DUET

By/with Adriana Gheorghe & Andreea David

After an idea by Adriana Gheorghe

Presented as a work in progress at National Center for Contemporary Dance in Bucharest (CNDB) on April 29th 2014

My name is Adriana. I’ve been unemployed since forever. I’ve closed down cultural pages and even newspapers (Ziua, Gândul, Cotidianul). The last time I was payed it was by a German contemporary art museum (ZKM in Karlsruhe). As for Romanian money, probably from Adevărul newspaper, where I was fired after one week. It is true, there was also a small budget from CNDB to make a piece together with Alexandra Pirici. But it was 2011, not a good year to make performances, CNDB had no theater space, most of the money went away on decor, technicians etc. (Someone more inspired would have responded to this context instead of fighting it).

Suspended is the the word I would use for the last two years of my life – uncommon times. That I mostly spent looking through the window, following all that cold winter light, the forever evening blue light in my house, listening to the builders outside my window building a new level to my block of flats every spring, contemplating a favourite armoire made of sweet cherry tree wood (and the light that glides over its laque surface), my eyes following the shaddows that the natural and electric light leave on the walls, watching the walls in different shades of white; mostly being happy and reading, reading a lot, everything I would always rather postpone and, since a certain moment, reading only one author, so uncontemporary, with a fantastic mind and a style to match it and who wrote enormously (extensive introductions to almost all of his texts included).

I had a wisdom-tooth removed and it got complicated. Then there was an entire summer under the menace of a severe and strange intoxication, which errupted apparently for no reason and disappeared without a trace in hours. It had a logic of its own that escaped the medical experts I visited. Then there was the stomach ache, annoying digestive malfunctionality to be more precise, that altered my other than that passionate but sweet character. Then I really became an hypochondriac: daily cooked meals, numerous diets and medicines. Until I got bored and just forgot about the malfunctionality (one of the medical specialists told me it had to do with global warming). Then there was the sinus inflammation (nothing metaphisical about that, as much as I’d try), then the seasonal flu. I still got the coughing. It’s dry and interesting.

The almost same two years Andreea was out of town. We mostly talked on the phone. She talked about adventureous bikerides from town to town, I talked about my room light. Sometimes she talked about applying to master degrees and I talked about illness as body art. 🙂

Last December she returned to Bucharest and we started working together. For fun and due to being offered the physical space vital for research in contemporary dance and performance. Almost two weeks at WASP and almost two full months at CNDB, just because Vava Ștefănescu really liked our project. This performance is not being produced by anyone, nobody pays for our research and work.

I almost forgot – not long ago, last fall, I was still stating that there will be no more performing for me, ever. I will not go near it not even to write about it (I used to be a contemporary dance critic for a long time, actually). In my head there were only two ways: I was either performing and overexposing myself or staying in and reading and making conversation only to the best of friends.

What triggered the very idea of performance back into my head was the last summer’s most recent mobilization for CNDB versus the absurdities of the Ministry of Culture. Almost every year there was need for such mobilization, always hoping that it is the last time when the MCC needed explanations regarding what CNDB meant etc. I decided, then, to write one last text on the subject and I did wrote nonstop for a night and a day (interrupted only by pauses to pee, drink coffee and eat something). It was then that everything came back to me, in theory. And then there were some extremely inspiring workshops taught by Sergiu Matiș and Mila Pavicevic, last fall, during the Explore Dance Festival organized by WASP. And the deed was done.

There is this rumour that there aren’t that many active contemporary dancers left in Bucharest, but nevertheless the Stere Popescu Hall at CNDB is in high demand. I fought hard, with determination close to despair for the stars to align so that all the impossible conditions would be fulfilled and Andreea and myself could occupy the same space at the same time (preferably for more than one hour), so that we would be both healthy and well rested, uninterrupted by the doorman at CNDB, in good or bad spirits, but professionally there. And there were also some overwhelming little revelatory moments.

Andreea

She is an architect. Now also a performer. That is she can actually make a living out of the collaborations she has with some international artists. She works simultaneously at several projects. While she was working with me, she was also involved in Mădălina Dan’s performativity lab (often working literally 3-4 hours there followed by 3-4 hours with me). She presented in Viena and in several places in Germany for a couple of times a performance called more than naked, where she collaborates with Doris Uhlich and 19 other dancers. Currently she is in a residency in Rotterdam and when we present our Duet at CNDB, she will be in Bucharest because she will also happen to be in residency at WASP, where she will develop a research project together with Ingrid Berger Myhre.

Two years ago, Andreea was a DanceWEBer and had the kind of decisive formatory experience given by the ImpulsTanz Festival in Vienna. When she returned to Bucharest, she tried to create contexts for herself to continue with the practices she acquired in Vienna and she applied, without success, at Zona D. Her choices, at that point, were: to return to a full time job in order to stay in Bucharest or to return to natal town Reghin and make plans on how to better approach and develop her new status of being a performer or maybe something else. She went back to Reghin and it proved a good decision. After a scholarship at Montpellier, last fall, she decided that we put into practice our idea to create our own working frame to share, based on research, solo improvisation, feedback, reshaping rules.

She would bring the passion to work with scores and time frame and solo improvisation marathons and I would bring my addiction for the game of „cosmology” (learned from Sergiu Matiș) and for working with language, with heavy language and BIG questions. And small performative solutions. We would share the time and the space and esentially work on individual solos. That was the plan and it all went to pieces when I formulated the proposal to make a Duet instead…

Andreea loves to improvise, to work with the „here” and the „now”. She follows inner and insight organic intuitions. I write scenarios on paper, I have it all „ready” before we even begin. I really like to test the ideas in my head mainly. She would interrupt my inner dialogue saying: „we shall see tomorrow, when we are in the space”.

Actually Andreea would say it’s never all black and white, any label however nuanced still sacrifices reality.

She states about herself to be interested artistically in the context where activity is produced and „to see the space as a resource for a future action”. About the Duet, she calls it a „trio” with me and „something else”.

Here ends all the personal details. Something else is waiting in the performative space. Or, at least, this is my perspective on things on paper.

Our approach is to, paradoxically, bring into the performative space (testing its limits) BIG questions, so uncontemporary, comfortable inside the mind but difficult to formulate loud or publicly, unapproachable & uninteresting in contemporary art, still forever in the back of our minds. A continuous process to bring to (a continuous) present the adventurous atmosphere of two minds in a duet in time and space.