The Exceptional Value
It's been a long time since, at the Romanian Opera, I have assisted at a première with an allure of great show as it is now Mihaela Atanasiu's Peer Gynt. An authentic première, not the remake of a show put out of the program for a while, not the resumption, either,
Preludes And Carmina Burana
Premiere at the Romanian National Opera While in most theatres of the Capital premieres succeed one another at breathtaking speed, the Bucharest ballet season seemed on the verge of collapse. After a long wait, at the beginning of April the first ballet premiere of the
The Spirit Of The Age
How is it possible that, neither in the century celebrated last year since Vaslav Nijinsky's birth, nor in the four decades commemorated this year, on the 8th of April, since his departure, no personality should have appeared to dispute the legendary ballet dancer and
Trends In Promoting Romanian Choreographic Art
It is the third consecutive year when the town of the Union becomes, for three days, the capital of Romanian Contemporary Ballet. Or even of the entire Romanian ballet, one might say, since there is no other reunion of national choreographic forces yet, either complementary
Daphnis And Chloe
The new season of the National Opera opened this autumn with a ballet made up of four choreographic pieces united under the title of the most elaborate one, Daphnis and Chloe, a production staged by Gelu Barbu, a Romanian choreographer from the Diaspora. Gelu Barbu belongs
A Continent Dreamt By An Island
A talk with Gelu Barbu Each artist who fulfils his destiny up to the zenith of glory becomes the founder of an island nostalgic about the continent. The creator does not represent a boastful, empty oneness but a world within a world. His original formula is achieved thanks
Gelu Barbu At 45 Years From The Debut
The ballet dancer who made his debut on the stage of the Kirov Theatre in Sankt Petersburg, prime ballet dancer at the Opera in Bucharest, then, after 1961, prime ballet dancer at the Norwegian Royal Opera in Oslo, decorated by King Olaf with the Constitution medal, first
Interview With Magdalena Popa
Art critics acclaimed Magdalena Popa: She is one of the most dazzling stars of the century. She was regarded as a goddess of this art. Her small body expressed grace, a sort of ritual noblesse. Born in Bucharest, she graduated from the High School of Choreography and then
Floria Capsali - Musical Vibration Turned Movement
In the summer of 1982, as I was saying an emotional good-bye at Floria Capsali's deathbed, the whole mournful world felt we were witnessing the end of a living legend of Romanian dancing. Indeed, for over half a century (she was born in 1900 in the town of Bitolia,
Argument
A first attempt at collecting in a book texts on personalities of Romanian dance or who have spent a decisive stage in their formation within the framework and in the atmosphere of a Romanian school is bound to be controversial. Although partial and subjective, the present
The Dialectics Of National Self-Criticism
Some time in the autumn of 1994, Sorin Alexandrescu asked in an interview in 22 magazine why, in the canonical battle between the various radical-democrat and nationalist structures of the opposition (and of the government), more attention is not paid to the real traditions
Music - A Mirror Of Specific Romanian Psychology
It has been justly stated by foreign researchers that the melancholy of the Romanian folk doina, transposed by the brilliant George Enescu into learned creation, in the characteristic and unmistakable lyricism of the people at the curvature of the Carpathians and the mouth