I made my debut in 1974. I had graduated from high school the year before and in the summer of '73 Adina Cezar, Nataşa Trăistaru, Anca Mândrescu, Cristian Crăciun and I decided to establish a contemporary dance troupe. As far as I am concerned, the decision to put together such a troupe, to stage a performance of contemporary dance and give up a contract in Austria as well as the passport I had in my pocket has to do with a certain happening. In 73, in March or April, the Alwyn Nikolais company was touring in Bucharest. It was with some difficulty that I managed to get into the Romanian Opera hall and find a seat in the back row. I can still remember that on the spot I experienced but a sort of perplexity. Something fundamental had changed in my way of thinking, in that area of stability made up of the basic images all of us at some point form about art. We all carry inside such more or less flexible contours within which, like in a jewel box, we preserve the values painstakingly sifted out of the bulk of daily experience. Before such a box, like before an ark of laws that we carry along our whole life, we size up the allogeneic gold and meteoritic rocks that pierce our cultural atmosphere in an endless approximation of total, ultimate value. Just like in the biblical parable of the precious stone likened to the Heavenly kingdom, any normal human being, upon meeting with such a "stone", sells out his possessions, takes his fake jewels out of the box, sells them and uses whatever he gets for them to buy the new gem. It all looks simple and commonsensical, but only someone who has learnt the hard way what it feels like to empty completely one's own system of values can begin to understand why the next day I walked aimlessly the streets of Bucharest with Nataşa – who had felt it too – talking and crying like babies. The most painful feeling – for both of us – was that we had been robbed. We both felt like nine years of our lives had been taken away from us. And worse, that in order to be thus wronged, we had been subjected to a grueling labor at the end of which all we did was fill our treasure boxes with sand. Still, the parable requires some rephrasing, at least where I myself am concerned. It would have been so simple and easy for me if it had all come down to a "trade" in values, if I could have swapped my ridiculously classifying fortune for Nikolais' fluorescent flashes and bodies of light. The truth is that Nikolais' show had only the magical power to reveal to me, like in an X-ray, that my artistic structure back then lacked a real articulation. With each day I became more aware that Nikolais' "stone" possessed but this irradiating force. After all he only repeated – at a different technological level – what the French called "danse lumineuse", an invention for a music-hall theatre belonging to the American dancer Lois Fuller. Precisely like his predecessor, Nikolais opted for the beauty of some forms devoid of content instead of some contents devoid of beauty. The final result of that experience was, on the one hand, a total disillusionment with my horizontal landmarks, having as an immediate consequence the loss of any horizons; on the other hand, I was completely swept off my feet, which resulted inevitably in the need to recover the vertical I had lost because of my floating around weightlessly. It is from this starting point that there began to take shape my first show, Consensus, which opened in the autumn of 1974. If this show was a success it was largely due to my encounter with Corneliu Cezar. His mind was a brilliant, thrilling and paradoxical blend of meditations on music, philosophy, religion and poetry. Sometimes he would come to our rehearsals in the Grand Hall of the high school. It was with some reluctance that he came and, undoubtedly, out of sheer amusement at first. Everything changed radically the day he saw the first complete choreography of the show. It was Albinoni's Adagio, a sketch of Eleatic movement, a choreography that in a way abolished movement, announcing the butto technique, which was to appear here only after 89. Our friendship, born on that day, lasted throughout the years of my artistic growth accumulating mutual admiration, endless arguments, jealousies, fits of fury, repeated betrayals and reconciliation. From Cezar, or should I say in the space of the disputes generated around his convictions – challenged or defended by those who came into his house – I learnt more than I did, later, in the lecture halls of the Faculty of Letters or at Duke University. Among those who crossed his threshold or whose homes hosted temporarily our disputes counted Sorin Dumitrescu, Ştefan Niculescu, Radu Stan, Octavian Nemescu, Andrei Pleşu, Daniel Turcea, Justin Marchiş, Anatol Vieru, as well as hosts of monks from various monasteries, in passing through Bucharest, who used to make us mountains of doughnuts in the kitchen boiling with oil and our interminable discussions. In 1974, when my first show opened at the Ţăndărică Theatre, which was managed back then by Margareta Niculescu, not only had the way been paved by the "Nine and a Half Nocturnes" staged by Miriam Răducanu, but also the audience had been rendered faithful and was, besides, of top quality. Before such an audience you are free, you can devise your creation without the fear that they might not be able to grasp your meaning – a fear which, at times, causes you to betray authenticity – and especially without being conditioned by the commercial imperatives which today are beginning to imperceptibly move your hand for you. For me the years 1973-77 were "une saison au paradis", save one year and four months while I was a conscript. Even after 1977, the year that marked a rapid degradation of the artistic atmosphere in Bucharest, I still had some interesting experiences. The people in RAAM still had this positive ambition to bring to the capital the greatest ballet companies in the world. During that period Bucharest could thus see besides Nikolais, who returned for a workshop at the ChoreographyHigh School where I had come back as a teacher, the troupes of Alvin Ailey, Lar Lubovich, the Rambert Company, the Murry Louis Company and many more. The second target of RAAM programs was managing ethno-dance troupes. So that we could see a lot of troupes from India, Africa and Japan. The managerial landscape was rich and, what was most favorable to us, diverse. Most importantly, however, these companies presented their basic repertoire, which is now part of the world's choreographic heritage. In the mid 80's this fountain ran dry. Not until after the revolution was another wave of dance companies to appear in Bucharest, occasioned by the "La danse en voyage" program. The downside of this program, compared with what had happened before, was its homogeneity. For months on end the public in Bucharest watched a kind of French "school", perceivable not so much in terms of technique – mostly lacking – as particularly in terms of some sort of common air in which one could feel the same kind of pollutants, more or less homogenously blended but generally amounting to the same density. From the French experience, as from a "beau marche" perfume, I was left, shortly afterwards, with nothing but the memory of some sequences from Nadj's "Commedia tempio" and Karine Saporta's hyper intelligent conversation. Evidence once again that today, as of old, the best French artists are the foreigners. What kept striking me about my relationship with the choreographers or members of the companies which participated in the "Voyage" was – with the abovementioned exceptions and that of Dominique Bagouet – a certain "simplicity" of conversation and my constant failure every time I tried to slip in some hint along some cultural line. I was involuntarily responsible for quite a few moments of "significant" silence before I finally gave up this game. But there were also moments of disconcerting "sincerity". Here is an anecdote: as I was leaving for Bucharest from Constanţa, where I had just completed some rehearsals with The Tempest for the ballet theatre run by Ana Maria Munteanu, I accepted to offer a ride to a French lady who had just finished work on a project unfolding at the same time. On the way the woman kept deploring the gruesome sight of animals smashed by the traffic. "Mais c'est une horreur! Quelle horreur!" And she kept saying that. What irritated her in reality was that no one came to clear the road right away of the dead cats and dogs. When my patience gave way I explained that there existed indeed such a service, and that she was in fact witnessing the cleaning of the roads, since between the cars driving along and the crows on the road side there developed a real symbiosis, thanks to the singular industriousness of the Romanians. Her "candid" question came like a cold shower: "Mais c'est quoi un symbiose? Comment ça c'écrit?" It wasn't devoid of humor though. Past the bridge at Giurgeni, on both sides of the road, we started spotting the regular locals, mostly poachers, who, arms stretched out the size of a large fish, were signaling that they were selling the day's catch. Some of them – those who were selling not only large fish but smaller ones too – kept moving their arms, showing with the palms of their hands the size of the merchandise. Intrigued, the French woman asked me what those signs meant. I answered dryly that those people were Romanians who wanted to emigrate and who had nothing else to offer to the potential foreign women interested in taking them along but their natural manly "gifts", whose size they were advertising in this manner… "Mais arrête toute de suite alors!" she feigned the intention of opening the door. After the "Voyage" died out I was particularly amazed by the way my former students reacted. On certain occasions, when some project made it necessary for my students to produce a curriculum vitae, I noticed – not without a tinge of bitterness – that all of them claimed to have grown out of the "Voyage" experience. None of their high school teachers was anywhere mentioned, to say nothing of the professors from the University, whose lectures some of the students were still attending. All of us, their former professors, were cast away like sparrows that had hatched cuckoos' eggs. I failed to understand it back then. Now I can see clearly that the crucial part in the growth of a generation is not the incubation period but the breaking of the shell. The first generations of choreographers that we produced at the NUTCA shared the experience of the ducklings who are unfortunate enough to hatch in the absence of mother duck, just as the neighbor's cat is passing by. Today the unnaturalness of meowing ducks can but amuse me… At the time, however, the difference in "language" created a gap, if not actually a rupture, between generations, which kindled a muffled conflict. Teenage iconoclasm and Oedipus-like reactions of all kinds, unassimilated culturally, smoldered during meetings or throughout the various projects that we shared. This rebelliousness gradually slipped into downright boycott. The choreographers' association, which took great efforts to create and for five years had a praiseworthy activity, was slowly emptied of substance until it eventually lost its objectives against the background of almost complete absenteeism. Today, those who boycotted the first association would like to create a second one counting on the participation of precisely those people whom they boycotted. Romanian dialectics seem to have a two-phase movement: the first phase consists – because of the scarcity of forage – in poisoning the neighbor's goat, as this is the only guarantee of success for the second phase, which consists in fattening one's own goat with the poisoned food left from the first one. The only thing that frightens me about this logic is that the third phase could be a remake of the first. Hardworking and diligent people, the Romanians adopted the work style of the ant-hill even when it comes to choreography, pulling in all directions at once, and thus securing progress a slow and unpredictable advance. The motion vector is generated to a larger extent by some forces abandoning traction than by extra force applied to one traction direction. If it is true that yielding is the attribute of intelligence, then it is also true that Romanian choreography is moving in the opposite direction from those who yield… Amid this deadlock which seemed to have become the rule, there happened however a small miracle, which heralded the revival of Romanian choreographic creation: the Oleg Danovski Ballet Theatre. Here production dynamics are hallucinatory, here there take place international festivals and contests, debates on choreography-related topics, international tours organized in collaboration with the most important Western managers, etc., all of which have caused the nerve center of Romanian choreography to move completely to Constanţa. The merit of Ana Maria Munteanu, general director of the Oleg Danovski Ballet Theatre, extends nonetheless beyond strictly choreographic successes. The publishing of Amphion magazine, of some programs turned into real professional sources of choreographic information within the scope of high culture, qualify this structure as a success model for cultural management in Romania. What is however beyond any comprehension is the fact that the artists in this company, most of them first-rate professionals, do not flee to the West, like so many mediocre dancers, but remain faithful to the troupe in which they matured and which grew and matured according to the rules of mutual respect, of a balance of values and of reciprocal and comradely support. If there are any tensions within this troupe, they arise solely from disputes around the choice of projects that might best launch the company along the path towards true value. Seeing this troupe which obstinately insists on staying "here", on serving an audience which cannot begin to grasp the extent of their sacrifice, I cannot help thinking about the words of Henri de Montherlant, uttered by a character in Siegfried: 'Les grands hommes changent de planète, jamais de pays.' Surely some Russophone presidential adviser must have had the same words in mind when he decided that, despite all evidence, the highest distinction ever to have been awarded to artists in the field of choreography should go exclusively to people who changed country…
by Silvia Ciurescu
