International

I first saw Cristina Hamel when I was a petit rat and I would sneak a look at the soloists during rehearsals, crouching behind a pillar. I remember her rehearsing unrelentingly a diagonal of pirouettes that wouldn't turn out well, in Act II of Swan Lake. I was admiring

A talk with Gelu Barbu Each artist who fulfils his destiny up to the zenith of glory becomes the founder of an island nostalgic about the continent. The creator does not represent a boastful, empty oneness but a world within a world. His original formula is achieved thanks

The ballet dancer who made his debut on the stage of the Kirov Theatre in Sankt Petersburg, prime ballet dancer at the Opera in Bucharest, then, after 1961, prime ballet dancer at the Norwegian Royal Opera in Oslo, decorated by King Olaf with the Constitution medal, first

A superstar of Romanian ballet in its golden era, when the light coming from the East would fashion great interpreters, Gabriel Popescu began the study of dance with the maestra Floria Capsali. He was hired by the Bucharest Opera in 1948, when he was 16, and in 1949 he was

Art critics acclaimed Magdalena Popa: She is one of the most dazzling stars of the century. She was regarded as a goddess of this art. Her small body expressed grace, a sort of ritual noblesse. Born in Bucharest, she graduated from the High School of Choreography and then

I owe much of my setting up as an artist to Boris Kneazev as well. There’s another aspect to consider. One can work enormously in ballet and never get proper parts. Or, there’s even a more dramatic situation, when one gets these parts and realizes that one doesn’t

Do Romanians look in a particular way, precisely as Romanians, and not merely as people of their own times? The answer to such a question of image, apparently simpler than the one to the proper being of the Romanians, is actually much more difficult. And this basically because

Some time in the autumn of 1994, Sorin Alexandrescu asked in an interview in 22 magazine why, in the canonical battle between the various radical-democrat and nationalist structures of the opposition (and of the government), more attention is not paid to the real traditions

The other Monday walking on Victoriei Road I met a friend. It is a well-known fact that today any guy you treat to a glass of wine at Fialkowsky's or who is in the delightful habit of bumming two or three lei from you is called a friend. Last year, this guy borrowed

*excerpts THE SOPHISTICATED PEASANTS The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on

Chapter XI. The Reforms of Romanian Institutions and their Psychological Consequences If, by using a certain amount of imagination, logic and common-sense, we reconstruct mentally what Romanians' life in the Carpathian or Balkan Mountains might have been, we easily

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half