Acting Out

Dance & performance
+16
The performance will be followed by an artist talk
Part of Iridescent Festival

70 min.

12.11.2025

Wednesday

19:30

CNDB – Stere Popescu hall (Bd. Mărășești 80)

Tickets

Acting Out (Festivalul Iridescent – CNDB)

12 noiembrie 2025 Ora: 19:00

CNDB - Sala Stere Popescu

Info

ACTING OUT is a performance about body, memory, and resistance, inspired by the figure of Esther Magyar-Gonda – dancer, antifascist activist, and architect of modern Romanian dance. Starting from her story – deportation to Transnistria, giving up the stage, transformation through education – the show explores how the body can become both an archive of trauma and a tool for political and pedagogical struggle.

At the center of the performance is actress Katia Pascariu, who intertwines Esther’s biography with her own bodily history: a path marked by symbolic and concrete abuse, pressures of classical theatrical training, but also forms of resistance and rediscovery through alternative pedagogies.

The performance directly confronts the idea of artistic corporeality – not as an aesthetic of control or sublimity, but as a political, affective, and vulnerable terrain. ACTING OUT rejects linear narrative and dominant theatrical conventions: instead, it offers a collage of gestures, silences, live sounds, and video images, in which the audience is invited to reconstruct meaning from discontinuity and absence.

The performance is completed by an artist talk that opens up space for direct dialogue and critical reflection together with the team.

Direction, concept, text: Mihai Lukács
Performance: Katia Pascariu
Live music: Oana Hodade
Set and costumes: Szilárd Miklós / Dénes Miklósi
Tour manager: Ioana Brăilescu

Genre: interdisciplinary performance (theatre, text, live music, video)
Language: Romanian
Producer: Centrul Dialectic

Country: Romania

Partners: Archive of the National Center for Dance Bucharest; Center for Policies, Initiatives and Research Platform; Center for Cultural Projects Arta Azi; Tranzit Foundation Cluj-Napoca; Contemporary Art Space /SAC; Constanța State Theatre; Union of Armenians of Romania; West University of Timișoara; George Enescu National University of Arts.

Funding
AFCN – Session I/2024 (production)
AFCN – Session II/2025 (tour in 11 localities across Romania and the Republic of Moldova: the ACTING OUT NATIONAL project)

Biographies

Katia Pascariu
Theatre and film actress, Katia Pascariu is the winner of the Gopo Award for Best Actress (2022) for her role in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (dir. Radu Jude). The film won the Golden Bear at the 2021 Berlinale, and Pascariu was included in The New York Times list of the best actors of 2021. In 2025, she received the “Boccalino d’Oro” Award for Best Actress at the Locarno Film Festival for her role in Sorella di Clausura. A graduate of UNATC Bucharest, she has extensive experience on the independent stage and in political theatre projects.

Mihai Lukacs
Director, playwright, and researcher, Mihai Lukács is the founder of Centrul Dialectic, an artistic platform dedicated to artistic research and interdisciplinary performance. His work explores the relationship between art and society, corporeality, and memory. Notable projects include Mansdorf (Jewish State Theatre, 2023), Oedip la Timișoara (audio performance, 2021), and Mama (Centrul Dialectic, 2020).
He is also active in academic research and artistic pedagogy, with a focus on the relationship between the body, representation, and political resistance.