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

“I felt a strong aggression from the outside, I needed to respond and didn’t know how.”

Alexandra Badea’s story has it’s roots in a Romania that forever marked the generations raised under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s didctatorship and their children.

Born in Bucharest in 1980, Alexandra’s path seemed to be similar to that of the entire youth of those times.

“In the 90’s there was a tendency to assure a child’s future. There were a few ways: Medicine School, Law School, Economics Academy, Polytechnic.” Her parents insisted that she chose one of those paths.

But their daughter had discovered the fascinating universe of theater and felt the need to express through art feelings that she couldn’t express through mathematics.

“Going to school in the Central School in Bucharest, I would see through the window what was happening in the back yard of the Bulandra Theater – Icoanei Garden. I would watch them unload the sets, actors rehearsing.

At one point I skipped school with a friend and actually went inside the theater, during rehearsals, we made friends with the dressers, who gave us the tour of the theater, went inside the actors’ cabins, the costume workshops and I was fascinated with the theater outside of the hall, the one back stage.”

That was the first contact with the theater for a teenager who had never seen a show.

“The first show that I went to was “Procust’s Bed”, directed by Cătălina Buzoianu. I liked the novel and it was in my graduation exam’s curriculum.

That was a very powerful encounter for me, an aesthetical shock and a show that I ended up seeing at least ten times during two years of high school.

That is how I startet going to many of Cătălina Buzoianu’s shows. At one point, I said something stupid to myself: if she can do this, so can I.”

She was always told that she wasn’t talented in writing or any other artistic field and she started to believe it. Directing seemed, nevertheless, a way of bringing together talented people who could express in a show, what she couldn’t otherwise.

“Since tenth grade I felt the need to speak about some things that I felt, like anger, sadness, strong emotions that hurt me. They were a type of response to the aggressive environment in which I was living, both in school and in society.

I thought that I could express through images and words what I felt, to let out all the anger I had inside.

When I said that I wanted to go to journalism, I was discouraged. I could do journalism with anything, but I should graduate from somewhere serious before that. Then I said photography. “What are you going to do at Plastic Arts? you don’t have any talent at drawing.”

This notion of talent kept coming back, that I now reject, I don’t know what talent is.

In France, they don’t talk about talent. I often do workshops with students from theater schools and if I were to mention talent, to say that one is more talented than the other, I think they’d kick me out. The notion does not exist.

They talk about skills, authenticity, singularity and work, not about talent. Theater schools in France are trying to form artists, not just actors that execute something. Artists that express a personality, that have the courage to express a point of view – I think that this should be more stressed in Romanian theater schools.

Us, in the East, tie talent to something very religious, something given, with which you are born. I disagree. If we were to talk about talent, I think it is something you can educate.

I see it as a muscle you keep training through everything that you see, through discussions, films, life experiences.”

As per the deal she made with her father, Alexandra had to get into the Academy of Economic Studies first, in order to get permission to try getting into theater direction, at UNATC. That’s how she got both an economics diploma, and a director’s diploma.

20 years later, Alexandra is today one of the most appreciated emerging theater directors in France, but also Romania. The true way of expression that led her into the French cultural elite was playwriting.

After the two universities graduated in Romania, she mastered in “Theater aesthetics and theory” in Sorbonne and settled, without intention, in Paris.

She directed her first shows on small stages in Paris, with little budget and friends rehearsing without pay.

“I did a show – Family Stories – we played it several times. I didn’t understand the system. It was very hard.

In France there are no ensembles, the director has a company, it applies to state subventions and searches for co-producers in institutionalized theatres, where there are only technicians and administrative staff working. The artistic staff is project-based”

“In France, a director does one show per year, if not one in 2-3 years. 70% of his activity is administrative.”

In total, there have been 10 years of efforts until now, in which she has not made a living out of theater. She did stories for RFI, worked with children in schools, taught theater or earned scholarships.

In the meantime, she was invited by several Romanian theaters to do shows based on plays already written. But she felt that something was missing.

“I felt like an outsider in Romania. In France, people would ask me about my accent.

My wish was to write about what I felt and I couldn’t find a play that expressed what I wanted.”

“And it happened during a visit in Romania, in that strange time between Christmas and New Year’s. It was a highly autobiographical text, a collage of scenes, monologues, lists of instructions.

It was speaking on the impossibility to adapt to a society or the other. The impossibility to assimilate the rules of society, imposed in the family.”

The text became her first play, Mode D’Emploi, (Instructions Manual), that she later sent, by mail, to a famous publishing house in France – Arche Editeur.

Only a year later she heard back.

“They called to say that they wanted to meet me and to ask if I had any other texts. They said that they wanted to publish me.

When I left the meeting, I was doubtful, I thought that they would change their minds, much like many were saying that they would come to see my shows and never showed up.”

In 2009, her first three plays – Mode D’Emploi, Controle d’identité, about the refugees that came in France in 2005, during Nicolas Sarkozy’s time, and Burnout, about working conditions in companies – were published in a single volume by Arche Editeur, made into shows by various directors all over France.

“It was a relief. My life totally changed. Theaters started opening their doors.”

And this was only the beginning. The young woman who was constantly told in school that she didn’t have talent in writing, received in 2013 The Grand Prize for Dramatic Writing, offered by the French Ministry of Culture, for the play Comminution, published at Arche Editeur.

“Nobody expected me winning this award. That includes me. I was in Mexico, I didn’t even attend the awards ceremony. “

Comminution is an X-ray of French society and was the result of a year’s work of research, during which Alexandra interviewed numerous immigrants from a small town on the outskirts of Lyon.

“Research is an essential step. I am interested in the way the wounds of history still have repercussions on today’s generations.

I met the first Algerian workers that settled here, they are living in precarious conditions, working for very little, sacrificing their lives to support those back home.

I met the wives of the workers that came here in the ’70’s, all they did was raise children, and now, at 60 years old, they were taking these language lessons, trying to learn French.”

“I understood globalization and how a decision taken here can affect the lives of people all over the world.”

The play was translated to English, German, Romanian, Portuguese and has become her most performed play.

She then wrote two novels (Zone d’amour prioritaire, 2014; Tu marches au bord du monde, 2020) and film scripts, also directing her first short films.

“I realized that my writing rhythm is faster then the rhythm of doing a show. I feel the best when I’m writing, I feel free, without administrative obstacles.”

Her own uncertain status in a foreign country, the tense relationship with her home country, but also her interest for history’s untold stories, birthed a courageous writer, noticed as a political theater author in France, on themes of corporations, globalization, colonization and surveillance.

And Alexandra Badea’s desire to tell these kind of stories grew even more since 2013, when she became a French citizen.

“It was a naturalization ceremony in which we were told that from then on, we must commit to this country’s history, with it’s glory moments and her shady zones.”

“And that perhaps, at some point, in case of war, you will have to take arms against your own country.”

That was the time she decided to read more about colonization and post-colonization. And through her art, she has brought to light scenes that were less known from France’s history.

Wajdi Mouawad, a well-known director who did George Enescu’s Oedipus opera in 2021, gave her the immense chance to do a show at one of the 5 national theaters in France – The La Colline Theatre in Paris, which he also manages.

And Alexandra Badea chose to stage a trilogy inspired by France’s history. While working on this project, she took many walks through The Père Lachaise Cemetery, right next to The La Colline Theatre.

“The first part is about a massacre of Senegalese soldiers, who came to France in World War 2, and actually liberated some territories. At the end of the war, France owed them their war payment, they were given a part and promised the rest when they returned to their home countries.

When they got back home and asked for their rights, they were shot, it was a massacre. Their numbers and even their names remain unknown, they were buried in a commune grave.

Everyone was astounded, the story had been unknown.”

The second part had it’s premiere at the prestigious Avignon Theater Festival, bringing to light an instance of several Algerians that were thrown into the Senne after asking for their rights, and in the third one she spoke about children of immigrants, brought to repopulate several rural areas of France.

The trilogy has been played even in integral shows and had great success, being played in numerous shows.

We found Alexandra, the high school student who snook into the Bulandra Theater, backstage of one of the most important theaters in France, this time as a French director, with Romanian origins.

A few steps from the theater, in the window of a bookshop, there are some of her awarded books.

But, beyond awards, Alexandra Badea’s shows and plays mean much more than prestige. They are the voice of society’s invisible people.

In Romania she wrote about the Pogrom in Iasi, in the play Perfect Composed, played at The Radu Stanca National Theater in Sibiu.

She is also equally interested in trans-generational psychology, how information is transmitted from one generation to the next and how we manage to let it go. That is what she will address in her future show – Exile – that will have it’s premiere this autumn at the Bucharest National Theater.

“We were taught to survive by not speaking our minds, by adapting, sneaking, sacrificing some things.

I don’t know if it’s a Romanian problem, maybe it’s universal, but in Romania it hurt more.”

I have wanted to write something on this theme for a while now. I want to talk about exile and the relation-ship with Romania, about anger and love, which we all feel, the desire to leave, the desire to come back, the impossibility to adapt here. But also about inheritance – education, obstacles from our families and from school.”

Alexandra Badea is settled in Paris for almost 20 years and, at least for the moment, she can not imagine living somewhere else.

I don’t see myself as an immigrant. It was an experience on which I stopped. But I’m moving, I’m not in one place.”

“I feed off cultural influences, I live in a neighborhood close to Gare de l’Est, there are African barber shops, there is a place called Little Turkey, then there is the Asian area. When I’m in Bucharest, I miss this mixture, especially in the artistic plane.

Paris is one of the few places in the world where you can almost anything being made in the world – in matters of film, theater, art shows – like an independent film from Guatemala or Cameroon.

I feed off this as a human being, not even as an artist. I need this energy. Paris is a source of energy.

She is a Knight of Arts and Letters in France, the country that has opened the doors to a universal culture for her, but she constantly comes back to her home country, with which she is trying to reconcile through theater.

“I want to speak to the Romanian audience as well. It is important, even vital to me.”

“I can’t explain why. I don’t know if I am needed, but I have this need to make something in Romania.

I said to myself that if I told untold stories from France’s history, I have to talk about the untold stories from Romania’s history.”

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

The post Alexandra Badea, writer and director: “I am interested in the way the wounds of history still have repercussions on today’s generations.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Versiune în ROMÂNĂ

“I, for one, did not have access to professional theatre, I had access to world theatre. The circus would come to town and I would be fascinated by the fair, the clowns, by film, by countryside traditions, weddings, christenings, which for me were a kind of performance.

I believe that’s how I fell in love with theatre.”

In the heart of beautiful Bucovina, which he now calls “the centre of his world”, a teenager was discovering the charm of art as a means of spiritual salvation during the communist regime.

He would spend days on end at the cinema and library in Rădăuți and discover that the universe can be completely different from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania.

The books of Sartre, Camus or Proust brought him closer to the French language and culture, but ultimately, the writings of Caragiale and Beckett were the revelations that would change the course his entire life.

“When I first read Beckett, I was astonished by the novelty of how he put the literary text on the page. That is when I realised that play writing is a different kind of literature, not in the form of poetry or prose, but rather in the form of lines. And I absolutely loved it.”

After reading plays, he started yearning to see them on stage. And since there were no theatres in Rădăuți, he got on a train and stopped where he knew he would find what he was looking for.

“When I was in high school, I ran away from home to go to the theatre in Bucharest. Every holiday after that, I would go to the theatre in Bucharest. I would go on my own and stay at one of my classmates’ grandmother.”

Today Matei Vișniec is one of the world’s leading playwrights, and his plays are performed in dozens of countries at the biggest festivals.

Last year the President of France awarded him the title of Knight of the National Order of Merit, and in 2018 the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the title of Knight of Arts and Letters.

He often says that Romania has given him roots, while France has given him wings. And his wings started growing in 1987, when he first set foot in Paris’ Gare de l’Est.  

“My dad came to Bucharest and put me on a train. I didn’t think I would manage to cross the border. I could hardly believe this dream of mine was coming true.

I only had enough money to get to Vienna by train. I was allowed to exchange 100 dollars and bought a ticket to Vienna. There, two former colleagues of mine helped me get to Paris.”

His lucky departure came after an invitation that he received from a European intellectual aid foundation, which also offered him a scholarship of 5,000 francs for a month in the French capital.

He was also lucky enough to receive his visa at a time when Romania was at risk of losing the Most Favoured Nation clause from the US, which is why the communist regime gave many intellectuals the right to leave in order to prove to the Americans that the Romanians were free.

“Once I arrived in Paris, the first place I went to was Radio Free Europe, where the leading figures of the Romanian exile were – Monica Lovinescu, Virgil Ierunca, Paul Goma. A few days later, I applied for political asylum.”

In Paris, he came across a Romanian diaspora made up solely of intellectuals. He was offered a place in a migrant dorm where he had to share a room with 8 other people, and he was a happy man.

“I had a scholarship of 5,000 francs and couldn’t keep the money at the dorm. Virgil Ierunca kept them for me at his place. We would meet once a week and he would give me 100-200 francs.

I had my morning and my evening meals provided, I also a bed, a desk, but we had to leave the hostel at 8:30 in the morning to go looking for work. We were only allowed to come back after 18:30.

I felt great there, I would go out on the Esplanade des Invalides and feel like a king. I would go straight to the library and spend the entire day reading, at lunch time I would go down and grab a sandwich for a couple of francs, and then I would head back to the library.

I had access to books, newspapers, films, music, it was fabulous. I spent all day long there.”

Within a few days, another Romanian introduced him to the daughter of Eugène Ionesco, Marie-France Ionesco, and this is how he came to step inside the Ionesco household.

“When I set foot in Eugen Ionesco’s house, I felt as if I were in a temple. I kept looking at the books, the furniture, the chairs in there.”

Marie-France Ionesco gifted him with invitations to the performances of The Bald Soprano and The Chairs. That was the first time that the young Vișniec saw Ionesco’s plays.  

“I was astounded. It was a kind of bourgeois theatre, but with a text which shone through its lack of conventionality.”

He did not meet the great playwright because he was in Switzerland at the time. Instead, he went to a conference held by Emil Cioran.

“I did meet Cioran, but I did not insist on getting close to him, he was already quite old. And these people had already given me so many extraordinary things that I could not longer ask anything else from them.”

After all, Vișniec had his own way to go. He started with the plays he had already written in Romania, but which he had not dared to bring along for fear that they would be confiscated.

“I asked my dad to send the plays as letters, about 5 pages per letter. They would begin with “Dear Matei” and then continue with my own texts. I received a lot of plays this way, by mail.”

He began translating them into French and some French friends helped proofread them. Then, the first play he wrote in French ended up in the hands of some French actors, thus paving the way to small, independent theatres in Paris. Those were the first to understand, appreciate and stage his plays.

In the meantime, he also received two job offers – one from Radio Free Europe Munich and one from BBC London. And he was curious to see what British theatre was like. In 1988, he set off to the United Kingdom as a journalist, reporting on international news and what was happening in Romania under Ceușescu’s abusive regime. As he did not want to run into problems with the Securitate (Secret police), he published his texts under the pseudonym Andrei Sireteanu

“Ceaușescu had turned into a total madman and the international press was writing a lot about him.”  

He had a 4-year contract with the BBC, but left after less than a year, as he could not find his place as a playwright in England.

“My plays were more avant-garde, more fantastic, more absurd, they were different from the realist theatre that appeals to the English. I was perceived as an alien. So I thought that that was not the best country for me. Within 6 months I realised that my chances were simply not there.

England is a country that has evolved outside of the European avant-garde, it is an island in all possible ways. With an extraordinary theatre, but I felt better in Paris.”

He returned to Paris in October 1989 and started a PhD. In December of the same year, Romania’s communist regime fell, and Matei Vișniec was no longer a political refugee, but a free man.

He received an offer to return to Romania as director of the State Theatre in Constanta. However, he knew that his plays had already found their place in France.

“Something fabulous happened. In 1991, my plays started being performed at the Avignon Theatre Festival. I would have 2-3 plays, 5-6 performances there.”

For thirty years he continued to write plays in French, and poems and novels in Romanian.

“The French language helped me write plays and short prose, because I wrote more shortly, more concisely, with fewer words, but many effects.”

For the past 25 years, many of his writings have seen the light of day at the Contrescarpe Café, where he spends every one of his mornings. Located in an intimate square in a central area of Paris, near his house, the typically Parisian café offers him peace and inspiration. In fact, that is also the place where he arranged for us to meet.

“When I came to Paris, I would often go to the Sorbonne Library and then wander the streets. This is how I stumbled upon this square. I would buy a cup of coffe for 1.50 francs and sit here and read.

As it happened, when my daughter was born 25 years ago I moved to this neighborhood. I feel good here because I also see the ghosts of the writers who were here before.

This is where Hemingway lived, this is where he wrote his first novel. There was also a cabaret in his area that he probably went to quite often. All of the taverns that you see here were probably frequented by Hemingway.

The novel I am about to publish has been written here. It is called A Century of Fog and is about 800 pages long.

Vague Theatre was written here too. Others as well. I don’t get disturbed by the people sitting here, quite the contrary. And when I leave the café at about 12:30, I see the students who come here to grab a sandwich, which reminds me of the times when I was a student myself.”

Hemingway’s home is just a few steps away from the café. A few buildings farther, it is followed by the place where the philosopher René Descartes lived. Vișniec then shows us the house from which the French-Romanian philosopher Benjamin Fondane was picked up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz, the concentration camp where he was gassed to death.

It is an entire universe fraught with history, one which Matei Visniec has left his own mark on as well. In the same neighborhood, he also shows us Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden where he has found inspiration too.

“Let me show you my rats!”

In a pen we see a few kangaroo rats, a rare species that is neither rat nor kangaroo, but looks similar to both. The unique feature of this species is that they are only animals that can survive without drinking water.  

“They are the most bizarre animals, yet they can provide fabulous moments of tenderness between mother and baby. Einstein used to say that if rats weighed 30 kilograms, they could rule the world. Well, look, here are the 30-kilo rats.”

This is how rats started cropping up in Matei Vișniec’s writings – “The King, The Rat and the King’s Fool”, “The Rat King”, but most of all, “The Preventive Disorder”, which examine human value in relation with rat value.

Since 2016, a new theatre founded in Suceava by the local municipality bears the name of Matei Vișniec. The playwright comes to Romania on a regular basis in order to visit his family, participate in the Sibiu Theatre Festival or hold conferences.

Unfortunately, his visits to Romania do not always bring him joy. One of his sorrows is that many libraries throughout the country have been closed or rendered destitute. Even the library in Rădăuți, the one which brought him closer to culture, was recently in the midst of an unfortunate situation in which the local authorities decided to cut down on the budget allocated to this cultural institution.

“It is a shame that the Library of Rădăuți was richer and more accessible to the public during the communist regime. It was located in the city centre, now it is upstairs, so you have to go look for it, because its place on the ground floor was taken by a shop.

Libraries shouldn’t be left in the lurch, but rather reimagined, reorganised, and the librarians should be prepared for a new strategy meant to attract readers.  

In France, for example, there has been a festival called “Let’s read out lout” for 20 years now, and every year, about 20.000 people participate voluntarily. What do they do? They visit schools and other institutions and read out lout, which is a completely different experience from simply telling a child that they should read. A miracle occurs. This is just one example of how you can pull children away from their mobile phones.

Libraries should also become a place to socialise. Not to mention that in France, they are no longer called bibliothèques, but rather mediathèques, because they offer films, music and other activities.

If you educate a child only through images, the mechanisms for concept-making and concept-based reflection disappear. When you read a story, you imagine whatever you want.

If 2 million children watch Snow White, a film produced by Hollywood, 2 million children will have the same picture of Snow White.

If 2 million children read Snow White, there will be 2 million different perspectives on it. That is the difference between letting oneself be indoctrinated by Hollywood as opposed to reading and letting one’s mind wander.”

France continues to be a model of a society that breathes culture as well as a country which is “generous to foreigners”, as the Romanian playwright describes it. Now, for the first time in history, the Avignon Theatre Festival has a foreign director – a Portuguese.

In Romania, not only are no foreign directors invited, but the Romanian ones sometimes remain in office for 20 years, so there is little chance of reconstruction at the moment.

“Here this happens only if a director builds his own theatre, financed with public resources, but they can stay in office for life if they are the ones to have laid the foundations.

By comparison, national theatres change their directors constantly, once every four years or with the possibility of extension for another four years. The way I see it, the great tragedy for Romanian theatre is not that a person remains in office for years on end.

The real drama is that new theatres, independent theatres funded by public money are not being created.

Small halls, with 100 seats, offer the most wonderful opportunities to launch new authors. My plays were only performed in small theatres at first. In a big hall, the investment is bigger. Until they decide to stage something, the directors ask themselves dozens of times if they will be successful or not and schedule your play in 3 years.

Whereas in small theatres there is tremendous mobility. You meet a director today, you give him a piece of writing, he likes it, and two months later he has staged it.

There should be a law to subsidise private artistic initiatives and also a sponsorship law, so that these people can get money from companies.”

Having left his home country 34 years ago, Matei Vișniec is now a French citizen but has also remained a Romanian one. Through his texts, however, he is universal.

He dreams of a EU plan that can save the millions of Romanians working abroad “in humiliating conditions” and provide them with the chance to return home and find work.

In his book “Cabaret of Words”, he speaks remarkably about the meaning of the word return.

“When I go on a journey, I take a single word with me in my suitcase: the word return.  

When I see you leave, I slip a single word into your coat pocket: the word return. (…)

When you return and tell me “I have returned”, it is not you I kiss right away. Before you, I kiss the word return.

When I am asked “But do you sometimes return to see your parents?”, I say “yes, that is the only place where the word return grows” (…)

When I die, I will give my soul in exchange for one single word: the word return.”

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

The post Matei Vișniec, the Romanian knight of French theatre appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

He managed to leave Romania in 1987, going to Paris with a tourist visa, but, while he was there, his play “Horses at the window” was banned by the communist regime in Bucharest, right before the show’s premiere, so the playwright gets political asylum and settles in France.

He is o collaborator of the British radio station BBC from 1988 to 1989, but returns to Paris where he receives a scholarship to write about “Cultural resistance in Eastern Europe under communist regimes”.

30 years later, we met him in Bucharest and asked him how he regarded the country he was forced to leave.

Mr. Vișniec, there are 30 years since the Revolution in 1989, how does Romania look like today, what is the difference between what people wanted Romania to become and what it became?

There are many contrasts and many disappointments 30 years after the fall of communism, but we mustn’t throw everything in the bin of despair, because we’re living in a totally different Romania that the one in which some of us have waisted our youths.

Let us not forget that, still, it is a time of peace in this part of Europe, it’s a democracy that, for better or worse, works, there is a freedom on circulation, of leaving, of coming back, nobody is getting arrested coming out of a restaurant or in his apartment for criticizing the president or the government. I haven’t heard of people getting arrested at 4 a.m. and taken for questioning for criticizing the government. So, let us not forget the truly dark times of Romania’s recent history.

Of course, we can try to sum up our achievements, which are full of contrasts.

Perhaps Romania could have walked faster on the path to prosperity, perhaps Romania, if it have had a political class more attached to the people’s interests than their own interests, it would have had the chance of getting closer to the West, to get closet to those living standards. Perhaps it would have had more opportunities and would have attracted more investors if there were less corruption.

So, there are many of these perhaps and if‘s.

I don’t find it a pretty picture that 3-4 millions of Romanians are working abroad, which means a thinning of the intellect, of the work force and of the living forces of nature.

Politicians today should imagine a plan of attracting the diaspora back home, of creating opportunities, because Romanians have had important experiences in the West, let them come back with that experience to Romania.

So, not all is lost, nu we haven’t been 100% winners either.

In regards to the dreams and illusions of December 1989, of course we could say that there are many disappointments. But even then, people were in an equation of enthusiasm, and, often, those dreams were made out or poor knowledge of economical mechanisms and the way democracy works.

Everyone thought that there was a cause/effect relationship between democracy and prosperity, but there isn’t. Prosperity comes with different rules, other laws than freedom and democracy.

That’s the portrait of Romania, 30 years later.

“The western and French hands have always reached out to Romania. Not always did Romanians know how to grab those hands.”

How is Romania regarded in France, where you live?

Romania continues to gather some sympathy in France and to gain appreciation for what it does and often critiqued for what it doesn’t do, it’s an objective view. Every time there were cases of grave corruption in Romania, the foreign press spoke of it.

In the first 15 years, Romania’s image was a negative one, in the last 10 years it started getting better because Romanians gave themselves some chances. Romania had the presidency of the European Union, there was a France-Romania cultural season, there is currently a sort of emblematic exposition for Romania, in Bruxelles, a Brâncuși exposition, in the Europalia festival.

I would say that the western and French hands have always reached out to Romania. Not always did Romanians know how to grab those hands, the same way as they didn’t know how to use European funds in order to create what I would have called unity through economy, through infrastructure.

Romanian unity through infrastructure would have been a wonderful thing, that didn’t happen.

Romanian unity exists through language, culture, religion, free circulation, but the fact that in all these years there haven’t been built freeways between historical regions, that you can’t drive on a highway form Bucharest to Suceava or to Timișoara – that’s a historical fault of all the politicians that have had some power.

I have travelled to Portugal, Spain, Greece, at a time that these countries were fully European Union funds and construction sites were everywhere. Romanians were left out of those chances and are still divided, because it’s easier for someone in Timișoara to go to Budapest than to go to Bucharest.

That’s an example of grave error in judgement and action.

In the same time, Romania has a great cultural capital, there are many wonderful things happening in Romania regarding festivals, creativity.

“Today, the minister of sports in France is Romanian and there are some who say: Oh, you’re a Romanian like Roxana Mărăcineanu! Now, I often speak to people, artists and they say: oh, the girl who has been taking care of my mother for three years, and is doing a great job, she’s also a Romanian.

Romanians are serving Europe, they clean, they wipe the asses of the elderly, they are working hard… and that is an image of Romania.”

Matei Vișniec

You were speaking about the Brancusi exposition in Europalia. It seems like a form of hypocrisy from the authorities, because they take pride in Brancusi overseas, but in Romania they have done very little to preserve his legacy. One example is “Cumințenia Pământului”, that the state refused to purchase, and now is exposed in Bruxelles.

Let’s not forget, though, that Brancusi made a name for himself abroad, in France, that the French have preserved his workshop next to Georges Pompidou and if he hadn’t left Romania, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has achieved, he hadn’t become the father of modern art.

It pains me as well that some of the artists that have left Romania and represent the image if Romania overseas, aren’t as appreciated back home. There is still this complex that you first must make it abroad in order to be recognized in Romania.

But, in the same time, Brancusi represent an image of Romania.

In the same sense that, I often meet people in other countries, they each say something else: oh, you’re Romanian! Cioran! others say: oh, you’re Romanian, Hagi, other say Năstase or Nadia, other Tristan Tzara.

For each socio-professional category, Romania has got a different image.

The image is full of contrasts. The advantages are peace, democracy, the fact that Romania is part of the European Union is a giant leap, nobody would have imagined that this was possible back in 1989.

In the same time, Romania has been mistreated by the political classes’ personal interests. They are to blame for the fact that time was not made into civilization faster.

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