Pian

A New Contemporary Dance Company

None of the totalitarian regimes of this century had any particular liking for the modern art trends and made them eventually disappear from the area controlled by them. Too free a manifestation of one's personality meant escaping their power. In Nazi Germany just as

The Young Choreographers

The opening of a department of Choreography in the Theatre and Film Academy in 1991, started to produce results two years ago. The academic training offered a large cultural opening to the dancers and choreographers that studied there. I had the chance to see some of the

The Chosen Chooser

Who is this Roman Vlad who composed 'The Seagull'? a well-known director asked me, a great music fan, therefore always present at the concerts and shows of the Enescu Festival. The meaning of this question was suggested by its intonation: Who is this Roman Vlad

The Exceptional Value

It's been a long time since, at the Romanian Opera, I have assisted at a première with an allure of great show as it is now Mihaela Atanasiu's Peer Gynt. An authentic première, not the remake of a show put out of the program for a while, not the resumption, either,

Preludes And Carmina Burana

Premiere at the Romanian National Opera While in most theatres of the Capital premieres succeed one another at breathtaking speed, the Bucharest ballet season seemed on the verge of collapse. After a long wait, at the beginning of April the first ballet premiere of the

The Spirit Of The Age

How is it possible that, neither in the century celebrated last year since Vaslav Nijinsky's birth, nor in the four decades commemorated this year, on the 8th of April, since his departure, no personality should have appeared to dispute the legendary ballet dancer and

Trends In Promoting Romanian Choreographic Art

It is the third consecutive year when the town of the Union becomes, for three days, the capital of Romanian Contemporary Ballet. Or even of the entire Romanian ballet, one might say, since there is no other reunion of national choreographic forces yet, either complementary

Daphnis And Chloe

The new season of the National Opera opened this autumn with a ballet made up of four choreographic pieces united under the title of the most elaborate one, Daphnis and Chloe, a production staged by Gelu Barbu, a Romanian choreographer from the Diaspora. Gelu Barbu belongs

A Continent Dreamt By An Island

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

Gelu Barbu At 45 Years From The Debut

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

Interview With Magdalena Popa

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

Floria Capsali - Musical Vibration Turned Movement

In the summer of 1982, as I was saying an emotional good-bye at Floria Capsali's deathbed, the whole mournful world felt we were witnessing the end of a living legend of Romanian dancing. Indeed, for over half a century (she was born in 1900 in the town of Bitolia,