Mălina Andrei is yet another young creator whose presence is being increasingly felt in our choreographic landscape. This year she will graduate from the Academy of Theater and Motion Pictures, the choreography section, but she already teaches contemporary dancing at the Bucharest choreography high school, and she has set up a small contemporary dance company with her students, Terpsichora. Although she was first hired as a ballerina at the Bucharest Opera House, she got mostly modern parts from the very beginning: one of her remarkable performances was playing the mother in Blood Wedding by Ioan Tugearu from Federico Garcia Lorca's play. In 1990, she went to dance for the newly-established Orion company, and she danced some memorable roles there, choreographed by Ioan Tugearu (goddess Fortuna in Theatrum Mundi) and by Miriam Răducanu (Three Portraits from Jazz Themes). Then, contemporaneously with studies in Romania and abroad with French contemporary dance choreographers, she began to outline her own creations. What she presented at the exhibition The Romanian Artistic Avant-Garde in the Early 20th Century at the National Theater in Bucharest already proved her capacity for plastic invention, and last year's show at the Romanian National Art Museum proved something else, a rare asset with choreographers – she designs her own costumes, which are extremely imaginative. The show Caprices first produced last year in Sibiu and recently at the Workshop Hall of the Bucharest National Theater, but in a different context, confirms her already mentioned two assets: her imagination and the creative costumes she designs. Conceived to be danced to a combination of music by Bach and Haydn, Caprices is made up of dance moments that alternate with love poetry by Pushkin, Baudelaire, and Goethe, recited by young actor Dragoş Stamate, while images of Renaissance and baroque palaces and gardens are projected in the background.In every show, the Terpsichora company, made up of Alice Popescu, Adriana Dumitru, Magdalena Truşcă, Monica Strat, and Cristina Burtan, proves increased cohesion and adjustment to this specific choreographic style, although the dancers still have to work to contour clearly the line of every movement, for one instance, in space.In Caprices, choreographer and scenery designer Mălina Andrei combined her talents, creating a costume out of expandable red cloth, fixed on the lower side of a wood square, and wrapping the chairs on stage; then, the dancers put it on, so they have many possibilities to create varied moving plastic images by combining body and costume. One of the most wonderful aspects in the shows of young choreographers is their varied conceptions in point of style, bearing the print of each personality. But for all these talents to develop normally, Bucharest badly needs a contemporary dance theater.
by Liana Tugearu
