The LIKE CNDB Festival – “You are the context”

Over April 15th and 27th Bucharest played host for the 5th edition of the Festival LIKE CNDB – “You are the context.

Luana Pleşea, 28.04.2018, 16:49

Staged by the Bucharest-based National Dance Centre, the present edition of this festival has a special programme and structure. In spite of being the most compressed edition so far, it has an international section. Here is with more the CNDB manager, choreographer Vava Stefanescu.

Vava Stefanescu: “The first edition lasted for a month. We started from a very poor state, but I remember the people who came to the Centre after an absence of several years from Bucharest’s cultural landscape. We used to have a round of talks shortly after the show and I would hear the people who left saying, ‘what a lovely night. I haven’t seen anything like that for a long time!’ We have grown ever since. We acquired a new hall. This is a winter festival and has been designed as a local event. It is a dance festival of Bucharest, spanning over a month or a month and a half. This year’s circumstances forced us to compress the event quite a lot. So, we had to capitalise on the partnership we have with Aerowaves, a very big network, a platform aimed at presenting and promoting young choreographers. Being part of this network enabled us to schedule three foreign shows: we opened the festival with Ohne Nix of Austria/Britain. Homo Furens is a French show and on April 21st we staged a Danish performance called Dans, for Satan.”

“Ohne Nix” created and performed by artists Luke Baio and Dominik Grunbuhel, is using digital elements as well as body projection, shape tricks and humour. In a different direction, Homo Furens, by French choreographer Filipe Lourenco, employs only the bodies of the five dancers to look at how we define movement.

But LIKE CNDB festival remains focused on Romanian dance. Here is Vava Stefanescu again at the microphone.

Vava Stefanescu: ”The Romanian section spans three days in the Focus LIKE CNDB 2018. It is a showcase section, with up to 3 performances a day. With the upcoming Romanian-French cultural season, we’ll have guests such as festival directors, directors of contemporary dance theatres who will come to see the best Romanian productions. These are the most relevant shows. The shows that make up the context, that talk about context, that generate ideas you would not normally think about. Ideas that it approaches from a perspective that opens up the mind to thinking, ideas well-structured within the composition of the show. It is not just the idea that matters, but how they are placed within this mechanism.

One of the shows considered relevant is 37 Minutes of Make Believe, created and performed by Andreea Novac.

Andrea Novac: “I started off from a thing that has been a concern to me in all my shows — the meeting between me and the audience. Except that this time I decided for this meeting to take place at the level of the imagination. Therefore the show 37 minutes… works with my imagination and that of the spectator, and with what happens when the two meet. It has a lot of humour and is a way of showing the audience the ways in which what I do on stage can meet what they imagine me doing on stage, and this becomes an exchange. I work with three simple things. One of them is the word, which opens up or closes up possibilities. I also work with the idea that a movement can be exactly what I want it to be, or the opposite, a movement may have all the meanings in the world. And finally, because imagination works with things that we know, but are re-organised, repositioned so that new things emerge, there is a moment when I do this directly with the audience.”

The 5th edition of the LIKE CNDB Festival — “You Are the Context” takes place in the context of preparations for an important moment: the relocation of the Centre to a new space, Omnia Hall, associated with a new stage in its activity. The hall will be inaugurated in 2020. This is why the Centre invites local artists, the team, the audience and the authorities to try to give performance answers to the question: “What will CNDB look like in 2020?” And 3 of the Festival days will be devoted to the series “Performance Answers”. Here is Vava Stefanescu again:

Vava Stefanescu: “There will be several performances every evening. For instance, Dan Perjovschi will be live from Omnia Hall with a performance. We may also have there Ada Solomon, Alexandru Solomon… people who had a connection with the Centre, benefited from the Centre, or simply members of the public. I believe it is very important to have this exercise in imagination and projection, because in times of change you have to own your space and your property. Contemporary dance and all it means — the convergence with other art domains, with other cultural domains, not necessarily artistic — has always been a feature of CNDB. At that point it would be under a new status. I believe this exercise is good for the public, the artists, and those who work.”