“Unauthorized Movements” and “Under Pressure” premiere at CNDB on June 27–28
History, social norms, technology, the pressure to perform, and the need for self-regulation leave their traces in the body long before they become ideas. On June 27 and 28, the National Center for Dance Bucharest presents the premieres of Unauthorized Movements, by Mihai Mihalcea in collaboration with Mara Bugarin, and Under Pressure, by Ana Costea. Approaching the body from different perspectives, the two works explore how the world shapes movement, perception, and presence.
History Reaches the Body Before It Reaches Books
After more than three decades of artistic practice spanning contemporary dance, performance, and visual arts, Mihai Mihalcea returns to one of the central concerns of his work: the relationship between power and the ways historical eras leave their marks on the body.
Recently presented at the Antistatic International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance in Sofia, Unauthorized Movements begins from the premise that history reaches the body before it reaches books. The performance explores how time, labour, political imagination, and promises about the future continue to shape gestures, reflexes, and ways of being.
Developed from the lecture-performance Unauthorized Movements: from Taylorism to Dance and Digital Surveillance, the work asks a simple yet unsettling question: how can bodies and movement escape the systems through which they are observed, analysed, measured, and optimized? And what dominant logic underlies these processes?
At the heart of the performance lies the encounter between Mihai Mihalcea and Mara Bugarin, who create a performative landscape where fragments of different historical periods overlap like a hallucination. The beginnings of industrialisation, the domestic optimism of the 1950s, and a present increasingly shaped by technologies capable of recognising and interpreting our movements and behaviours coexist within a world populated by advertisements, discourses of efficiency, archival traces, and collective fantasies of progress.
How does a body learn what we now consider natural? How are gestures and behaviours shaped by the ways different eras organised life, labour, and ideas of success? And what might a body do if it no longer wished to be understood and anticipated?
A Woman Moving Through Different Eras
At the centre of this universe stands a woman moving through multiple historical periods and multiple promises about the future. A woman undressing herself from history. Her body becomes a living archive of the forms of power that have written their stories onto it, but also of the futures that have been promised to us.
Mara Bugarin’s fragility, humour, and stage presence transform this body into a terrain where different eras continue to negotiate ideas of discipline, conformity, progress, and freedom.
The Body That Self-Regulates
Presented on the same evening, Under Pressure, Ana Costea’s new work, brings into focus the experience of a person on the autism spectrum and the often invisible effort required to function within environments that do not always recognise their needs, rhythms, and ways of being.
The work explores questions of adaptation, masking, overstimulation, and exhaustion, as well as the strategies through which the body attempts to regain balance. One of these strategies is stimming: the repetitive gestures, movements, sounds, and behaviours through which many autistic people regulate their relationship with the world.
Often misunderstood, viewed with suspicion, or hidden in order to avoid stigma, these forms of self-regulation appear here not as symptoms but as resources. As ways through which the body manages anxiety, sensory overload, social pressure, and the need for safety.
Against the backdrop of a society that glorifies efficiency, performance, and constant availability, Under Pressure questions the everyday imperatives that urge us to keep going regardless of the cost. Between exhaustion and self-regulation, between the pressure to conform and the need to exist at one’s own pace, the performance reflects on vulnerability, rest, and the right not to turn every difficulty into yet another achievement.
Two Perspectives on the Body’s Autonomy
Although they emerge from different contexts, the two works meet around a shared concern: the ways social, economic, and cultural norms shape the body, and the ways the body attempts to preserve its autonomy.
If Unauthorized Movements looks at the body through the lenses of history, labour, and technologies of control, Under Pressure foregrounds neurodivergence and the often invisible cost of adapting to a world built for others.
Unauthorized Movements
text and artistic direction: Mihai Mihalcea
co-creation and performance: Mara Bugarin
sound and video environment: Mihai Mihalcea*
duration: 60 min
performed in English with Romanian surtitles
Under Pressure
a work by/with: Ana Costea
sound design: Lala Misosniky
mastering: Dan Bărbulescu
duration: 42 min
Master: Dan Bărbulescu
Durată: 42 minute
June 27 and 28, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.
Stere Popescu Hall – National Center for Dance Bucharest
The two performances are presented within the framework of Unauthorized Movements, a project initiated and curated by Mihai Mihalcea and produced by Solitude Project Cultural Association, in partnership with the National Center for Dance Bucharest.
Partners: Antistatic International Festival for Contemporary Dance and Performance and Reactor for Creation and Experiment.
Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN).
This project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or for the ways in which its results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.
