The Platform of Contemporary Dance was opened on September 17th by Mihai Mihalcea, the director of the National Centre of Dance in Bucharest, Vava Ștefănescu, artistic director NCDB and by the Minister of Culture, Theodor Paleologul, whose question - "Hey you ephemeral is it referring to me?" - was among the few good jokes of a minister who wants to have humour at any costs and who, often, screws it up.
The presence of Theodor Paleologu at the NCDB can be considered as a moment of changing an ideological paradigm and of politically-cultural assuming the representation of a phenomenon expulsed from the domain of hard arts with weak arguments. Paleologu is the first minister who participates to a contemporary dance event with a singular span if we think about the concentrate of Romanian shows presented to some festival directors, critics and programmers invited to connect with what is alive and authentic in the Romanian dance. The NCDB also hosted other events relevant for the debate of contemporary corporal-radicalism - the performances of some artists who are creators of choreographic reflection and modalisation -Vera Mantero, Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy -, ignored by the authorities who systematically confuse contemporary dance with ballet.
In this context that is of a serious and, in the long run, extremely dangerous lack of information and adequate support, the contemporary dance in Romania consistently dismantled the handicap of perception through the construction of a double articulated performing space. The specificity of the interests and working modalities and the redoubling, through assumption and not through artificial undertaking, of the practices of the international choreographic discourse were the two paths of evolution.
The Platform of Contemporary Dance, with a capital of semantic image through which, the permanent emergency status, the status of a marking awaiting for unmarking is reflected - Băi, efemerule! (Hey, you ephemeral! - n.t.) - referentially defines the type of reporting to a regime of artistic existence that is more in the air than on the ground.
The state of possibility in suspension was proper to the contemporary Romanian dance. Despite the umbilical connections that are constantly cut, the dance succeeded in surviving in a performing manner. And it grew.
It can be spoken about a personal identity and about elements that are constantly explored in the shows created by Carmen Coțofană, Maria Baroncea, Mădălina Dan, Mihaela Dancs, Alexandra Pirici, Cătălina Gubandru, Iuliana Stoianescu.
There is a certain quality of the innocence doubled by the force of filling the body with the material of the stage, which individualises the performances of the choreographers.
Carmen Coțofană seduces, without exhibitionisms, through fragile femininity and through the temperature of the well calibrated outbursts. Through what could be called the rhetoric of the explosions without excesses. The choreographer has a rhythm of the scenic presence in which contradictory states with the peddle pushed on vertige melt. From Ready (Modern) Made (choreography: Florin Fieroiu), Coțofană keeps in Stage Psychosis (presented within the Platform of Contemporary Dance) the emotional charge of the experiences at the edge between self-control and vrie. The choreographer, the phantom-like silhouette anticipated by a fist of light, refines the unbalanced balance in Staga Psychosis, the walking on a fine line in a perimeter that she feels elastic and ready to break. Dressed in black from head to toe, with feline leap-movements and with moans of a night bird, Carmen Coțofană tests the edge of the stage with her fingertips as if she would want to see if it burns her or not. The exertions-moans-squeaks-sighs from the tape push her movements towards the centre of the stage. They arch her body, bend her like an old woman after which they stretch her like a diva who pushes her chest up front. Step by step, the sounds are taken by the choreographer and become the intimate column of fear, uncertainty and of her impotence, exploded in a scream-stream of agony. Carmen Coțofană verbalises in a proper tempo, in which the syllables are said after an interior emotional logic, the confrontation with the self from the stage carpet, with the consciousness, with the 'work object' and with the painful vulnerability. Coțofană makes abstract the friction between public mask - private mask in a performative space that interferingly mixes them up to dementia.
