A Look from the Suspended Alley
Episode 4
Coca. Forever
I would be very difficult to compare her with anyone else, since, on a scale from 1 to 10, nothing in her personality stands comparison. After she’s always a score 10, you always need to add up to that. Sometimes I wonder if to certain people (who make up a category that they only can be part of) the profession is added value or, simply, the profession is there because they are the living value adding to it.
The first time I saw her it was a common situation, again during my first weeks in the literary department, when she needed to make an urgent call. It was, as I said before, a hard winter, and her tiny apartment (I was to find soon) didn’t have a... telephone. She was small, of an indefinite age, wearing a black turtleneck and her head was wrapped in a silk scarf. When introduced, she shook hands like a man, with firm and dry hands and a large smile, encompassing you in a moment, silently assuring you of her entire goodwill and friendship. If you knew what that was. She spoke softly, briefly, with no useless words and, especially, as if she refused any of poses.
Her name was just as unusual as she looked. Coca. In my adolescence, this was a sort of pet name, which had to hide something. And then... Bloos, a German name landed in a (still) German town. I assumed she was a local, but I was wrong. She was from... Vilcea, as I was to find later. Then why Bloos? It's a long, complicated but true story, too long to fit in just one page. Imagine something like Andersen's little match girl, but with a surviving heroine.
She looked at you carefully, and made you feel evaluated as to uncommon, incomprehensible criteria. She talked more about books than theatre. Poetry, prose, philosophy, whatsoever.
Then, they were to play it again, I saw her in one of Everac’s plays, watching the rehearsals from the suspended alley. And, amazingly, I needed several minutes to recognize her. The play was called The Fifth Swan and was a kind of well written melodrama about forbidden love between a party activist and Corps de Ballet ballerina... A sort of Two for the Seesaw, in a socialist context. Coca was the first to play the central part, as it was later staged with other actresses, in all kinds of theatres. She was even awarded a prize with the Contemporary Drama Festival. She is hard to describe.
First of all, because I do not know how she manages to be so volatile and so vulnerable at the same time. She seemed like a wing, or a Zippo lighter flame. It seemed she had no physical body, but only a metal body. The strangest thing was that she didn’t change her voice at all, but was the same I heard in every day conversations, but because of the airy movement her voice turned to tones of an autumnal leaf, sliding down the pavement.
Then they resumed Mary and Her Children by Osvaldo Dragun, where she epically crossed about three ages, starting with the child-adolescent age. The mutation was overwhelming to watch, cold as a knife blade. Then I gave her a hand with a poetry recital that she conceived herself and revelations came in, step by step.
Coca? She never went to a theatre school to become Coca Bloos. She studied philosophy in Cluj and, since she had always been a good student, she ended up as a journalist in Sibiu. I’ve left you speechless, didn't I?
There, in Sibiu, acting with amateurs, I guess, was seen Tocilescu, who asked her to play the War of the Cow. And who prepared her for an entrance examination with the Institute for Theatre and Cinematography. Where... she was not admitted (you’re left breathless, aren’t you?) Only that she was already decided. She left for Satu-Mare as… a “corps de ballet” actress and played, nearly from the very beginning simply actress roles. Olga in Three Sisters (directed by Mircea Marin), for example. Or Ioana in These Sad Angels. Or Charles V in Forte's Martin Luther and Thomas Muntzer (an unrepeatable and unique staging directed again by Marin).
She then moved to Brasov, and from there, for some years to Piatra Neamt. Where she intensely played memorable roles in that island of experiment and friendship that Teatrul Tineretului was: Electra in Sartre's Flies (directed by Laurentiu Ulici), Arkadina in The Seagull (directed by Nicolae Scarlat), Nana in Èapek's R.U.R. (directed by Alexandru Darie), the unmatched Catte in Goldoni's miraculous Little Square (directed by Silviu Purcarete) and, especially, especially, the paranoid revolutionary Efimita in the legendary Mr. Leonida and the Reactionries (directed by Alexander Dabija).
Inevitably, she eventually hid... in Bucharest. At Teatrul Mic. And then, wherever there was to do something not done yet. You may not know, you may have forgotten ... In Purcarete’s mega-performance The Danaids, Coca plays Danaus himself, the bisexual matrix leading the invasion, an “anarchetypal” embodiment (to use Corin Braga’s excellent concept), snake, dragon and rat at the same time, whip and whipped. And how about The First Ladies? Or the voices, beings and ages plurmorphism in Ich Bin Ophelia? (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x90lrz_coca-bloos-ich-bin-ofelia-la-gala-s_webcam)
Or Mazilu and Dabija’s Blok Bach? Make a haste it might still be on this week ... Or Afrim’s Tales of Common Insanity, in Piatra again? (If you like, you can get a peep on the “tube” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgTGO6IuoOE).
Still, it was films that eventually turned Coca Bloos into a brand... And that, of course, by narrowing the perception, as film only can do it, because we're dealing with a phenomenon theatre actress, while film creates patters roles difficult to rid of. Still should we not revisit, of only to see her and Dinica, Daneliuc's Marital Bed? Or Mungiu's West? So much spontaneity, so much refinement in composing the thought behind the gesture, the intention behind the words...
Somehow, I meant to tell you about something else... About friendship and availability. Honestly, I believe it's very hard to find anywhere a talent so open to any challenge, such as Coca Bloos’ is. Not impossible, if I were to think, for example, of Constantin Cojocaru, another wonderful actor who, in a healthy-rigorous way is skipped by all the awards flooding institutions. Even so: it is best to leave them alone, they have nothing in common with the television goods market.
Equally honest, I think beyond being a gift from God, this also comes from service (it is also called devotion); which is a educated human attitude-quality, raised in silence and care within people. The mixture of permanently inquisitive intellect, talent devoted to sacrifice and active humanity, happily and generously spread with no effort or affectation, flows from the actress like a magic potion. And this makes you, the audience, healthier than you were when you came to the theatre. This is witchcraft, man!
