Alexandra Manole, Anca Turtoi, Dan Iliuță, Daniel Dragomir, Octavia Roman will be the first generation of producers trained through the CNDB Dance and Performance Academy program. In April and May, they are following internships in various institutions – unteatru, Areal, Linotip and TEATRELLI. As an alternative cultural space dedicated to the performing arts, Teatrelli has become an artistic laboratory in dialogue with the public, dedicated to innovative productions and cultural debates. Roxana Lăpădat, artistic director of Teatrelli, is Luana Pleșea’s guest on Dance Diary.
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
On 23 May, at the “Uzina cu Teatru” of the National Theatre in Iasi, the performance “About you (a version)” by Vava Ștefănescu, presented by HazarDance will be shown within the Romanian Creative Week.
The show was created 25 years ago and was a choreographic solo of contemporary dance, accompanied at the time by live electric guitar, which premiered in 1997 at the Atelier Hall of the National Theatre in Bucharest. Subsequently, it has taken various forms: the performers have been multiplied, the performance spaces have been changed, even going as far as an experimental performance in a grocery store and even an attempt at a radio dance performance.
In 2023, Vava Ștefănescu revisits this work, calling it About you (a version) and is working on staging it again with performers Diana Solomon and Cătălin Munteanu. It is therefore a completely new performance, which opens up the following four themes: Child, Street, Home, Love, for the two performers (Diana Solomon and Cătălin Munteanu) and the audience alike, and (perhaps) questions human identity.
As in the original version of the work, the audience will be invited to vote on the order of the scenes before the start of the performance, with the most votes going to the first of the four scenes: Child, Street, House, Love. The fifth scene, The Horse, is always the last and is an improvisation from the energy built up to that point.
The performance of Vava Ștefănescu’s About you (a version), presented by Hazardance during Romanian Creative Week in Iași, will be a unique experience for the audience and will represent a new form of this internationally recognized work from the 90s.
Between 22 and 25 May 2023, Iasi becomes the capital of dance and creativity at Romanian Creative Week. HazarDance proposes to the public a series of 8 contemporary dance performances (7 productions from Romania and one production from Spain), a street dance competition, two Hip-Hop workshops (adults and children).
More information about the schedule of performances in the link here.
Luați de VAL…s is a dance performance performed in the Kerim House and inspired by its architecture and history. In addition to the house in Parfumului 19, the creative process was supported during the summer by working with the waves of the Black Sea during long surf sessions. To be taken by the wave became artistic practice for the two artists who created the show and are at the same time performing it: choreographer ALEXANDRA MIHAELA DANCS and actor VLAD BENESCU, Luana Pleșea’s guests on Dance Diary.
The next performance of the show Luați de VAL…s is scheduled for 19 May, at 7 pm, in the same special space where it was created: HEARTH – Casa Kerim. A production presented at Casa KERIM as part of CNDB Itinerant – a season of performances in other venues in Bucharest and other cities in Romania.
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The pathosphere is the sphere of pathos (of emotion), the environment in which contradiction, contrast, overlapping, deformation, the fabric of paradoxes coexist, seen both from a biological and psychological point of view and in relation to the surrounding reality and the universe. Choreographer Mădălina Dan proposes a sphere of pathos created through movement, dance, sound, text, image, like the city and the water flowing through it. At Dance Diary we enter a fragile and brilliant universe, specific to ecological thinking and off-centre from the human perspective, with choreographer Mădălina Dan and performer Cristian Nanculescu. The premiere of Pathosphere takes place on May 5, at 19:30, at the CNDB.
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
We would like to remind you that Inventory of the Week, a programme of film screenings, starts on May 9 and it marks a last intervention in Sala Omnia before this iconic building enters a stage of complete transformation and becomes the main location of the National Center for Dance in Bucharest. Unfolding throughout a week, a programme of screenings will situate the political and personal, local and planetary implications of modernity within a broader perspective to which the history of Sala Omnia – a socialist building designed in 1967 to host the Romanian Communist Party’s Central Committee meetings – is closely tied. Placing the history of Sala Omnia within a multidimensional and comparative analysis of history, the Inventory of the Week will draw unexpected or underexplored networks of affinities and tensions to assert the interdependencies defining our world.
Screenings schedule
| Tue 9 May Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor – Omnia Communia Deserta (2020, 29 min) Bo Wang – The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned (2022, 27 min)
| Wed 10 May Tekla Aslanishvili – Scenes from Trial and Error (2020, 32 min) Alia Farid – Chibayish (2022, 22 min)
| Thu 11 May Alexandra Pirici – Girl Folding a Handkerchief (2021, 22 mi) Migrant Ecologies – {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves (2021, 28 min)
| Fri 12 May Mădălina Zaharia – Bye Bye Confidence* (2023, 18 min) Emilija Škarnulytė – Burial (2022, 60 min) *commissioned for Inventory of the Week
| Sat 13 May Natasha Tontey – Garden Amidst the Flame (2022, 27 min) Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan – Blue Ground (2020-2021, 12 min)
Appreciated as one of the most daring choreographic works of the early 2000s in Romanian contemporary dance, Outcome was brought back to the stage after 20 years by its author, choreographer Manuel Pelmuș. In 2020 and 2021, Manuel Pelmuș worked with the students of the CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance, assisted by Eduard Gabia – the artist who performed in the original version in 2001. In the new version, the young dancer Filip Stoica takes over the task from Eduard Gabia, who became the coordinator of “Outcome”. The performance can be seen on 23 April at 7pm at Linotip, in Double-bill: Outcome & Reverse Discourse – CNDB productions, respectively LINOTP, presented at LINOTIP as part of CNDB Itinerant.
Outcome started a form of critical reflection towards the means of artistic production and the conventions and context in which they take place. The main merit (if not all of it) for the work is Eduard Gabia’s. We were friends and, one day, I told him about my idea. Edi was very open and pervious, he fully understood the artistic proposal, even if the concept was quite uncommon for him, but for me as well. What followed was a period of rehearsals and discussions, during which the piece evolved naturally, supported also by Edi excellent performance abilities. It was not a working process in the traditional sense, one in which I showed some moves and he tried to do them as well as he could. It was more of a process of accumulation, in which we fed each other ideas and feelings, adding movement details as we went along, and finally everything came together as Outcome. I remember that we talked about the relationship between object and subject, between presence and expression, between body and context.
(ManuelPelmuș, 2020)
Eduard Gabia, performer, choreographer, musician and actor in international film productions, and Filip Stoica, dancer and choreographer, are Luana Pleșea’s guests in the Dance Diary.
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Through Projecto Agit Lab, the work “Wor(l)ds“, by Eliza Trefaș, was presented at the Manuel Alegre Municipal Library. A production of the National Center for Dance Bucharest, the performance is part of “Fictions, my body”, created by Andreea David & Eliza Trefas at the CNDB in 2022.
The sensitivity of the body actualizes worlds, worlds actualize words, through which different realities can appear. States make their presence felt from the inside out, from the outside in, from the past to the present and from elsewhere – here. A fragmented speech, in an attempt to remember a dream, during the dream. A deviation in reality incorporating the invisible. The body between what we perceive and what we don’t, between what we know and what we don’t. The body changes worlds, navigates abstract and banal territories, which also announces its presence through the word. The word facilitates the experience, it appears from a sensitivity activated in the body, from an attention directed by the invisible. A fragmented speech, trying to remember a dream, during the dream. World as a body being read.
The project MODINA (Movement, Digital Intelligence and Interactive Audience) aims to expand the creative possibilities for contemporary dance performances, and augment the experience for the audience, using digital technology – with an emphasis on exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and audience interaction, on-site and online. MODINA is a 3-year Creative Europe cooperation project, co-financed by the European Union.
Within the intersection between contemporary dance and technology, increasing attention is being given to AI (computers as creative partners) and to audience interaction (a shift from passive spectators to active participants). This creates interesting challenges for dance artists and creative technologists: how to integrate computational systems and audience members in a performance as co-creators, in a way that enhances the artistic work?
In the scope of MODINA, we are opening a Call for Artist Residencies for multidisciplinary duos, encompassing competences in dance and in technology (particularly related to computational creativity and audience interaction), for example: a dancer/choreographer and a creative technologist. In the first stage of MODINA, we are organizing 5 residencies of 8 weeks, across 5 performance centers: CNDB (Romania), Kino Siska (Slovenia), STL (Estonia), tanzhaus nrw (Germany), and Trafo (Hungary). These residencies will receive the mentorship from academic partners, from 3 universities: Hochschule Düsseldorf, Tallinn University and University of Lisbon.
What is left when apparently there is nothing left? The 19th century archaeological excavations in Pompeii revealed voids formed by the decomposition of organic matter beneath layers of calcified ash. Once filled with plaster, a series of casts took shape – ‘stone bodies’ trapped as in an eternal sleep. Following the programmatic destruction of Uranus Hill in Bucharest in the 1980s, almost nothing tangible remained, but a few physical fragments. Yet, a vivid community keeps the memory of the erased districts alive. What is the potential of somatic and affective explorations to generate new relations to a traumatic historical past? In three days the grass will grow… oscillates between oblivion and remembering, erasure and recovery. Past spaces, objects and stories are brought into the present. Their reconfiguration generates new experiences that become in turn archival sources. The concept belongs to Ioana Marinescu, visual artist and architect. Performers: Smaranda Găbudeanu, Iulia Mărăcine, Katia Pascariu, Andreea David. In three days the grass will grow… will be presented on 20 and 21 April, at 19.30, at the Contemporary Art Space / SAC – Atelierele Malmaison.
Luana Pleșea spoke to actress Katia Pascariu and to dancer and choreographer Smaranda Găbudeanu.
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
If you’ve already met producers at the beginning of their career, today we present a special “Dance Diary” episode, which has a professional at its center: Andreea Andrei, our wonderful colleague from Production. Andreea Andrei has been producing since she finished her studies, and we don’t know what we’d do without her patience and acuity. Andreea has been working in the Romanian theatre and dance industry for 10 years. She has worked so far in public institutions, at the German State Theatre in Timisoara, and now at the CNDB, but she has also collaborated with independent associations. At the German Theatre she coordinated the European Theatre Festival Eurothalia, the largest project she has ever worked on, where she was in charge of the executive coordination and selection of the festival for 3 years. She is currently a producer at the CNDB where she is in charge of programming events, coordinating residencies, various CNDB projects, organising the contemporary dance season and the IRIDESCENT Festival.
Creator: Luana Pleșea Producer: Gabriela Mitan Host: Andra Petrariu
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
From cultural policies, administrative and teamwork tools to networking sessions, mentoring and internships in relevant organisations. All this to become a professional producer, especially in dance and performance. The Academy’s Dance and Performance Producer Programme courses have reached the halfway point. And today you will meet Alexandra Manole and Anca Turtoi. Who already have experience in the production area. And yet they are now at the National Dance Centre Bucharest as students. What are they missing from their training as producers? What do they want to learn at the Academy? Find out in the new Dance Diary episode.
Creator: Luana Pleșea Producer: Gabriela Mitan Host: Andra Petrariu
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The center is where you dance. The center can be anywhere. Linotip – Independent Choreographic Centre presents a double bill on 31 March: the performances Outcome and Reverse Discourse. Learn more about Linotip’s invitation and especially about Reverse Discourse, a performance by and with Ioana Marchidan, from her meeting with Luana Pleșea. We’ll tell you just that Reverse Discourse is a performance about body politics and vulnerability. And the choice to construct the performance in this form, an empty back in a space that oscillates from dark halo to video projections, implies vulnerability. About Outcome, a CNDB production, we tell the story in a future issue of Dance Diary.
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The CNDB Media Library is a primary source and resource for documentation, research and artistic education in contemporary choreographic history and theory, an open and active space for dialogue of informational and performative diversity, bringing together interdisciplinary discourse practices and events, fluidifying the boundaries between choreographers, dancers and theorists from different creative fields. The CNDB media library includes a collection of books and periodicals and a collection of international dance videos (international productions by choreographers, dancers and dance companies working in the field of contemporary performing arts, video art, dance cinema films, etc.). Corina Cimpoieru, artistic consultant, is in charge of the media library.
Creator: Daria Ghiu Producer: Gabriela Mitan Host: Andra Petrariu
The Academy of Dance and Performance is part of the South-East European Dance Stations (SEEDS) project, coordinated by the National Center for Dance Bucharest and carried out in partnership with the Brain Store Project Foundation (Sofia) and Stanica – Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade) in the period between 2022 and 2025. The SEEDS project is co-financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe program. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The performance “Less might be more but sometimes less is just nothing”, created by Bulgarian choreographer Willy Prager together with the students of the first edition of the CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance, has been invited to Tanzhaus NRW in Dusseldorf, where it will be presented on 17 and 18 March.
The performance is inspired by the disco band Zoom, founded in 1973 in Spain, and explores the relationship between visual art and disco dance culture. Willy Prager, the artist who conceived the show, is interested in processes of transformation in the context of social, political, economic and cultural change and has developed a working method based on procedures of translation and reformulation of pre-existing performance material.
In the context of the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which have reduced communication, interaction and participation, the performance “Less might be more but sometimes less is just nothing” explores whether less is still more or whether it is nothing. At a time when contemporary art followed the modern principle of “less is more”, this performance challenges this thesis and explores the boundary between “less” and “nothing”.
The invitation to Tanzhaus NRW is a recognition of the value and originality of the performance, and of the talent of the students CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance who participated in its creation.
Below is the press release issued by the Quantic Cultural Association announcing the opening of the call for submissions for the online speculative fiction platform, Possible Worlds:
Starting today you can send us literary, visual or sound creations until April 20, 2023!
We’re looking for original creations, unpublished somewhere else, that explore speculative fiction genres through an intersectional lens. We want speculative fiction to be a radical tool for emancipation, reflection, and changing the status quo.
Through visionary fiction we want to construct a space of reclaiming power and self-determination for historically dispossessed people.
Possible Worlds is an online platform for radical speculative fiction.
Lumi Posibile hosts and celebrates a myriad of forms of creative expression: literature, essays, visual art, sound art, and anything else we can imagine.
Lumi Posibile encompasses various genres of speculative fiction: from science fiction, to horror, to fantasy and any other similar existing or future genres.
Our Possible Worlds include people with diverse identities and histories. We see speculative fiction as a tool for marginalized communities to forge a gentler, more revolutionary future, to explore the present and the past through fantasy, and to exorcise social injustices through an imaginary of chaos and the monstrous. We can build the world we want to live in, a world our ancestors have already begun to work on.
Possible Worlds rejects the binary and purity of literary-artistic genres. We encourage and celebrate mixture, hybrid forms, all that is strange, strange and hard to define..
Our Possible worlds are sensitive and curious, emotional and undisciplined, poetic and analytical; they are affected by everything that touches and affects them in turn. Our Possible Worlds are body, idea, sensation and thought in the same breath, which together are always transforming.
Our Possible Worlds are queer, Roma, feminist, anti-capitalist, anti-speciesist, neurodivergent, anti-abolitionist.
We welcome any form of speculative fiction, such as:
Fantasy (fairy tales, mythology, superheroes/heroines, etc.)
Magical realism
Alternative Histories
Any other genre we can imagine
You can send us the following artwork:
Literature (prose, poetry, essays)
Visual arts (video poem, video essay, short film, comic strip)
Sound art (narrative podcast, music mix, song)
Submissions can be sent to along with a description of yourself of about 50 words.
Material published on the website will be remunerated.
Partners: Accept Association, National Dance Centre Bucharest, Intersect Community Centre, ArtHub, Art200 Queer International Film Festival, CUTRA Magazine, Echinox, SUPER Film Festival, AIVImedia.hub, Radio Romania Cultural;
The project “Possible Worlds” is run by Quantic Cultural Association and is a project co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the grantee.
Citofonare PimOff reaches its 9th edition and as every year it launches an international call for contemporary dance projects in phase of creation, that have never debuted, in Italy or abroad, and have never been presented to the public in finished form. It will be possible to send applications from15th March to 30th April 2023.
The winners of Citofonare PimOff are assigned a period of artistic residency up to maximum of 15 days from February to May 2024, which includes: the use of the theatre room and its equipment; accommodation; financial support up to a maximum of € 3,000; technical assistance; organizational, communicative and promotional support. The goal of the residency is not the staging of an accomplished show, but the artistic research. Precisely for this reason, each residency ends with a sharing of the project, a fundamental moment of encounter and exchange between artists and the audience.
Initially designed as an open call addressed to every sector of the performing arts, during its editions, Citofonare PimOff has defined its focus on dance, a sector that in the Italian context is among the most sacrificed. However, there remains a trace of its original form and of the heterogeneous activity of PimOff: these traces reflect in a broad concept of dance, a perspective that considers hybridization between knowledges and arts as an indispensable resource for reporting the complexity of our time.
PimOff is a member of dance card, the network of dance in Lombardia. In collaboration with FondazioneAccademia Teatro alla Scala –Photo Video and New Media course and with Afol Moda – Afol Metropolitana – Costume Designer course for Theatre and Entertainment. Patrocinated by Municipio 5 of Comune di Milano.
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