Mihai Mihalcea, performer, choreographer and director of the National Centre of Dance Bucharest, pulls a Lebanese out of his hat, sets his residence in Bucharest, and questions the double status of the artist-manager. Mihai Mihalcea puts up a double performance. Mihalcea creates one performance of the authority of the new author - Fairuz is a Lebanese of an unclear history – and another of the witch-mania. Farewell! (or the inconspicuous slips of the limbic system) is based on a bio-fictional concept, in the sense that it focuses on building an artist-character, highlighting the schizoid existence of the artist-manager and the entire dualism deriving from it. Mihai Mihalcea, director of the National Centre of Dance, concocted in Farid Fairuz an artistic identity and a subtending stage name for himself. Farid Fairuz, a project of fictional biography, sets off prospective strategies for the author’s absence and presence. The author is the one contriving his own range of appearances running from borrowing names (famous performers have resorted to equally famous names to sign their work – Saint Orlan), to borrowing personal circumstances, or positionings in the most exceptional situations (Sophie Calle got a job as a chambermaid and documented her experience in an art project). The artist transfers and refers himself to artifices of identity, distancing him from his old self, or questioning his condition in a Romania where social intervention appears to be a lost cause.
The author is the most fragile and mouldable work-in-progress.
This is how Mihalcea explains his choice of Farid Fairuz : “I no longer want entertainment! I only want extreme entertainment! I want Babi Minune singing at the court of the prince in Swan Lake! I want to hear Mariana Nicolesco at the Miss Piranda Show and Irina Loghin singing “Prayer for the Romanian People”, in the Eurovision opening! I want Dan Puric to step dance at the opening of the People’s Salvation Cathedral or, even better, I want Puric for president! I bid my farewell to reason and decency! I bid my farewell to the Romanian culture and its issues. From now on I am Farid Fairuz’’.
Farid Fairud signed up for Facebook and sent a large number of friend requests. Fairuz contrived a virtual behaviour, correspondent of the fiction he perpetuated. Then he wrote long and intricate e-mail messages to culture journalists in which he asked them, in English, questions about Romanian culture, so their answers could help him in better developing the project. Then, the National Centre of Dance made a press release saying that the Lebanese had a slight far-fetched behaviour and that his collaboration to the National Centre of Dance led to a tensioning of the relations with him. And then the exotic Lebanese came to life, “was adopted by two Bedouins who fed him camel milk and raised him according to their beliefs.”
