"Interior/Exterior" - a contemporary dance show

Oana Rasuceanu collaborated on the show with the film director Iulia Rugină. The show proposes an introspective look into the lives of four female characters and into the world of their emotions and experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The show is based on documented interviews conducted by the two artists during the lockdown period and proposes to the spectators a reinterpretation and an analysis of those emotions, of our experiences, of everybody's emotions actually. We spoke with the director about the show's artistic concept, about her vision translated into the show. Here is Oana Răsuceanu:

Oana Rasuceanu: "'Interior/Exterior' is a show that talks about the existence, let's say slightly shaken, of four female characters, who end up being trapped in something that we were all trapped in the period March to May 2020. And I am referring to the state of emergency, the lockdown, the pandemic, the onset of the pandemic in Romania. My thoughts about this show were generated by several states, bizarre states, ambiguous states, anxiety, questions about what it was like for us, all of us, at that time. And I also thought of how we can actually get back to that period, after these years that have passed, years which did not erase, though, the respective experience, but on the contrary. I have had this feeling that what these years that have passed did to us was to put a magnifying glass on certain types of scars, which, I think, everyone feels. I also think that some of us decided to let these scars be visible, becoming aware of them eventually, while others simply decided that it is better to hide these scars in a drawer and lock them there for good. The show kicked off from here to further convey this message and we eventually made it to a point where we actually realized that there is video that we have. And I am using the plural here, as I speak about me and Iulia Rugina. During the pandemic lockdown in May last year, we decided to do a series of interviews via the Zoom platform, as nobody was allowed to leave their places. So we had a series of talks with various people in our life, some of them close to us because we felt like documenting that unique moment, which none of us had experienced before. And that unrefined material proved to be extremely valuable and I believe its value is going to increase from one year to another. We used only parts of these talks and some of the interviews we got from women. We held talks with males and females with ages ranging from 10 to 70 years and from all these we have chosen four females who were to become active characters in this show intertwined with the live performances of the four protagonists."

The screenwriter, choreographer and director of the show has also talked to us about the four performers, their work and transcending emotions. Here is Oana Răsuceanu at the microphone again:

Oana Rasuceanu: "The four performers are Mariana Gavriciuc, Anastasia Preotu, Teodora Velescu and Eva Danciu and I started working with them on four scripts I have written for the 4 live female performances. I felt the need of a common denominator when I started building the moving performance of these four bodies, beginning with biographic data, states, thoughts, social status etc identified for each of the four.  I felt that the movement and the construction of the movement phrases should combine the emotional and social trajectory of those characters until the beginning of the state of emergency. Then it was the process of their transformation over the two months and the moment it ends and when they got the false feeling they could simply resume life from that moment on as if nothing had happened. It was something of extreme falsity and we were quite captive in that moment of falsehood, which we didn't realize at first but were able to see very clearly after a couple of months or years. Since then, I myself have been experiencing some sort of an anxiety, the need to be always on guard. Somehow to me, the entire period of the pandemic seems to be a big question mark hanging over our tomorrow. And I believe this feeling has been pervasive throughout the entire show because there is this uncertainty of tomorrow, you know, the feeling that you are in complete darkness. I tried to make this darkness visible, so to say, but certainly many of us and the four performers at that, have eventually accepted the situation and there is nothing we can do, so we must move on. This is the thing I have done, the thing they do, and many of us have done, a step 'forward', no matter where this forward will take us."

(LS & bill)