About you (a version)

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CNDB reopens its doors with a performance that the choreographer Vava Ștefănescu dedicates to her parents.

About you is a show made by Vava Ștefănescu 23 years ago – a choreographic solo, accompanied at that time by live electric guitar, which premiered in 1997 at the Atelier Hall of The National Theater of Bucharest. Subsequently, the show took various forms: the performers were multiplied, the spaces in which the performance took place changed, also becoming an experiment performance set in a grocery shop and even an attempt at a radio dance show.

In 2020, the choreographer revisits this work, working on its re-enactment with Diana Solomon and Cătălin Munteanu, students in the program of the CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance.

At that time, in the ’90s, it was a successful show, as it had been invited to many international festivals (Aerowaves – London 1998, Manoever – Leipzig 1999, etc.).

The audience had the opportunity to vote on the order of the scenes before the show began; most votes designated the first scene of the four: The Child, The Street, The House and The Love. The fifth scene, The Horse, was always the last and was an improvisation starting from the energy accumulated up until that moment. For me, this game of random dramaturgy was very important then, there being 24 options in the succession of the scenes.

If then the stake of the whole performance was placed on dramaturgy in all the elements that constituted it, today, the form I found together with Diana Solomon shifts the stake on “what the body can say”. I was looking for a certain radicalization of the work process, of the research exercise, as well as of the general aesthetics of the result – the performance.

Very few elements have remained since then. It is interesting that at a distance of 23 years (I was 27 when I created it, and Diana Solomon is the same age today) certain “archetypal” themes such as The Child, The Street, The House and Love have a first bodily representation in the same family of bodily signs.

In the original work, the choreographic discourse integrated for each scene an installation with several photos made by Cosmin Bumbuț and some from my father. In the current version I tried to keep this element (of photography), but in the same manner of radicalizing the image. Cătălin Munteanu is the witness, almost journalistic, of the body. The instant photographic image has its independent course, it has its voice – like a parallel performance to the three-dimensional one.

It is therefore a completely new performance, which opens the 4 themes: The Child, The Street, The House, The Love of the two performers (Diana Solomon and Cătălin Munteanu) and the audience alike, and (perhaps) questions human identity.

Vava Ștefănescu

As in the original version, the audience will be invited to vote on the order of the scenes before the performance starts.

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The performance was created within the program Dance me to the End of…. in which CNDB invited established artists to revisit their own works or sign new productions, together with the students of the Dance and Performance Academy CNDB and the performance is now presented within the project Distances and proximities.

The legal provisions regarding the safety of spectators, regarding the maximum number of participants allowed during an event at CNDB, together with all the protection measures and regulations imposed in force against the spread of CO-VID19 will be respected throughout the entire event.

Special mentions

”The performance is dedicated to my parents”

Vava Ștefănescu