Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky (reactivări)

Info

“We don’t remember, but we rewrite our memories”, says Mihai Mihalcea, returning with detachment to his own work “Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky”, which premiered in 2003.

Created in a context in which in Romanian arts there are appearing more and more works with different aesthetics compared to what one could generally see on the stage, “Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky” is internationally seen as a scenic installation, “an experimental creation that removes itself from dance codes which it refuses to exhibit”.

Introduced as work-in-progress at the Centre National de la Danse – Pantin, the work was premiered at the Hebbel am Uffer theater, within Internationales TanzFest Berlin, in 2003, starring Maria Baroncea, Eduard Gabia and Mircea Ghinea, alongside scenographer Andu Dumitrescu. Following the berlin premiere, Martin Hargreaves, editor at Dance Theatre Journal, wrote in the 19^th issue of the London-based magazine about the festival and considered “Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky” as” an intelligent and well-thought performance, whose minimalistic approach highlighted the complexity of the choreographic and political questions it raised”.

The centerpiece of the new work does not necessarily reside in the original one, but rather in the context that led to its creation. It is an exercise of communicating towards a new generation of artists of historical fragments that resides only in the memory of those who took part in those events. In the current setup, mixed on the present’s unstable canvas, there are texts, sounds, images and actions, memories, personal and collective histories, that are rewritten and reactivated via the performance of CNDB Academy of Dance and Performance students, the characters of the work’s current version. After choreographers Vava Ștefănescu and Eduard Gabia participated in their own works presented at CNDB in 2021, now it is Mihai Mihalcea’s turn to return to a rewriting process, in the version “Stars High in Amnesia’s Sky (reactivations)”.