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” ...
The problem is not mimicking, mimicking is, most of the times, the great enemy. The problem is touching instantly - and accurately – that invisible ball of nerves that the imaginary and personal memory crosses instantaneously. And being the body crossing the honey, and not imitate the movement of the body in a honey pool. And, after all, how would you imitate it?
Imagine that an actor would be told by the director, as a primary indication for the construction of a role: “Play transparency!” I hope that you won’t find it funny, although I'm sure it must seem nearly impossible. Not hate, not love, not indecision, not sadness or frustration, but transparency. The body is alive, material, cut into space, invisibly hitting the air and disrupting it. What’s with this 3D prank? I remember that when I saw at the National Theatre in Cluj the play He Who Gets Slapped (by Leonid Andreyev, directed by Anca Bradu and scenography by Lia Vasilescu, 1998) I had this acute physical sensation: that the actor’s transparency is not only possible but also attainable. I liked the performance in parts, and at times it seemed slow, maybe a little too demonstrative (now, the play isn’t of the easiest either, to be quite honest!) In contrast, Irina Wintze in Consuella’s role - in fact, compared with the original text, a role quite sketchy - managed the performance to produce a vibration in the audience never seen before, as if the character she embodied was and, at the same time, wasn’t there, in that universe of cardboard and colourful costumes, of passion, manipulation and deception. I wouldn’t say that she was floating (although the image of the floating dance over scenery and props, is included here) but that it exuded a sort of enigma-interrogation in every breath.
Irina Wintze graduated UNATC in 1991, and since she played dozens and dozens of roles. For Phaedra’s Love by Sarah Kane, staged by Mihai Maniutiu in Arad, she was nominated for Best Actress at the UNITER Awards in 2007. Is this much? Is this little? It is, at any rate, completely irrelevant, as we are dealing with that rare kind of actresses for which the columnist language (and even the trained columnist), seem to be powerless. For many years, she’s been preparing (with her low voice, with barely perceptible gestures from the outside), together with Bacs Miklos, generations and generations of students in Cluj, who later became great actor. When she is alone on the stage, she fills it with magnetism. When she is present in a team, the team turns into a balanced organism...
In The Colonel - Bird (by Hristo Bojcev, directed by Alexandru Dabija, 2003) she played a patient in the sanatorium-monastery, called Titch, who was absolutely certain that she doesn’t measure more than a few centimetres. She was obsessed that she will be crushed by the feet of her room mates, hide in corners to shun, franticly and aggressively argued in her own defence, with the cunningness of a prey cat and, at the same time, she involuntarily exposed her fragility and inner wound, that of a child who fails to grow up. A probably very difficult character composition, exhausting, distilled into such a gracefully complex interpretation that psychosis itself naturally became naturally genuine, a part of you, the viewer.
Also in 2003, I was writing on the dance-theatre experiment proposed by Vava Stefanescu in Solo On Line:
“A rather melancholic piano aria opens the story, triggering the gestural actions of the two characters: seemingly without perceiving each other, the two women tend to take possession of the square territory of the stage, on in broken lines as well as apathetic suffering, the other in a sort of obsessive restlessness. Vava Stefanescu will order coloured mats on all sides of the stage, will install a laptop on which she will work quickly and nervously, will make a bed out of a folded blanket; and all the while, Irina Wintze’s actions associating opaquely, in crosses and segregations of herself and the world, search for clothes and dressing up in the open, falls and lifts, frenzies and dives into autism. On the pace of musical collage, (unsigned by anyone, bringing together classical chamber music but slow music, reggae, cafe concert etc., the soundtrack probably also belonging to the choreographer) that divides the performance into multiple “scenes”, states of tension and denied meeting between the two characters succeed. The actresses-dancers exchange their condition, are serving one other, they contemplate each other with the feeling that they are looking one through the other, repositioning themselves in relation to the always repetitive collage on the computer, restore the design of the scenery objects, in a sort of competition which emphasizes to paroxysm the feeling of loneliness and incommunication. (...)
Finally, in a scene-section before the end, the two beings-entities get to compete in the very centre of the stage, in a long and exceptionally suggestive climax of exchanging clothes, rhythmically placed one on top of the other, removing and reordering them, mutually exchanged: role appointing and unveiling, self-denials and recompositions, identities and differences without rest. Tension reaching its peak, Vava and Irina will finally end up finally dancing together, nevertheless rather in a sort of effort to preclude, to cancel one another than an effort to find each other. As if the unwhispered story of longing for otherness, or the union in itself of the double, turns out, after all, in its essence, to be equal with fear and the denial of such a union. (...) The crystalline beauty of Vava Stefanescu’s poem and her and Irina Wintze’s amazing expressiveness turn Solo On Line into an audience experience that I woulnd’t hesitate to call overwhelming.”
Moreover, the willingness to experiment and the courage to take on the adventure, however risky - or perhaps precisely because it is very risky, turn Irina Wintze into a model of dedication and generosity. Let us suppose, that for Psychosis 4:48, directed by Mihai Maniutiu, the actress could rely on her previous experiences with the director, in the construction of one of the most difficult and strenuous characters in contemporary theatre. But for the dramatization of Ilisie Florina’s novel, Matthew Call, in a multimedia performance, by Ozana Budau as a playwright, and Andreea James as director, Philip Odangiu and Irina Wintze on stage in the film episodes, actress could not have had, before embarking on this journey, any guarantee; only a... work hypothesis. Undertaken and served with mastery and dedication, fascinating ultimately. Unfortunately, the film directors only go rarely to the theatre; otherwise they would have had the revelation of a strange presence, of radiant beauty.
Not far from the end of the season, within the TIFF selection for short films, but also within the Galactoria section, I received a new gift: the actress playing the central role of a deaf-mute who finds back her son, abandoned before, now a Rock star, in Rock n' Roll Sticks, written and directed by Cristian Pascariu. Here, Irina Wintze is all glances, at times playful, at times frightened, at times communicative, at times deceived, at times happy to elation. A crossing of the void, a must see.
What I think lies in fact behind these poses, in the silent and humble being that seems to be hardly touching the only carpet of the stage, is an inexhaustible inner power, born out of of faith and love. Not to mention the mastery... because, isn’t it, mastery is a prerequisite taken for granted, which you only start to building upon. This may also be hypothesis (a working one), as I never exchanged with Irina Wintze more than polite greetings. But any meeting, in theatre or on screen, convince me once more.
