Making of Coreomaniacii

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In November, CNDB is presenting online 9 video productions that accompany each of the performances that resulted from Dance me to the End of… (exercises, distances, proximities) – a program whereby ten guest choreographers worked along with the first generation of students from The CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance.

Jan Burkhardt (DE) and Sigal Zouk (ISR), Mădălina Dan, Simona Deaconescu, Farid Fairuz, Eduard Gabia, Andreea Novac, Manuel Pelmuș, Willy Prager (BG) and Vava Ștefănescu – were invited by CNDB to revisit well-known works of theirs which, in their time, wrote history in Romanian contemporary dance.

The choreographers worked together with the students from The CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance to bring back to stage the older works, but also to propose new ones. After a year of courses and workshops, the formed teams went through an intensive process of practice and live presentation.

The whole process was documented by Bogdana Pascal, video artist and TVR producer. Throughout November, CNDB will broadcast these video productions via live streaming on Facebook.

The nine video productions capture Dance me to the End of… (exercises, distances, proximities) in its essence: the revisitation of recent Romanian contemporary dance history as an exercise in training the new generation of dancers and performers.

Through interviews with artists, rehearsals recordings and excerpts from the original nine shows, the documentaries presented by CNDB invite you to discover the collective and personal efforts behind Dance me to the End of… (exercises, distances, closeness) – the program through which a new generation of artists is making their debut right in the middle of a pandemic.

CHOREOMANIACS – by Simona Deaconescu

“Coreomaniacs” is a performative docufiction, which chronologically follows the events that marked the Dance Epidemic of the summer of 1518, in Strasbourg. Named over time “The Dance of St. Vitus”, “Lasciva Chorea”, “dance mania” or “choreomania”, the documentation of this phenomenon is strongly infused by the ideas of the Christian Church of the late Middle Ages.

The few contemporary researchers who have studied it have classified it as a mass hysteria, and some dance theorists have even called it an early manifestation of choreopolitics.

In the absence of any testimony from a choreomaniac, the appearance of this epidemic – which affected several hundreds of people – remains a speculation transformed into historical truth, in the light of the writings of those who had a voice in the community at the time: clergy, local authorities, theologians, chroniclers.

The performance recontextualizes through contemporary movements the way we choose to look at dance, starting from a series of testimonies of scholars of the time, a mixture of pseudo-science, theology and medieval science fiction. The emphasis is on the way in which the spread of the epidemic was documented, the events being narrated from the perspective of the one who looks at them, never from the perspective of the one who experiences them.

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The facebook event where you can watch this video production is available here.