Sergiu Anghel

I made my debut in 1974. I had graduated from high school the year before and in the
summer of 73 Adina Cezar, Natasha Tristaru, Anca Mndrescu, Cristian Crciun and I
decided to establish a contemporary dance troupe. As far as I am concerned, the decision to
put together such a troupe, to stage a performance of contemporary dance and give up a
contract in Austria as well as the passport I had in my pocket has to do with a certain
happening.
In 73, in March or April, the Alwyn Nikolais Company was touring in Bucharest. It was with
some difficulty that I managed to get into the Romanian Opera hall and find a seat in the back
row. I can still remember that on the spot I experienced but a sort of perplexity. Something
fundamental had changed in my way of thinking, in that area of stability made up of the basic
images all of us at some point form about art. We all carry inside such more or less flexible
contours within which, like in a jewel box, we preserve the values painstakingly sifted out of
the bulk of daily experience. Before such a box, like before an ark of laws that we carry along
our whole life, we size up the allogeneic gold and meteoritic rocks that pierce our cultural
atmosphere in an endless approximation of total, ultimate value. Just like in the biblical
parable of the precious stone likened to the Heavenly kingdom, any normal human being,
upon meeting with such a stone, sells out his possessions, takes his fake jewels out of the
box, sells them and uses whatever he gets for them to buy the new gem. It all looks simple
and common sensical, but only someone who has learnt the hard way what it feels like to
empty completely ones own system of values can begin to understand why the next day I
walked aimlessly the streets of Bucharest with Nataa who had felt it too talking and
crying like babies. The most painful feeling for both of us was that we had been robbed.
We both felt like nine years of our lives had been taken away from us. And worse, that in
order to be thus wronged, we had been subjected to a gruelling labour at the end of which all
we did was fill our treasure boxes with sand. Still, the parable requires some rephrasing, at
least where I myself am concerned. It would have been so simple and easy for me if it had all
come down to a trade in values, if I could have swapped my ridiculously classifying
fortune for Nikolais fluorescent flashes and bodies of light. The truth is that Nikolais show
had only the magical power to reveal to me, like in an X-ray, that my artistic structure back
then lacked a real articulation. With each day I became more aware that Nikolais stone
possessed but this irradiating force. After all he only repeated at a different technological
level what the French called danse lumineuse, an invention for a music-hall theatre
belonging to the American dancer Lois Fuller. Precisely like his predecessor, Nikolais opted
for the beauty of some forms devoid of content instead of some contents devoid of beauty.
The final result of that experience was, on the one hand, a total disillusionment with my
horizontal landmarks, having as an immediate consequence the loss of any horizons; on the
other hand, I was completely swept off my feet, which resulted inevitably in the need to
recover the vertical I had lost because of my floating around weightlessly.
It is from this starting point that there began to take shape my first show, Consensus, which
opened in the autumn of 1974. If this show was a success it was largely due to my encounter
with Corneliu Cezar. His mind was a brilliant, thrilling and paradoxical blend of meditations
on music, philosophy, religion and poetry. Sometimes he would come to our rehearsals in the
Grand Hall of the high school. It was with some reluctance that he came and, undoubtedly,
out of sheer amusement at first. Everything changed radically the day he saw the first
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complete choreography of the show. It was Albinonis Adagio, a sketch of Eleatic movement,
a choreography that in a way abolished movement, announcing the buttoh technique, which
was to appear here only after 89. Our friendship, born on that day, lasted throughout the years
of my artistic growth accumulating mutual admiration, endless arguments, and jealousies, fits
of fury, repeated betrayals and reconciliation. From Cezar, or should I say in the space of the
disputes generated around his convictions challenged or defended by those who came into
his house I learnt more than I did, later, in the lecture halls of the Faculty of Letters or at
Duke University. Among those who crossed his threshold or whose homes hosted temporarily
our disputes counted Sorin Dumitrescu, tefan Niculescu, Radu Stan, Octavian Nemescu,
Andrei Pleu, Daniel Turcea, Justin Marchi, Anatol Vieru, as well as hosts of monks from
various monasteries, in passing through Bucharest, who used to make us mountains of
doughnuts in the kitchen boiling with oil and our interminable discussions.
In 1974, when my first show opened at the ndric Theatre, which was managed back then
by Margareta Niculescu, not only had the way been paved by the Nine and a Half
Nocturnes staged by Miriam Rducanu, but also the audience had been rendered faithful and
was, besides, of top quality. Before such an audience you are free, you can devise your
creation without the fear that they might not be able to grasp your meaning a fear which, at
times, causes you to betray authenticity and especially without being conditioned by the
commercial imperatives which today are beginning to imperceptibly move your hand for you.
For me the years 1973-77 were une saison au paradis, save one year and four months while
I was a conscript.
Even after 1977, the year that marked a rapid degradation of the artistic atmosphere in
Bucharest, I still had some interesting experiences. The people in RAAM still had this
positive ambition to bring to the capital the greatest ballet companies in the world. During
that period Bucharest could thus see besides Nikolais, who returned for a workshop at the
Choreography High School where I had come back as a teacher, the troupes of Alvin Ailey,
Lar Lubovich, the Rambert Company, the Murry Louis Company and many more. The
second target of RAAM programs was managing ethno-dance troupes. So that we could see a
lot of troupes from India, Africa and Japan. The managerial landscape was rich and, what was
most favourable to us, diverse. Most importantly, however, these companies presented their
basic repertoire, which is now part of the worlds choreographic heritage.
In the mid 80s this fountain ran dry. Not until after the revolution was another wave of dance
companies to appear in Bucharest, occasioned by the La danse en voyage program. The
downside of this program, compared with what had happened before, was its homogeneity.
For months on end the public in Bucharest watched a kind of French school, perceivable
not so much in terms of technique mostly lacking as particularly in terms of some sort of
common air in which one could feel the same kind of pollutants, more or less homogenously
blended but generally amounting to the same density. From the French experience, as from a
beau march perfume, I was left, shortly afterwards, with nothing but the memory of some
sequences from Nadjs Commedia tempio and Karine Saportas hyper intelligent
conversation. Evidence once again that today, as of old, the best French artists are the
foreigners.
What kept striking me about my relationship with the choreographers or members of the
companies which participated in the Voyage was with the abovementioned exceptions
and that of Dominique Bagouet a certain simplicity of conversation and my constant
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failure every time I tried to slip in some hint along some cultural line. I was involuntarily
responsible for quite a few moments of significant silence before I finally gave up this
game. But there were also moments of disconcerting sincerity. Here is an anecdote: as I
was leaving for Bucharest from Constana, where I had just completed some rehearsals with
The Tempest for the ballet theatre run by Ana Maria Munteanu, I accepted to offer a ride to a
French lady who had just finished work on a project unfolding at the same time. On the way
the woman kept deploring the gruesome sight of animals smashed by the traffic. Mais cest
une horreur! Quelle horreur! And she kept saying that. What irritated her in reality was that
no one came to clear the road right away of the dead cats and dogs. When my patience gave
way I explained that there existed indeed such a service, and that she was in fact witnessing
the cleaning of the roads, since between the cars driving along and the crows on the road side
there developed a real symbiosis, thanks to the singular industriousness of the Romanians.
Her candid question came like a cold shower: Mais cest quoi un symbiose? Comment a
ccrit? It wasnt devoid of humour though. Past the bridge at Giurgeni, on both sides of the
road, we started spotting the regular locals, mostly poachers, who, arms stretched out the size
of a large fish, were signalling that they were selling the days catch. Some of them those
who were selling not only large fish but smaller ones too kept moving their arms, showing
with the palms of their hands the size of the merchandise. Intrigued, the French woman asked
me what those signs meant. I answered dryly that those people were Romanians who wanted
to emigrate and who had nothing else to offer to the potential foreign women interested in
taking them along but their natural manly gifts, whose size they were advertising in this
manner Mais arrte toute de suite alors! she feigned the intention of opening the door.
After the Voyage died out I was particularly amazed by the way my former students
reacted. On certain occasions, when some project made it necessary for my students to
produce a curriculum vitae, I noticed not without a tinge of bitterness that all of them
claimed to have grown out of the Voyage experience. None of their high school teachers
was anywhere mentioned, to say nothing of the professors from the University, whose
lectures some of the students were still attending. All of us, their former professors, were cast
away like sparrows that had hatched cuckoos eggs. I failed to understand it back then. Now I
can see clearly that the crucial part in the growth of a generation is not the incubation period
but the breaking of the shell. The first generations of choreographers that we produced at the
NUTCA shared the experience of the ducklings who are unfortunate enough to hatch in the
absence of mother duck, just as the neighbours cat is passing by. Today the unnaturalness of
meowing ducks can but amuse me
At the time, however, the difference in language created a gap, if not actually a rupture,
between generations, which kindled a muffled conflict. Teenage iconoclasm and Oedipus-like
reactions of all kinds, unassimilated culturally, smouldered during meetings or throughout the
various projects that we shared. This rebelliousness gradually slipped into downright boycott.
The choreographers association, which took great efforts to create and for five years had a
praiseworthy activity, was slowly emptied of substance until it eventually lost its objectives
against the background of almost complete absenteeism. Today, those who boycotted the first
association would like to create a second one counting on the participation of precisely those
people whom they boycotted. Romanian dialectics seem to have a two-phase movement: the
first phase consists because of the scarcity of forage in poisoning the neighbours goat, as
this is the only guarantee of success for the second phase, which consists in fattening ones

own goat with the poisoned food left from the first one. The only thing that frightens me
about this logic is that the third phase could be a remake of the first.
Hardworking and diligent people, the Romanians adopted the work style of the ant-hill even
when it comes to choreography, pulling in all directions at once, and thus securing progress a
slow and unpredictable advance. The motion vector is generated to a larger extent by some
forces abandoning traction than by extra force applied to one traction direction. If it is true
that yielding is the attribute of intelligence, then it is also true that Romanian choreography is
moving in the opposite direction from those who yield
Amid this deadlock which seemed to have become the rule, there happened however a small
miracle, which heralded the revival of Romanian choreographic creation: the Oleg Danovski
Ballet Theatre. Here production dynamics are hallucinatory, here there take place
international festivals and contests, debates on choreography-related topics, international
tours organized in collaboration with the most important Western managers, etc., all of which
have caused the nerve centre of Romanian choreography to move completely to Constana.
The merit of Ana Maria Munteanu, general director of the Oleg Danovski Ballet Theatre,
extends nonetheless beyond strictly choreographic successes. The publishing of Amphion
magazine, of some programs turned into real professional sources of choreographic
information within the scope of high culture, qualify this structure as a success model for
cultural management in Romania.
What is however beyond any comprehension is the fact that the artists in this company, most
of them first-rate professionals, do not flee to the West, like so many mediocre dancers, but
remain faithful to the troupe in which they matured and which grew and matured according to
the rules of mutual respect, of a balance of values and of reciprocal and comradely support. If
there are any tensions within this troupe, they arise solely from disputes around the choice of
projects that might best launch the company along the path towards true value.
Seeing this troupe which obstinately insists on staying here, on serving an audience which
cannot begin to grasp the extent of their sacrifice, I cannot help thinking about the words of
Henri de Montherlant, uttered by a character in Siegfried: Les grands hommes changent de
plante, jamais de pays. Surely some Russophone presidential adviser must have had the
same words in mind when he decided that, despite all evidence, the highest distinction ever to
have been awarded to artists in the field of choreography should go exclusively to people
who changed country

By Silvia Ciurescu (Gheata)