With each new performance, the director-choreographer Răzvan Mazilu shapes even better his personality and his special type of performance, unique at this moment in our theatrical environment. With each new show, the director-choreographer Răzvan Mazilu adds something of amazement on the faces of his audience, owed to his maturity in thinking, at an unbelievable young age for a producer of performances with such large views. If, at almost twenty in 1993, Răzvan Mazilu was being awarded, at the International Festival of Choreographic Creation in Iaşi, a special prize of the jury for choreography with a work that synthesized the conflict of Garcia Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, a show put up with women students at the Film and Theatre Academy, in 1995, he directly aimed at one of the most important stages in the country, the National Theatre in Bucharest, inaugurating by his performance, The Lady of the Camellias after Alexander Dumas the son, a new genre of theatrical performance. To the configuration of this appropriately contributed the words of the actors Maia Morgenstern and Marius Iosif Capotă, bur also the movements of the two and of the choreographer himself in the role of the Destiny and not in the least the tensed music of Dorina Crişan Rusu played on the cello by Adrian Mantu, as well as Doina Levinţa's scenography of an exquisite refinement. With his present creation Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen To You by Tennessee Williams for which he already obtained a new prize at the International Contest of Iaşi this year, for a new genre of theatrical experiment, Răzvan Mazilu continues his experiments and, working with the same means, he obtains new effects. This time too, his main pawns are two: She, Rodica Mandache, that defends herself of loneliness by constructing an imaginary world and He, Dan Bădărău that lets himself be caught in the web of the tentacular city. This time too, the word uttered by them has dramatic value, but not less important is their movement. This time too, the performance is starred by the jazz composer and interpreter of prestige, Johnny Răducanu, and the scenography evinces Adriana Grand's great power of expression. What is new, then? The place that dance has in this performance, dance in the largest sense of the world – of expressive movement – is much bigger. The two actors don't utter a single line without accompanying it by movement which is not the gesture that naturally prolongs the world but the graphicalness that gains a weight equal to the world defining itself as a discourse parallel to that one. And, much more than that, the choreographer himself, alongside with four aspiring actors, Marian Baciu, Ionuţ Pascu, Ştefan Puşcaşu and Cristian Toporan, from the Students' Theatre The Bridge act some important moments of the show through their dance graphicalness of a particular relevance even though the young actors to be are not aspiring to the profession of dancers as well. These moments perfectly integrated to the flow of the play give a plus of graphicalness to the stage image dominated by the big window in the background, owed to Adriana Grand, on the window pane of which the rain drops flow. And one of these scenes with a retro tint in which each of the five performers-dancers (the choreographer and the students) become, each of them, a revived image of the famous Charles Chaplin becomes a dance sequence perfectly accomplished. Of course the general tendency is, today, all over the world the same: the actors must be, whenever necessary, as good singers as dancers. But it is to be noticed Răzvan Mazilu's capacity of attaining this aim with all the performers, his capacity both of directing and of making the choreography, to give all the interpreters a breakthrough towards a double and simultaneous way of expression through word and through movement.
by Liana Tugearu
