Casual Wednesday

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“Casual Wednesday – ideas asserted performatively” returns to the National Center for Dance Bucharest (CNDB). Perhaps the best-known project of the CNDB and the one that attracted a large audience during the years when the institution operated in the building of the National Theatre, “Casual Wednesday” is a format initiated and conceived by artists Eduard Gabia and Maria Baroncea, and presented in collaboration with Paul Dunca/Paula Dunker.

“Casual Wednesday” involves direct experimentation with ideas using performativity, but without the prior elaboration and repetition of content as in a performance. At “Light Wednesdays”, participants come with their laboratory of intimate concerns and approaches which they expose to an audience curious to participate in the performative experimentation of free statements and questions, in a setting free from the expectations, constraints and stress of presenting a finished performance. Each of these exhibitions is a premiere in itself, in a concentrated active, vulnerable, open present.

When the project was launched in 2008, Eduard Gabia declared: “A show that has no past, no future, only a present – a now. By disappearing as it appeared, the show only makes the affirmation of that moment. Affirming something every Wednesday, in time, the affirmations become of a week, of months, of a year – the year of light affirmations.”

Casual Wednesdays – ideas asserted performatively is an open platform where anyone can test, on stage, the ideas they have, provided they sign up in advance. Anyone can participate, regardless of age, profession, education and training. The stage thus becomes a democratic space accessible to all, creating the conditions for encounters and dialogues without boundaries, across disciplines, backgrounds, experience.

Over the years, this laboratory of experimentation has contributed to the coagulation of a spirit that has generated numerous projects and inspired the artistic endeavours of many artists from the fields of contemporary dance, visual arts, theatre and music, but has also attracted to the arts many people in search of forms of free expression.