximum confidentiality to a mass phenomenon.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

RO

Born in Oravița and going to high-school in Bucharest, young Cristinel Șirli was dreaming in the ‘80s of becoming a cinematographer. At the age of 20, a horrifying diagnosis that gave him only a few months to live, would change his destiny.

Today he is one of the most important film sound engineers in France, owning his own studios, at the highest level, in the center of Paris.

“In Romania they gave me a 5 months chance of survival. My uncle, Vasile Șirli, composer, was here, in France, he looked into it and here they gave me around 8% chances of survival with a 9 months treatment that involved full-time hospitalization.

So I came here for treatment, but my visa was only for three months, they didn’t want to extend it and I either went back to Romania and was done for, or stayed here with 8% chances to live.”

He remained in Paris, knowing that he could never return to Romania, where he would die. A long period of recovery followed and for eight years he carried on fighting the illness, but he also started a new life. When he left the hospital, he was committed to learn French and finding an occupation.

„Because of my health issues I couldn’t work as a camera operator, so I thought I’d do something else that I enjoy, also connected to film.”

Being related to Vasile Șirli, a well-known theater and film composer, he ended up studying sound.

„I went through the necessary stages and after 4-5 months I was already working. I worked a lot, mixing many television shows, documentaries.”

He started as an assistant sound engineer and then worked as an engineer at an independent studio until 1998.

„Then I thought that it would be better if I became a freelancer, to be able to work with more independent studios. I worked a lot and in 2000 I realized that I had so many clients, I wanted to start my own firm.

But because I didn’t have the means to build a studio, I rented. Two years later, my old employer went bankrupt, I went to the courthouse to pay off his debt and took over his studios, 4 at the time.”

That’s how he started building what today is one of the most appreciated sound mixing and sound design companies in the world of film.

“There was an old cinema in Paris, Le Grand Pavois, which had gone bankrupt. I bought this cinema and turned 4 projection halls into 4 sound studios for cinema.”

It was successful very fast and I then looked into making a bigger sound mixing studio, I was looking for a place and I found this huge space and I wanted to build my studios here.

I planned everything and found financing. We’re talking about a 10 million euro investment, I have never had that kind of money.

Anyway, in France, even if you have money, you still get a loan. It’s much safer, financially. If you can’t keep your car, you sell it and then you don’t lose all of the money. I know that this mentality is not present in Romania. But western logic is different.

If I have a million euro in my company account and I want to open a studio that costs 1 million euro, I go to the bank and get a one million euro loan. Sure, French interest rates are not that high. But we never make investments in cash because you never know what tomorrow brings.”

So we found Cristinel Șirli working, in one of the most performant sound studios in Paris, in the 15th arrondissement, close to the Eiffel Tower.

At the front desk we were welcomed by his daughter, Eliza, who is working behind the front desk until she finishes her studies. On the walls in the mixing rooms we can see posters of some of the films that had the sound mix done there, at Creative Sound – “Respect” or “Fast and Furious”.

The first thing that the Romanian sound engineer wants to show us is the fascinating hall in which sounds from films are created from scratch. It looks like a storage place for all kinds of objects, but it’s a place filled with crativity and passion.

In order to understand the universe of sound, Cristinel explains the main pillars.

“Ambiental sound is what you hear on the footage – birds, the city, the train. Sound effects are door sounds, electric equipment, water flowing from the tap, etc. And foley refers to these sounds that we remake in the studio. We are in a foley studio and the ones who create these sounds are foley artists.

If a character from a film moves a chair, the foley artist remakes that movement watching the footage. You can’t learn this in school, it’s a thing that is passed on.

Then, if a chicken passes through the frame, they make chicken sounds. They are true artists.

And finally, sound design is everything that doesn’t exist and we create, abstract sound. For example, what does a space ship that doesn’t exist in real life sound like? We imagine and create that sound.

In our studios we cover all of those categories.”

Minding every detail, as a manager, Cristinel is 100% involved so that his studios reach perfection in sound.

“This is a cabinet from the ’30s. An Ikea wardrobe cannot sound the same as this cabinet. The same with wood floors. Here we have a wooden floor that is over 200 years old. It’s really noisy, I bought it from an antique store and it was originally in a hotel.

Here there is a Parisian window, that has a particular sound, unique, the wooden frame sounds some kind of way.”

Many Hollywood films end up in Cristinel șirli’s hands or other engineers using his studios, to be dubbed in French. Among these there is Oscar winning film The King’s Speech.

„It’s a film that touched me because it was also about language. I try to stick to the original version as much as possible, that means 100%. And the voice of the actor cast here, the interjections, everything came out perfect. The French version of The King’s Speech is one of the best French dubbed films.

The dubbing industry here is colossal, bigger than the film industry, because all films must be dubbed. We have thousands of actors and other people working behind the scenes, thousands of jobs.

French actors demand that the dubbing is done here, in the central studio. Some directors demand it too. The most recent, working here right now, is Roman Polanski.

Polanski also did his last film here and told me << Cristinel, you have exceptional studios and trust me, I know what I’m saying.>> Last evening Polanski was here, he’ll be here this evening again.”

He is also a constant collaborator with George Lucas’ studios, and business is prosperous both individually, as well as for the entire company Creative Sound. He currently owns 12 studios and is working as a sound engineer and as a manager for all the studios.

„When they have to send american films to be dubbed in French, the people at George Lucas’ studios reccomend me. I have reached this level being a Romanian, and Romanians don’t have a good reputation when it comes to sound. I am happy and proud of this.”

His evolution is even more impressive as he works with directors from all over the world and is doing sound mixing for many foreign languages.

„Some had doubts, not because they were racists, but because they were not convinced that I understood French words in order to work on the sound. Then, the transition from television into cinema was a bit weird for the French, it’s not a common thing.”

At a recent reunion of French sound engineers, the person who had done the sound mixing for the French film that won the Palme d’Or this year (Anatomy of a Fall – 2023) and someone said that he was the third French sound engineer with a Palme d’Or.

–              What about me?

–              Oh, you did a Romanian film.

–              But it was mixed in France, it’s my film.

–              Yes, but it’s a Romanian film.”

He did the sound for the film that brought the Palme d’Or to Cristian Mungiu, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days. He is also a supporter of Romanian filmmakers, every time they have asked for his help.

„A lot of people say that you can’t hear Romanian films. Indeed, there are several problems regarding this issue.

First – the cinemas are not calibrated. Sound has to be perfectly calibrated in order to work, and in Romania, there aren’t any specialists who can calibrate sound in cinemas. I saw a film that I had mixed here in a Romanian cinema in a mall, and it wasn’t calibrated. It’s not ok.

Then, historically, Romanians have never had a good sound school. Russians had a good school. Romanians are extraordinary when it comes to cinematography, with the lighting and visual aesthetics, but the sound has always been a problem. In Ceaușescu’s time it was the same.

And, not least, there aren’t any studios. If we sum all these up, you get bad sound in films.”

Despite all of the above, Cristinel Șirli continued working on Romanian films, from the desire to give back to people he admired as a child and encourage the new wave of filmmakers.

He has worked on some of the most relevant Romanian films in the past 20 years, such as California Dreamin’, 4,3,2, Beyond the Hills, Child’s Pose or Aferim!, awarded in Cannes or Berlinale, but the Romanian label has not always been associated to success in cinema.

„I was working with a director and he came one morning with the Liberation news paper, he put it on the table and the front page read “Romanians are coming to break our parking meters.”

I said:

–              <<Why did you bring this?

–              Aren’t you Romanian?

–              I am, but not like them.>>

That was a joke, nothing serious. Somebody once said to me:

–              <<Are you Romanian?

–              Yes, I am Romanian.

–             And you aren’t tanned, like they are?

–              When I go to the beach, I am tanned, I said laughing.>>

These things don’t get to me, I even make jokes on the matter. I have my pride, I never hide that I am Romanian, I keep my head high, nothing ever bothers me. The French are not racist and I treat jokes as such.”

He has worked with great French directors, but his biggest satisfactions came from working with Romanian filmmakers.

„My greatest joy was working with directors like Mungiu, Netzer, Radu Jude, but most of all with the seniors – Dan Pița, Sergiu Nicolaescu, Stere Gulea, the ones that I admired in high-school. That was really magical. To have behind me, in this studio, Stere Gulea, on The Moromete Family part 2, to me was amazing.

We see a film as a child, we give it so much, we try to make it perfect, so it is hard for me to choose which one was the most important to me. Each experience is special.

Some directors prefer to come in once in a while, they see the advancements, they give notes.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days was special because it doesn’t have any music. Mungiu, when he first wrote to me, he said that he wanted the audience to be glued to their chair of fear, anguish, but that he doesn’t want any music, he doesn’t want any sound design, gust real sound. He wanted the truth in his sound.

When you think about it, no music, no sound design, then how do you show fear, stress? On a horror film, for example, if you remove the music, you don’t have anything. It was very difficult, but when I was in the cinema at the Cannes screening, it was extraordinary. The screening started at 10 in the evening and nobody left the cinema.

Mungiu’s style is that he sits next to you and doesn’t leave the studio at any time. You go out to the toilet, he goes out with you. You come back, he comes back with you.

Puiu, on the contrary, he wasn’t like that. He came towards the end to see.

This year I have worked on Călin Netzer’s latest film, he was in Paris and he would come at the end of the work day, he would see the progress and give notes.

Sound is very tiresome, especially if you don’t do it all the time. And it’s possible that you won’t get the necessary reaction if you are caught in it all day long.”

When he speaks about film and sound, Cristinel Șirli lights up. Although he doesn’t need the money, he continues working, he feeds on his passion as if it were a vital nutrient – “If you take this away, you kill me.”

For him, the day starts early in the morning, continues inside the isolated walls of the high-end Dolby-Atmos studios, and ends at night, when the Sun sets over Paris.

“When I get out of the studio and drive home, I put on classical music, to calm me down. We work a lot and it’s hard. We start at 7 A.M. and finish at 9 in the evening. I try to take care of myself now, but there were times when I would work even more.”

On the list of projects already finished this year, there is Luc Besson’s latest film and the French version of Guy Ritchie’s latest film.

He hopes that his example encourages young people to chose his profession and the new generations lay the foundation for a Romanian school of sound.

“If a young Romanian is passionate, he should work in Romania. Maybe study in the West and come back to help Romanian cinema to have true value when it comes to sound.

When I visit my mother and I see empty villages, everyone gone to Germany, Spain, Italy, it hurts. There used to be good people, and because they didn’t have the means to remain in Romania, they went to do construction work in other countries. Human value is lost.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Cristinel Șirli, the sound engineer in charge of one of the top studios in France: „I didn’t come to France to do sound, it was a matter of life and death.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

RO

20 years ago, the great German conductor Kurt Masur, while he was the musical director of the French National Orchestra, was naming as head of the orchestra a young lady violinist, of only 21 years old.

Sarah Nemțanu thus became the youngest concert master in the history of the National French Orchestra, a position she still occupies today.

100% French on paper, Sarah bears a Romanian name – Nemțanu – and has a Romanian-beating heart especially when she visits Romania.

“The first time I came to Romania and I heard people speaking Romanian, I thought everyone was my cousin. (laughing) It was like all the family was there, that was my feeling. I felt home.”

Her story is not only one of an accomplished musician, who has conquered the world’s greatest stages, but also a testimony of a universal Europe, in which millions of families break, in need, from their homes and grow roots in other places, that adopt them and give them wings.

Vladimir Nemțanu, born in Bucharest into a Jewish family, was a concert master in the George Enescu Philharmonic, and his wife had just graduated from canto at the Conservatory when they decided to flee communist Romania, that was under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship.

They took advantage of The Most Favored Nation Clause, through which Ceaușescu allowed Romanian Jews to emigrate to Israel and The United States of America, and left for Israel themselves.

After a few months spent there, the two young Romanians were getting a chance in France. He got the position of concert master of the Bordeaux National Orchestra and she was hired at the Bordeaux Opera.

“When they got to France, they started a new life. They had nothing, they lived in a hotel for a while, until they rented an apartment. It really was starting from 0.

There were a few Romanians in the Bordeaux orchestra, there already was a cultural connection between Romania and France. And in the ’70’s, a lot of regional orchestras appeared. There were not so many French musicians, so they were completed by Romanian musicians.

Even to this day, the Romanian musicians communities in European orchestras are impressive. But especially in France, because there is this cultural friendship, there have been so many extraordinary Romanian artists who created in France, such as Ionesco, Enescu, Brâncuși.”

“It is the Latin side that binds Romania to France, our atoms intertwine.”

A year and a half after settling in Bordeaux, Sarah was born into the Nemțanu family.

“I’m the oldest of three children and first learned to speak Romanian at home. Then, when I went to school, French became my first language.

But I would say that until about the age of 12, at home I would speak Romanian. Especially when my grandparents were visiting, about a month every year, we would only speak Romanian. Also, my parents’ entourage was formed exclusively of Romanians.”

Although she was fairly young, Sarah vividly recalls her first visit to Romania.

“I went to Romania with my mother and sister when I was six, I have memories, but they are not nice. It was around 1987, my mother already had a French passport, but she was afraid that they wouldn’t let her get back to France, at the airport.

My memory is of my mother crying in panic. She was questioned: why are you married to a Jew? Why are you living in France and not here? I remember all the questions, it was something very violent for me.

Then, I remember it being cold, winter, a lot of snow. The only pleasant memory is riding the sleigh with my grandfather in Bucharest. That was cool!”

She pronounces the word “sleigh” (săniuță) perfectly in Romanian. More so, even though when we started the interview she said that she will be speaking French, because she does not manage speaking Romanian so well, Sarah mostly answers in the language that her parents taught her when she was a child.

As a child, information about Romania was vague, as it would have been for any other child to understand why her parents had to flee their own country.

“I have this memory of being in the car when Ceaușescu was executed, my mother stopped, turned up the volume and stood still. I knew that they had fled Romania because it was not good, but I didn’t understand why.

On the other hand, I was aware that they were happy in France, with a double culture, that they passed on to us, their children.”

Sarah and Deborah, her sister, took on their father’s passion for violin, while their brother became a jurist.

While Sarah leads the National French Orchestra, as a prime violinist, Deborah Nemțanu is, as well, concert master of the National Chamber Orchestra in Paris.

“I implored my father to teach me violin. He was very passionate, he would study a lot, and when we heard him play, we would run to him.

To me, the violin is like a voice. I’m trying to say something through music, through a universal language, without precise words. And people understand what it wants.

I can’t remember wanting to do anything else.

“The most wonderful thing that our father passed on was to be independent, self-critics, knowing on our own whether what we’re doing is right or not, listen to ourselves, without anyone else telling us that we were off-key.”

From 16, Sarah moved by herself in Paris, where she graduated from the Conservatory. And recently she was made a violin teacher at the prestigious school. She enjoys teaching the youth and says that she got this gift and this joy from her father.

She was also a violin teacher for Melanie Laurent, the actress, for the film Le Concert, directed by Radu Mihăileanu.

Sarah Nemțanu is the one playing the music in the film – Tchaikovsky’s concert for violin and orchestra – and had enormous success, along with the film. Le Monde were saying at the time: “Sarah Nemțanu, the true violinist from The Concert”.

“Radu is very precise, he knows exactly what he wants and what I loved was that he made the entire final scene of the film on the timed rhythm of Tchaikovsky’s concert, he first played the music and built the script based on the musicality of the work.

I had never seen that. Usually, in films, they add the music after the shoot.”

As a head of orchestra, she works directly with Christian Măcelaru, the Romanian musical director of the French National Orchestra. He believes her to be one of the finest violinists of the world, who could easily transition to a solo carrier.

But Sarah loves working in an orchestra and can not see herself doing anything else.

“I knew that I wanted to be a concert master. In my mind, I could’t see myself playing alone. My father was a concert master. When I finished school, I loved going to rehearsals when I knew that the orchestra was also there.

My life philosophy is that we all form a chain in which each is a link, we are very different, but only together we can form this chain.

When we will accept that each has his own personality, then everything will be alright. The main priority is the common good, that of the orchestra.

And I love the orchestra, I love the orchestra repertoire, and it shows and my colleagues see it.

I am both head of the orchestra, and part of it, I’m a crossroad that creates connections and this is owed mainly to my education.”

I ask her how many Romanians there are at the moment in the French National Orchestra and she effortlessly answers:

“- Oana, Teodor, Eduard, so 1,2,3,4.

– 3.

– 4, counting me.

– Do you count yourself?

– Of course. (laughs)”

With a Romanian conductor at the helm and a Romanian-born concert master, the French National Orchestra took on an important project, dedicated to the great Romanian composer George Enescu.

The entire work of Enescu will be recorded during the next 10 years at the prestigious record label Deutsche Grammophon.

“In Enescu’s music you can find images from his childhood, birds singing, a violinist playing on the street.

I believe that George Enescu wrote so that he would never forget his memories and did it in the smallest details regarding folklore.

It is, obviously, also classical composing, savant music. But in his music there is always this transparent veil of folklore, which he managed to integrate.

Romania is making all these great efforts to be a European country in all aspects and I believe that the artists are te first that succeed, artists are the first creating connections between countries. Enescu did this perfectly.

In his music there is a lot of freedom, but it is in a special frame, a deeply personal one. This is truly special at Enescu. And that is how I see freedom. We are free on this Earth, but we are also limited on this planet.”

Last year, Sarah Nemțanu opened the International George Enescu Festival, along with the George Enescu Philharmonic, which her father had led, 44 years prior, as a concert master.

And as of this year, Cristian Măcaleru took the helms of the festival as the artistic director. They both wish for a refreshing of the event, but also more attention to young Romanian musicians.

“The Enescu festival is truly impressive. What I find to be a shame is that there is but one such festival in Romania.”

“All the funding goes to one place. I wouldn’t see a single event once every two years and then nothing. And, as we mentioned the youth, if there were larger investments in the system, I would like to see professors from all over Europe teaching in Romania.

Sure, there is the Enescu Contest, but the stakes there are a prize. Who is helping the young artists for the rest of the year, who is teaching them?

At the Enescu Festival I’ve met wonderful young people, volunteers, staff. The youth want to learn, they are fascinated by the European educational system.

Unfortunately, there are many leaving. The best of the youth are leaving Romania.

Here is where I believe that the Enescu Festival with Cristian Măcelaru as an artistic director will bring changes.

It is an enormous hope. It is something I feel.”

Sarah lives in one of the most bohemian neighborhoods in Paris – Montmartre. She walks daily, on her way home, on the wavy streets that were once walked by the great European artists – Monet, Manet, Renoir, Picasso or Van Gogh, and is at home in the vivid atmosphere of the place filled with tourists, right next to the Sacre Coeur Cathedral.

She is the mother of two, a wife and an artist who enjoys live through everything she does. She loves cooking, jogging with her husband and traveling. She lives a typical Parisian life, but equally loves each of her trips to Romania, which she sees as a fundamental part of her identity.

“I’ve went to Romania each of the last 6 years and every time I felt like home. It is something that cannot be explained, can only be felt.

I feel like home, I even took Georges there, my son.

Romania is at a European crossroad, it is a unique country through the fact that it is Latin in the east, and this gives it a special identity and in the same time it is a country of adaptability.

That is why I think many artists leave the country and are very evolved culturally.

And if we were to mention musical particularities, I think that the Romanian style has a certain elegance, something that my father absorbed and passed on.”

Sarah Nemțanu is the result of a family of Romanian migrants in France, in the same way as thousands of children are born in Romanian families overseas, and take on different paths than what their lives would have been, would their parents have stayed in Romania.

Art, in this case, has fundamentally contributed to the conservation of a cultural identity that Romanians carried along in their adoptive countries.

In a world where foul history repeats itself and millions of families are forced to flee from war or dictatorial regimes, Sarah is a believer in the good in everyone, and the power to bring a little light around us, be it through art, or through simple gestures.

“I believe that when you do good and are positive, there is an effect around you. For example, I have some friends that are constantly complaining about Paris taxi drivers, that they’re bad, this and that. I often take a taxi after concerts and I only meet wonderful taxi drivers, really nice.

Once I had a taxi driver that had came to see me at a concert. He was 50 years old and he listened to classical music on the radio, he had just enrolled in music school, to learn an instrument. I invited him to a concert, he came, waited for me at the end and cried.

To me, this is real life. If you do good, keep a positive attitude and don’t let all the negativity in the world influence you, than everything will be better.

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Sarah Nemțanu, outstanding French violinist, born from Romanian parents: “To me, the violin is like a voice. “ appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Albumul, pe care David Bowie și trupa lui planificaseră să îl lanseze în 2001, conține cântece noi și versiuni noi ale unor cântece mai puțin cunoscute din perioada 1964-1971, printre care și single-ul de debut „Liza Jane”. O versiune a albumului a apărut accidental în spațiul public în 2011, după ce un bărbat din Australia a vândut o copie a albumului pe eBay, care a fost ulterior încărcată pe site-uri de distribuire de fișiere, potrivit The Guardian.

„Toy” a fost înregistrat în Manhattan în 2000. Ideea albumului a apărut în 1999, după ce Bowie a interpretat „Can’t Help Thinking About Me” pentru prima dată după 30 de ani, pentru un episod din seria „Storytellers”, produs de VH1. Co-producătorul „Toy”, Mark Plati, spune că David Bowie și membrii trupei sale nu și-au dorit să insiste asupra perfecționării albumului, ci și-au dorit să lucreze rapid și să facă o lansare surpriză.

„Piesele sunt atât de vii și pline de culoare, încât sar din boxe. Este greu de crezut că au fost scrise cu atât de mult timp în urmă.”, spunea David Bowie în 2001, potrivit sursei citate anterior.

Lansarea albumului a fost amânată și, în cele din urmă, împiedicată, a mărturisit artistul în același an.

O versiune de radio a piesei „You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving”, de pe albumul „Toy”, a fost publicată pe 29 septembrie pe pagina oficială de YouTube a lui David Bowie.

Warner Music se va ocupa de relansarea pieselor artistului, ca parte a unui acord de licențiere pentru lucrările produse pe durata întregii cariere.

David Bowie a murit pe 10 ianuarie 2016, la scurt timp după ce a împlinit 69 de ani.

The post Albumul „Toy” al lui David Bowie va fi lansat oficial pe 7 ianuarie 2022 appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Bursa a fost acordată jurnalistei Alexandra Tănăsescu, fondatoarea proiectului, iar premiul în valoare de 2500 de euro, oferit de Conceptual Lab, va ajuta la dezvoltarea platformei online.

” Pentru a scoate cultura din dubă și ea să fie cu adevărat vie, avem nevoie de jurnalism autentic, care să scrie și despre bune, dar și despre rele, nu doar articole laudative. La culturaladuba.ro scriem pentru corectitudine și împotriva imposturii.”

Alexandra Tănăsescu, jurnalist și fondator Culturaladubă.ro

Povestea Culturaladubă.ro

În urmă cu 8 ani, la protestele din Piața Universității din București, un jandarm le-a ordonat colegilor să ia site-ul de cultură și să îl bage la dubă.

De atunci, ideea de cultura la dubă a devenit un simbol al modului în care acest domeniu este tratat în România.

Numele site-ului nostru este o ironie, scopul nostru fiind opusul – să #scoatemculturadinduba prin știri de actualitate, reportaje, interviuri, anchete, articole de opinie.

Culturaladuba.ro a fost lansat pe 28 octombrie 2019 și a crescut cu o rapiditate surprinzătoare chiar și pentru echipa noastră.

În 9 luni de activitate, peste 400.000 de vizitatori unici au ajuns pe culturaladuba.ro, o cifră impresionantă pentru un site care scrie doar despre domeniul culturii.

Culturaladuba.ro este un proiect pornit de Alexandra Tănăsescu, fost jurnalist la Știrile Pro tv timp de 12 ani, alături Andrei Băicuș, web developer și Sorin Tănase, regizor de film.

Fotografii Bogdan Iordache, de la PhotoCube și Adi Bulboacă sunt alături de noi pe teren, la reportajele și interviurile pe care le realizăm.

Printre cei care contribuie cu articole pe site se numără, alături de Alexandra Tănăsescu: Sorin Tănase, Ioana Miron, Ana Cantacuzino, Ramona Păuleanu, jurnalist Pro Tv sau Andreea Brașovean, jurnalist Digi24.

Proiectul a fost susținut prin propriile eforturi financiare ale membrilor echipei și, ulterior, cu donații din partea cititorilor.

Premiul oferit de Conceptual Lab la TIFF este primul sprijin venit din partea unei companii private. Îi așteptăm și pe alții să ni se alăture.

Pentru a supraviețui jurnalismul independent are nevoie de susținere financiară.

Dacă doriți să sprijiniți demersul nostru o puteți face printr-o donație lunară pe Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/culturaladuba sau prin transfer bancar în contul deschis la BCR – RO47 RNCB 0318 0098 3168 0001, titular Tănăsescu Alexandra.

The post Culturaladubă.ro a câștigat Bursa Alex. Leo Șerban la TIFF 2020 appeared first on Cultura la dubă.