Double bill: Wow! You’re a dancer?! Can you show me a split? & ICSPRES IORSELF  

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Wow! You’re a dancer?! Can you show me a split?  

Drawing on the author’s own journey through dance, this performative solo explores the body as a living archive, in which experiences, emotions, and transformations accumulated over the years remain inscribed. The work creates a personal map of a dancer’s becoming, revisiting the moments that have shaped both the body and the performer’s identity.

Combining direct testimony with movement, the piece brings to the forefront often invisible realities of a dancer’s life: injuries, the pressure of auditions, the constant adaptation to the expectations of the industry, the transition from classical ballet to contemporary dance, and the need for rest and recovery. All of these are approached with self-irony and humour. The performance does not seek to dramatize the dancer’s journey, but rather to find humour in the absurd situations, pressures, and contradictions inherent to the profession. Humour thus becomes a way of coping with the pressures and vulnerabilities of a body constantly subjected to the demands of performance.

At the same time, the body’s archive is incomplete, and the dancer’s journey cannot yet be brought to a close. The solo has an open ending, leaving space for the dancing experiences yet to come. The unknown thus becomes not merely the absence of an answer, but a possibility: the body continues to accumulate, transform, and discover new ways of dancing.

Although rooted in an autobiographical experience, the performance reflects on the memory of the body and on the ways in which each dancer’s journey is constructed through visible and invisible traces, preserved in movement.

Concept, creation, choreography, and performance: Sofia Sitaru-Onofrei
Lighting design, lighting operation, and sound design: Dragoș Mărgineanu
Dramaturgy: Cristina Tudor
Musical arrangement for “Arlechiniada”: Daniel Stanciucu
Voice: Iustin Danalache
Text: Sofia Sitaru-Onofrei and inserts written by Iustin Danalache
CNDB Mentor: Mădlina Dan

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ICSPRES IORSELF 

Did she fall         or         was she pushed?

Your T-shirt     on         my chair

Your T-shirt     on         my chair

I’ll be      with you      I’ll be       there

I’ll never      leave you      ever

Your T-shirt      on         my chair

Come here,    little girl.          Come on        —get in    the car

It’s a         brand-new Cadillac.           Bright red.      Come here                little girl

Hey!      Haven’t I             seen you              somewhere before?

Your              despair             in my heart.                                Bright red

Your                   words                 in my ears

I’ll be                with you. I’ll be              there. I’ll never                leave you            .

––– from Bright Red, Laurie Anderson

How can a unique self still express itself in the age of absolute commodification? Or reveal the “naked truth” in the age of pornography? And if the proliferation of media amounts, in fact, to nothing more than its opposite—a single, self-sufficient medium: the selfie, the reel, preferably in English—how can this unique self still express itself? And what self remains to be masked and unmasked when it is always the same mask at play?
Icspress Iorself aims to make the paradoxes of this injunction visible, tracing its history—and, implicitly, its decline—in a rhizomatic, nonlinear discourse. Personal experiences, money, the years, poetry, clothing—the various forms of self-expression take their place at the table and receive their bill in an anti-spectacle that navigates with skill and spontaneity from Valentino to Ozu, Marx, and Rilke.
— Vlad Cristache (Matca Magazine)

Language: English
Duration: 30 min
One-woman show: Daiana Sargan
Costume design: Cireșica Cuciuc
Special thanks to Ivana Müller.
CNDB Mentor: Mihai Mihalcea