Artist Profile

Since I traveled abroad for the first time to attend theatrical events, the minute I was saying I’m coming from Romania I heard Silviu Purcarete’s name. Almost as often as I heard Nadia’s name or Hagi’s. Not as often as I heard Dracula’s name, of course, but he is not “ours” any more.

What I am trying to grasp here is the bleary flow of emotional memory. Bearing in mind actors, some famous, others that may go, or already went into undeserved oblivion. They are mentioned in a random order, by no means hierarchic, but rather emotional.

Sometime in January 1980...
Around the third day, a rather tall man, still young, despite his silver clump of hair, matched by a short beard. He comes straight through the snow, in his Clujeana snow covered boots, jeans tucked into them; for the outfit, he’s wearing a brown fluffy coat, not exactly new, tied with a belt.

He can, in exchange, symbolically represent the destinies of all those who, in the place decided for them by Mighty God, started blessing the place. This positioning of our “first graduate of his class” (as Ilinca Tomoroveanu said in Laudatio) is a kind of higher aristocracy that any ordinary fame, no matter how well paid it may be. Here's, therefore, a good opportunity, in this less ordinary situation on the scenes of all sort of awards...

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.

There must be some onomastic to motivate the nicknames that the actor I am talking about turned into a sort of pet emblem, used by all (many, discreet, lasting) of his friends. In theatre, he is called... Ţâcă, despite the fact he is a… venerable actor. For real, this is no joke! Unfortunately, contact with him was always limited to a straight admiration on my part, and a brotherly smile, on his, so I have no details on how the nickname came into being.

The most fascinating warming up exercises in acting workshops are traditionally based on the relationship between the body and the matter. “Now we’re walking through mud” ... “Now we focus and cross a river filled with balloons” ... “Now we swim in a pool full of honey” ...

It feels terribly funny today to say this, but before being the one thousand faces theatre actress today, Emilia Dobrin, Miki, was to a film actress... Give a search and you’ll find over twenty films in the filmography... And if you take a quick look squint on the YouTube Brother as well (as I did myself in search for something that I will tell you about below), you’ll find her as a blue fairy ... singing.

Well, if someone would ask me (they don’t, but I sometimes answer anyway) which is, in my mind, the thread linking all these actors, so different between them and that I love more than I love others - perhaps more famous, or maybe just more popular – I’ve ponder over it for one moment. And then I’d admit that my very personal emotional scale is based on ... jumping over one’s shadow.

Oana Stefanescu is actually what the classical French system of employment would have called, a century ago, “La Tragedienne”. In other words, she would have been the ideal performer for who knows how many Lady Macbeths, Medeas, Andromacas or Agrippinas. Our good fortune - and hers, of course –is that contemporary theatre has firmly deconstructed fixed structures in drama and casting.

Painters and graphic designers get sometimes a sort of a portrait cramp, exactly in those cases where, at first sight, the model looked not only generous, but easy to place on the canvas or paper. The architecture of the composition is right, maybe even charming and, still, something in the model’s personality can’t come out, and eludes the brush, “cannot be grasped”.

If he were born in England, and not in Brasov, Marian Ralea would have certainly been knighted by now, and we would have had to attach the title when writing about him. But as he was born and raised in my adoptive city, in a house well hidden in passage way, at the beginning of the pedestrian street crossed by thousands of tourists every day, I haven’t learnt to look closely enough at Marian Ralea,

There are actors that speech (my) critical-descriptive can only approached in reserve. It's like when you analyse a poem (assuming that anyone is still doing it nowadays) and, if you further too much from it, it grows incomprehensible. Because speech is a way of objectification of subjectivity.

Let's begin with the ending, in an exercise of imagination ... For the Romanian theatre audience who can't get to see the performances in the Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, who has missed it Bucharest tours, or performances in the various editions of the NTF, the first meeting with András Haházi was probably (or may have) occasioned by cinema with Marian Crişan's Morgen.