About you (a version)

Info

The National Center for Dance Bucharest presents the next performance from Dance me to the End of… – a program in which revisiting the recent history of Romanian contemporary dance becomes an exercise and practice in training students from the CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance.

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.

Vava Ștefănescu:
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.

—

Given the legal provisions on safety measures against CO-VID19, regarding the maximum number of participants allowed at a CNDB event, participation at this contemporary dance performance is by invitation only, the selection of guests being reserved for the artistic team.