Corina Cimpoieru and Paula Dunker participated in the symposium “(in)visibilities – Moderner Tanz Re-Visited”, which took place in Essen and was organized by the Institute for Contemporary Dance of the Folkwang Universität der Künste. The two presented a lecture performance that brought back into the limelight two of the outstanding personalities of Romanian modern dance, Iris Barbura and Trixy Checais.
Abstract:
“Map To The Stars” is a moment of inverted history, a lecture performance in the footsteps of two forgotten legends of Romanian modern dance, Iris Barbura and Trixy Checais. The performance retraces and reimagines parts of their artistic lives, creating a moment of performative lucidity, a “what if”. Putting together dates, places and facts with dreams, hopes and gossip, Corina Cimpoieru (archivist at the National Dance Center in Bucharest) and Paula Dunker (choreographer and performer) not only map the period of modern dance in Romania, but propose, through an imaginative dialog, an alternative reinterpretation of cultural archives in new contemporary contexts.
Who were these splendid Romanian superheroes? And why so little has been said about them? What legacy did they leave us? Were they able to fulfill the projects they dreamed of at the time? And how can we bring their magical dance among us today in the absence of any video recordings?
Iris Barbura (1912-1969) belongs, together with Trixy Checais and Floria Capsali, to the first generation of Romanian modern dancers. She lived and worked internationally, with Bucharest, Berlin and later Ithaca (U.S.A.) as important landmarks in her artistic career. In the 1930’s she took dance classes under Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg and danced with Gret Palucca and Rosalia Chladek. She later returned to Bucharest, where she opened a modern dance studio while creating sets and costumes for various performances at the Freien Volksbühne and Hebbel-Theater in Berlin.
In 1945, he befriended a group of surrealist artists in Berlin, with whom she formed the collective Die Badewanne, named after the show they performed together. In 1951 she emigrated to Ithaca, New York, as a displaced person, where she opened a modern dance studio. Her life came to a tragic end in 1969, when she committed suicide by jumping off the Triphammer Bridge at Ithaca Falls.
Trixy Checais (1914-1990) entered the world of dance relatively late, participating in modern dance classes taught by Floria Capsali and Iris Barbura around the age of 20. Between the two World Wars, he became an important artistic personality in Bucharest, noted for his queer recitals. In a 1943 chronicle: “Trixy loves and loves demonically. He cannot resist anything, he cannot resist!
He consumes himself with a rare, hallucinatory voluptuousness. From a refinement gone to oblivion it falls apart, vaporizes, so that it reaches the tail of a volute to descend and weave itself into an initial stage from which it started and from which it leaves in a cross.”
To create his unmistakable dance style, Trixy Checais drew inspiration from German Expressionism (following in the footsteps of Harald Kreutzberg and Gret Palucca) and the Oriental visual world. Between 1938 and 1952 (when he was sentenced to hard labor by the communist regime and sent to the Danube-Black Sea Canal), he worked at the Bucharest Opera. After his release from prison, he faced severe marginalization. In an interview published in 1984, at the age of 70, Trixy Checais was asked what he would choose if he were to start over. He replied, “I would still be passionate about dancing, although I suffered from it. I think I would also like archaeology.”
Corina Cimpoieru is researcher and coordinator of the Dance Archive at the National Center for Dance in Bucharest. Her interests cover the history of dance and performance in Romania, as well as archival practices and their potential for contemporary projects. In recent years, she has dedicated her time to researching lost or unknown dance archives, both private and institutional, in order to retrace dance paths for the future. Her activities also include curating dance history exhibitions and dance publishing projects.
Paula Dunker promises that their (artistic) work is based on analyzing systems of representation, production and creation. She works mainly with the body. Daughter of Romanian contemporary dance, sister of local political theater, mother of the queer clubbing scene in Bucharest, she is (together with Alex Bălă) the initiator of the techno-faggothique musical genre. Confronting existing patterns, Paula contributes to the construction of possible new worlds and the healing of this world.
