Resources
CNDB Publications
Info
Over the years, we have published a series of publications that the National Centre for Dance in Bucharest makes available to the general public in print through the CNDB Media Library.
Title: Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement.
Author: André Lepecki
Translators: Ilinca Toderuț, D. Sargan
Editorial Project Coordinator: Corina Cimpoieru
Book published by Tact Publishing in partnership with CNDB
Publication Year: 2024
Number of Pages: 258
The translation into Romanian language of this exceptional book written by dance theorist André Lepecki is particularly important for the development of dance studies in Romania, a field that has received little attention, providing valuable insights for choreographers, dancers, and researchers in the performing arts. The book offers a significant and radical rethinking of how we conceive dance, arguing for a renewed engagement between dance studies and experimental artistic and philosophical practices.
In the book’s seven chapters, Lepecki develops his argument regarding the ontological connection between dance and movement, analyzing a series of performance works by choreographers and visual artists who transformed the contemporary dance scene in the early 1990s in Europe and the U.S.: : Jérôme Bel (France), Juan Dominguez (Spain), Trisha Brown (USA), La Ribot (Spain), Xavier Le Roy (France-Germany), Vera Mantero (Portugal), and visual and performance artists Bruce Nauman (USA) and William Pope.L (USA). Through their lively and explicit dialogue with the performing arts, visual arts, and critical theory over the past thirty years, this new generation of choreographers challenges our understanding of dance by exhausting the concept of movement. Their works demand to be read as extensions of the radical politics involved in performance art, post-structuralist and critical theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.
Title: Radical Bodies in Contemporary Performances
Author: Mihaela Michailov
Published by: Vellant Publishing in partnership with CNDB
Co-funded by AFCN
Year of publication: 2021
Number of pages: 232
The book aims to identify and explore key moments in the Western history of contemporary theater and dance, examining some of the most relevant and controversial performances from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, with a focus on representations of the body exposed in contexts that radicalize its presence.
Without claiming to be an exhaustive analysis, Radical Bodies in Contemporary Performances is an applied study of points of connection and convergence, of correspondences and ruptures that define approaches often difficult to label and, precisely for that reason, thought-provoking through the questions they generate.
The book is structured into three chapters that trace the transformations of the representation of bodies in THEATER, PERFORMANCE, and DANCE—representations shaped by relevant social and political transformations: from Artaud and Meyerhold, through Grotowski, to Castellucci, Angélica Liddell, and Romanian theater; from Marina Abramović, Orlan, or Gina Pane, to Ana Mendieta, as well as Romanian performance art before and immediately after the 1990s; from Pina Bausch to Sacha Waltz, Maria La Ribot, or Vera Mantero, Jérôme Bel, Xavier le Roy, as well as Romanian contemporary dance.
Title: Dance Me to the End of… (Exercises, Distances, Closeness)
Publisher: National Dance Center Bucharest (CNDB)
Published by CNDB, co-funded by AFCN
Year of publication: 2020
Number of pages: 72
Discover within the pages of this publication a presentation of the entire “Dance me to the End of… (exercises, distances, closeness)” program as well as each individual performance. Furthermore, CNDB invited artists and theorists to publish texts focusing on various aspects of the process of reconstructing and revisiting a performance. We therefore invite you to read the texts by Mihaela Michailov (playwright), Adriana Gheorghe (performer and theorist), Dorota Sosnowska (expert in performance studies from Poland), and Janez Janša (Slovenian artist and director).
The full publication is available here.
Title: Black Hyperbox
Edited by Alina Popa and Florin Flueraș
Published by PUNCH
Editorial project published with the support of CNDB and AFCN
Year: 2016
Number of Pages: 368
Contributions by Florin Flueraş, Alina Popa, Ioana Gheorghiu, Ștefan Tiron, Gabriel Catren, Irina Gheorghe, Garett Strickland, Sina Seifee, Bogdan Drăgănescu, Cătălina Gubandru, Eleni Ikoniadou, Cristina Bogdan, Cosima Opartan, Nicola Masciandaro, Ben Woodard, Blake Victor, Adriana Gheorghe, Cătălina Gubandru, Gregory Chatonsky, Dorothée Legrand & Georges Heidmann, Matt Hare, Larisa Crunţeanu, Dylan Trigg, Ion Dumitrescu.
Title: Tribute to Iris Barbura
Authors: Corina Cimpoieru; Isabel Fischer; Agnes Kern; Igor Mocanu; Beth Soll
Bilingual edition published by CNDB and Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln, with the support of ICR
Translators: Georg Aescht (RO-DE), Andrei Anastasescu (DE-RO)
Year of publication: 2017
Number of pages: 108
This first exploration of the life and work of the Romanian-born dancer Iris Barbura traces the artist’s journey from Bucharest to Berlin and on to Ithaca (USA). Trained in Bucharest, within the multicultural, innovative, and experimental atmosphere of the emerging art of dance, Iris Barbura would study in the 1930s at the centers of German expressionist dance with Harald Kreutzberg, Mary Wigman, and Gret Palucca. Iris Barbura’s career would reach its peak in postwar Berlin: there, the artist conquered Berlin’s major stages with her energetic and playful dances. She collaborated for a time with the multidisciplinary, surrealist cabaret Die Badevanne (The Bathtub), creating and performing experimental choreographies inspired by masterpieces of classical modernism.
This “laboratory book” brings together archival materials and in-depth research on the fascinating personality of Iris Barbura, offering access to a biography that intertwines the history of Romanian and German dance from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Title: The 21st Century. Dance, Dance, Dance
Publisher: The 21st Century Foundation
Edition published in partnership with CNDB
Year of publication: 2020
Number of pages: 432
Dance Dance Dance – a unique volume that presents readers with valuable documents from the recent history of dance as well as a broad portrait of Contemporary Romanian Dance. This publication aims to compensate for the absence of written texts on dance in current cultural publications.
“This massive volume attempts to bring together, even if not exhaustively, sufficient evidence to support the idea that the Romanian dance scene—a hypersensitive seismograph capable of registering Western choreographic revolutions—naturally integrates, through its personalities, into the international circuit of values.” Alina Ledeanu
Title: A Whole World Made of Fragments. Ioan Tugearu. Dance, Dreams, and My Life. Vol. III
Volume Editor: Liana Tugearu
Published by Eikon Publishing in partnership with CNDB
Co-funded by AFCN
Year of Publication: 2015
Number of pages: 414
Ioan Tugearu was principal dancer at the National Opera in Bucharest from 1965 and danced, both in Romania and abroad, in numerous roles in works by Glier, Scendrin (a role in which he achieved great success in Moscow in 1984), Delibes, Tchaikovsky, Pugni-Glier-Vasilenko, Mincus, Bartók, Prokofiev, Trăilescu, and the principal male roles in works by Stravinsky, Ravel, Schubert, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky, in choreographies by Oleg Danovsky, Tilde Urseanu, and Vasile Marcu, and in “Wedding in the Carpathians” by Paul Constantinescu, choreographed by Floria Capsali. He also performed contemporary dance roles in „The Tunnel” based on Ernesto Sabato, choreographed by Mihaela Santo (1994), and in „The Picture of Dorian Gray”, choreographed by Răzvan Mazilu (2004). Ioan Tugearu has toured extensively in Europe, America, and Africa with the Bucharest National Opera Ballet, the “Oleg Danovsky” Ballet Theater in Constanța, and alongside the ballet companies Jeunesse Musicale de France and Grand Ballet Classique de France. He also held engagements as a principal dancer in Munich, where he performed the leading roles in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Ravel’s Bolero, and Xenakis’s Atress; in Bordeaux, where he performed the leading roles in Monetti’s Sebastian and Othello; and in Bari, where he danced in Pygmalion and Galatea.
Title: A Whole World Made of Fragments. Chronicles of Dance, 1972–2012. Vol. II
Author: Liana Tugearu
Published by Eikon Publishing in partnership with CNDB
2nd edition, Year of publication: 2015
Number of pages: 454
First Edition, Book published by CORESI Publishing House in partnership with CNDB
Year of publication: 2012
“In an amnesiac Romania and within an artistic field that is, by its very nature, ephemeral, the publication of this book means more than just a simple editorial release. The consistency and quality of attention with which author Liana Tugearu has followed, for 40 years, almost without exception, choreographers and dancers, the emergence and evolution of dance companies, placing them in the context of their time and highlighting the value of dance performance, regardless of style, among the other arts, is astonishing. A Whole World in Fragments – Dance Chronicles 1972–2012 – a collection of articles published mostly in the magazine Romania Literara – is the equivalent of a dictionary of choreographic art or a history of dance over the last forty years. Author Liana Tugearu belongs to that special category of people who move the world. She offers us all, specialists or not, a book that is rare in the truest sense of the word: a documentary work whose substantial and original content completes the cultural landscape of Romania today.” (Vava Ștefănescu)
Title: A Whole World Made of Fragments. Chronicles of Dance, 1972–2012. Vol. I
Author: Liana Tugearu
Published by Eikon Publishing in partnership with CNDB
2nd edition, Year of publication: 2015
Number of pages: 454
First Edition, Book published by CORESI Publishing House in partnership with CNDB
Year of publication: 2012
“In an amnesiac Romania and within an artistic field that is, by its very nature, ephemeral, the publication of this book means more than just a simple editorial release. The consistency and quality of attention with which author Liana Tugearu has followed, for 40 years, almost without exception, choreographers and dancers, the emergence and evolution of dance companies, placing them in the context of their time and highlighting the value of dance performance, regardless of style, among the other arts, is astonishing. A Whole World in Fragments – Dance Chronicles 1972–2012 – a collection of articles published mostly in the magazine Romania Literara – is the equivalent of a dictionary of choreographic art or a history of dance over the last forty years. Author Liana Tugearu belongs to that special category of people who move the world. She offers us all, specialists or not, a book that is rare in the truest sense of the word: a documentary work whose substantial and original content completes the cultural landscape of Romania today.” (Vava Ștefănescu)
Title: Trixy Checais. The Cartography of Flight
Author: Gina Șerbănescu
Published by Eikon Publishing in partnership with CNDB
Year of publication: 2015
Number of pages: 138
“We will never have access to Trixy Checais’s actual dance, just as Nijinsky’s dance will always remain hidden from us. There is probably a logic of nature whereby what plays a foundational role within an art form must remain veiled. Perhaps if we today, who sometimes take a certain pride in being witnesses to an undeniable evolution of the art of choreography, were to witness Trixy Checais’s dance from more than six decades ago, we would feel as though we were looking directly into the sun. The rediscovery of Trixy Checais reveals to us that there existed in the history of dance in our country a creator of a choreographic language impossible to imitate, one who can serve as a source of inspiration only through the mystery he generates and only through the way we attempt to choreograph with our imagination what reaches us from the memories of those who knew him and through the fragments of his world to which we are permitted access.” (Gina Șerbănescu)
Title: Dance in the 20th Century
Authors: Isabel Ginot and Marcelle Michell
Published by Editura Art in partnership with CNDB
Edited by Vava Ștefănescu
Translated from French by Viviana Săndulescu
Year of publication: 2011
Number of pages: 288
The 20th century was an era of intense upheaval for dance. Two major trends emerged: the embrace of the past’s legacy and its violent rejection. Alongside the persistence of classical codes—sometimes rearranged to suit the tastes of the day—a veritable explosion took place. Driven by the desire to make a clean break with the past, contemporary dance explored the capabilities of the dancing body in every sense, developing movement in space.
At the beginning of the 21st century, we now have sufficient distance to analyze the various evolutions and revolutions and to distinguish between continuity and rupture. Indeed, the barrier between classical and contemporary dance, once insurmountable, has now been overcome, giving rise to an artistic form that places tradition and innovation at the service of authentic artistic expression.
This book traces the two parallel paths—that of the evolution of the classical and that of its challenge—before bringing them together in our time, when choreographers draw inspiration indiscriminately from both registers. It includes excerpts from texts by choreographers who reflect on their own practice, offering insights into the human body as a repository of memory, as well as how we perceive it. It serves as a seminal work on a subject that remains largely unexplored.
Title: Contemporary Dance - Meanings of the Body
Author: Gina Șerbănescu
Volume funded by CNDB through a project competition, 2007
Year of publication: 2007
Number of pages: 204
This is the first volume analyzing contemporary Romanian dance from a philosophical perspective. The author examines the works of our leading choreographers and dancers: Vava Ştefănescu, Răzvan Mazilu, Florin Fieroiu, Eduard Gabia, Cosmin Manolescu, and Adrian Stoian. A necessary contribution, foreshadowing a standalone volume, is the article on Trixy Checais (1914–1990), “the greatest Romanian dancer” (Nina Cassian), the teacher of Miriam Răducanu and Gelu Barbu, and choreographer of the “Nae Leonard” Musical Theater in Galaţi—a dazzling career brutally derailed by the communist regime.