FIlm @Sala Omnia: About Contemporary Dance in Romania. The ‘80s

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A first chapter of Manuel Pelmuș’s research about contemporary dance in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the movie is a reflection exercise regarding non-institutional choreographic practice, unofficial and mostly undocumented. The relevance of the marginal status and invisibility of dance during that period for today’s status is documented through a series of interviews that follow the continuities, discontinuities and their effects on the present days.

Where did the shows take place, who practiced dance, and how it was reflected in the media from that period are paths that the movie investigates, thus putting into context the choreographics practices from the totalitarian era. The map of spaces, persons and shows from the period, “About Contemporary Dance in Romania. The ‘80s” is a project about memory and body, without going into a traumatic approach and without glorifying or having the intentions to make things right

“I rediscovered “The ‘80s”, recently, when cleaning an old hard drive, together with what I was saying about it, in an interview with Mihaela Michailov for the Culture Supplement, more than 10 years ago. I was inserted in talking about what was done in that period and proposed debates starting from that. “What continuities or discontinuities exist and what do they mean for the current moment in contemporary dance?”, this would be the question that I leave unanswered, noua, at a new show of the movie, thirty years after the revolution in December 1989, in the former extension of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, Sala Omnia, currently managed by the National Dance Center Bucharest.” (Manuel Pelmuș)