Author: renate.dinu

Four months after the March 1977 earthquake, Nicolae Ceausescu convenes an urgent meeting in Bucharest. On 4 July, ca. 300 people (engineers, architects, party and local government leaders) are gathered in a room behind the CC and Ceaușescu orders them to stop all consolidation work on the buildings affected by the earthquake. In the capital alone, more than 10,000 buildings were thus left vulnerable to the next big earthquake.

After the success of the theatre show “4 July 1977. The Unknown Earthquake”, performed once – in October 2022 – at the Odeon Theatre, Re: Rise invites you, on July 4, to take part in the July 4, 1977 meeting, right where it took place.

You will have the opportunity to experience the sensations and moments experienced by those responsible for consolidation after the earthquake – the engineers and architects Ceaușescu ordered to stop consolidating. We will then go through the story of Gheorghe Ursu – the hero of seismic risk reduction in Romania and the only voice who sounded the alarm about Ceausescu’s order.

On the 4th of July, we reopen the Omnia Hall for one last time – before it undergoes a major renovation. Exactly 46 years after Ceausescu’s murderous order, we’ll re-enact that moment together.

We were very keen to hold this event in the very place where the meeting of 4 July 1977 took place – the Omnia Hall. The space, however, has been closed and unused for a long time, and this has led to the building deteriorating and potentially dangerous areas forming inside. So, to make this event possible, we need to take some risk reduction measures, such as:

Access to the event will be by prior reservation only
Capacity will be limited to 50 people
We will organise 3 evenings (50 people each), with access starting at 17.00, 18.30 and 20.00 respectively
All participants will be equipped with a safety helmet, which must be worn
Participants will be briefed on safety rules when entering the hall
Each participant must confirm that they have been trained and are aware that there is a certain level of risk involved in attending the event

Cast: Irina Artenii, Andrei Barbu, Denis Imbrescu, Răzvan Mîndruță, Vlad Pânzaru
Video projections: Mara Oglakci
Soundscape: Adrian Piciorea
Set design: Sabina Reuss / Theodor Niculae
Director: Carmen Lidia Vidu
Special guest: Andrei Ursu
Partners: Gheorghe Ursu Foundation, National Dance Centre Bucharest, Reflektor Bucharest

An initiative of Re:Rise – Association for Seismic Risk Reduction.

The National Center for Dance Bucharest announces the Gestures Blooming project – Strengthening the dance ecosystem in Romania, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and the French Institute of Romania. The project aims to strengthen and promote contemporary dance in Romania, providing training and collaboration opportunities for contemporary dance teachers in the country.

In the framework of this project, a camp dedicated to contemporary dance teachers in Romania will be organized from 28 August to 7 September 2023 at Ballet Studio in Marisel/Dealu Mare, Cluj. The camp is aimed at teachers from choreography and vocational art high schools, but also from universities or working in the private sector. The Gestures Blooming Camp offers the opportunity to participate for 10 days in 4 intensive practical workshops, coordinated by guest trainers from Germany and France with international experience in contemporary dance pedagogy, namely, Nadja Raszewski, Sunia Asbach (Germany), Lauriane Madelaine, Pierre Chauvin-Brunet (Ballet du Nord, France).

The workshops will address various aspects of contemporary dance, such as methodology, structuring a class/course, techniques and repertoire transmission. They are connected to current trends in artistic creation and education and offer participants the opportunity to improve their skills and knowledge in the field.

Following their participation in the camp, the selected teachers will receive a certificate of participation, signed by the trainers and organizers – the National Center for Dance Bucharest, Goethe-Institut and French Institute of Romania. The organisers also provide accommodation, meals and transfers between Cluj-Napoca and the camp location for the duration of the event. Participants from cities other than Cluj-Napoca must provide their own transport to and from Cluj-Napoca.

A total of 10 places will be offered and the participation fee is 350 lei. To apply, applicants are kindly requested to fill in the application form available HERE until 20 July; The selection process for participants will be finalised by 28 July 2023 at the latest.

Blooming Gestures Camp – Strengthening the Dance Ecosystem in Romania is an opportunity for contemporary dance teachers in Romania to develop their skills and knowledge in the field, to connect with international experts and to contribute to the strengthening and promotion of contemporary dance in the country.

We are excited to announce that this weekend we will be celebrating the culmination of the journey of the youngest dancers in our program, Performing art school for children!

The youngsters will present a performance on June 11 that will highlight the skills they have developed throughout the program, during which time they have begun to discover the limitless possibilities of expression through movement, and we will witness their creativity and enthusiasm, as well as the remarkable transformations that have taken place in each of them, alongside the skilled teachers who have guided them along the way.

Aimed at children aged 6 to 14, the Performing art school brought new additions in 2023: rhythm classes in each class module and a new course focusing on creation and repertoire, with an emphasis on working on choreographic moments, which will be staged this weekend.

The performance will take place on Sunday, June 11, 2023, at 18:00, at the CNDB “Stere Popescu” hall in B-dul Mărășești 80-82, and access to the event is by invitation only.

The performance marks not only the completion of a training program, but also serves as a testimony to the transformative power of arts education.
Launched by the National Center for Dance Bucharest in March 2018, the Performing art school for children is the first local training and artistic education programme in contemporary dance and performing arts. The Performative school runs throughout the school year and integrates contemporary dance, creation and improvisation classes, as well as other workshops and art education activities for children. More details here.

Teachers: Catrinel Catană, Alexandra Vieru, Eva Danciu, Mariana Gavriciuc, Simona Dabija;

Aerowaves is a hub for dance discovery in Europe with a network of partners in 34 countries. The network is looking for the next Twenty talented emerging choreographers based in Europe.

You can now apply to become a Twenty24 artist with the opportunity to have your work presented at the Spring Forward festival next year in Darmstadt, Wiesbaden and Mainz (Germany), and also by many of our Aerowaves partners around Europe.

Notice that applications close earlier than usual!!

Deadline: Thursday 10 August 2023 at 17:00 CEST.

Sounds interesting?
Find more information and the application form here: https://aerowaves.org/artists/how-to-apply/

For further queries, please, contact us: info@aerowaves.org.

The National Center for Dance Bucharest announces that due to recent legislative changes related to the OG 51/98 concerning the improvement of the non-reimbursable financing system for cultural projects, the process of endorsement of the methodological rules has been delayed.

In addition, all budgetary institutions have had to reduce by 10% the expenditures in Goods and Services, in accordance with the legal provisions of GEO 34/2023, as of 12 May this year.

Under these difficult conditions, the CNDB is unable to organise the Selection of Programmes and Projects originally planned for 2023.

The CNDB team is aware of the negative impact this can have. We remain, however, optimistic and confident that the Programme and Project Selection will be resumed in 2024, once the process of endorsement of the methodological rules is completed and the legislative context is stabilised. The National Center for Dance Bucharest remains committed to supporting the dance community and promoting artistic values in the field. We apologise to all those affected by this decision and thank you for your understanding. For more information and updates on the work of the CNDB, please continue to follow our website.

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.

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)

More information about the Inventory of the Week can be found HERE.

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. 

– Wor(l)ds

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. 

The five 8-week residencies will take place between November 2023 and April 2024 (see the application form available HERE for specific dates).

DEADLINE: May 24
Information about the implementation and running of the project in the original article, available HERE.
For more information: modina.europe@gmail.com