Gigi Căciuleanu Or Of Bodies In The Dancing State

Gigi Căciuleanu is a dancer and choreographer wrapped in a legendary aura, about whom dance magazines have written year after year, a formidable company manager who has worked in several cultural systems (Rennes, Paris, Santiago de Chile), possessed by a wonderful creative madness betrayed (as one can betray only in love) for the rigor of a normative system/language or alphabet that belongs only to him and is unmistakable, căciulissim (in the most inspired paraphrase of Vivia Săndulescu). The ODTB is a company in which he started the BDS, i.e. the complicated, fragile dancing state, clear and implacable like the ticking of a machinery that changes your life forever. Gigi Căciuleanu is "Ah! Gigi!" for Maurice Béjart, Germinal Casado, Pina Bausch, Maia Plisetskaya, Jean Guizerix, Pierre Cardin, and so on, the precious few that for the big/small world out there are already past any conjectures. In Romania, Gigi Căciuleanu's career owes more to the video image than to the dancers he's worked with. A career (of the name and the personality) is after all something alive, is based on seduction, contagiousness, as well as transmission and filiation (he invokes on all occasions the importance of Miriam Răducanu, his teacher and partner), presence and distance. A performance at the Opera in Bucharest, immediately after 1989, a powerful comeback in a wonderful TV performance produced by Silvia Ciurescu, preceded by a workshop for the Romanian dancers, several invitations to Theatre and Dance Festivals (Piatra Neamţ, Iaşi, Constanţa) and three groundbreaking shows in the ODTB portfolio (Mozartissimo, Requiem, Cross-breeding), a medal recently awarded by President Ion Iliescu. Beyond any strategic knots, his deep connection with the Romanian world and the world of dance oscillates between love, admiration and (the others') fear. Fear for one's own territory, fear of a confrontation with his enormous choreographic work, consistent on all, big or small, levels, rigorous and coherent, unpredictable and restless, clear and apparently simple like a Markov chain only to blow up all your certainties the very next moment. The internal mechanism of Romanian culture (which is said to have none!?!) is a profoundly conflicting one. A conflict whose force is made up of the sum of the strengths of all its personalities. A conflict in which value, of all things, plays the secondary role. We've tried to demonstrate, with an equal opening to the world of dance, the precariousness of equality… With every new project our company overthrows the rocking chair of "equalities", trying to go beyond the limit between desire and the impossible reality, between certain limitations of the background (political, social, financial, etc.) and the truth. The naked truth about the protean inequality. Could we infer from here that we could be equal to Gigi?But if we wanted to be un/equal to him, would we be equal? It's the same with Europe and America. How could we become equal to the dreamed America by becoming equal, in the best of cases, to some real Americans and French… in our dreams? Dreaming is a passport. Nobody asks you in a dream what's the purpose of your visit to America. You visit it with love, or sometimes with madness in a surreal(ist) dimension. Fortunately, dancing is different from utopia, failure, chaos, exile… from body and equality…It's time everybody found out that dancing is a form of thinking, an intelligent and miraculous presence of the body in the world, an anthropological discipline. It is the manifesto of the BDS, the manifesto of Bodies in the Dancing State, which is the form of existence of the dance and dancer, and the other way around. The dancer is the form and the state of the dance. But what about the company in its entirety? In dance, it could be Japanese, American, French, English, Russian, Romanian, Spanish. In reality, not really. Lucky we have the dream…Gigi Căciuleanu and Jean Guizerix have been working together these days with the dancers of the Oleg Danovski Ballet Theatre. Two giants (literally as well, they both are 1.90 m tall) in a French-Latin/American-Romanian tableau. Not until long ago, just a dream for a Romanian dancer. Probably impossible in France. Possible in Romania, thanks to the BDS and not only…


by Plural magazine