Nona Ciobanu is one of the most successful Romanian stage directors of her generation. She graduated in the 1990s and combined the professional choices made by her colleagues before and after the fall of communism, working both in Romania and abroad. 

In 1995 she earned a bachelor of arts in stage directing at UNATC and between 1993 and 1996 participated in several international workshops in directing, set design, Japanese butoh theatre, and cultural management. In her second year of studies, Ciobanu made her directorial debut with a childlike adaptation she wrote of a Romanian folktale, Youth without Old Age and Life without Death (Tinereţe fără bătrâneţe şi viaţă fără de moarte), which was successfully performed at the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest and internationally. 

In 1994, while still a student, Ciobanu was hired as a permanent associate director at the Mic Theatre. Her first professional production, Carlo Gozzi’s The Love for Three Oranges, won the award for debut at the 1994 UNITER Gala, as well as the best director awards at the I. L. Caragiale National Theatre Festival in Bucharest and at the 1995 Image-Theatre Festival in Satu-Mare. Ciobanu also successfully remounted it in 2004 at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California, where reviewer Charlene Baldridge described her directorial style as “pure, amusing, and refreshingly offbeat.” 

Searching for a place “outside the system” (Welsh) for her more experimental productions, together with actor and designer Iulian Bălţătescu, her long-time collaborator, Ciobanu founded the Toaca Cultural Foundation in Bucharest in 1996, which has supported young artists and interdisciplinary projects, including some of her own. 

For example, Ciobanu’s Orpheus: or, How to Undress Your Feathers (Orfeu sau cum să te dezbraci de pene) opened at the 2005 East Meets East Festival in Cambridge, England, then played at other theatres and festivals in Romania and abroad, receiving enthusiastic reviews. Although it was based on her selections from poems and a novel by Gellu Naum, the performance did not rely on the spoken word. Theatre critic Anna Carey of the Irish Times described it as “a production of astonishing beauty and grace,” writing, “Is Nona Ciobanu’s retelling of the Orpheus myth a play, a dance piece, a poem, a puppet show or a video installation? The answer is all of the above” (Carey). 

In 2008 Ciobanu coordinated Pilgrim towards the Centre (Pelerin spre centru) for the 2008 Puzzle Project, initiated in Romania under the auspices of the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue. It consisted of a video installation by Ciobanu and Slovenian artist Peter Košir and a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which she adapted and directed. In her powerful ritualistic version, Prospero and Miranda were the only speaking characters; Ariel and Caliban were both performed by an African-French dancer, and the other characters were suggested through music by a Syrian band (Zirra 22). 

Ciobanu continued her collaboration with Košir with Hopscotch, a multimedia performance and video installation produced in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2010. The show also included live music played on a traditional Persian fiddle and choreography based on the whirling rituals of Sufi dervishes. 

Over the years, Ciobanu developed a personal creative strategy. Before beginning rehearsals, she likes to define clearly the production’s main ideas, and together with designer Bălţătescu to search for the best and simplest images to represent them. She also prefers to cast actors who can freely improvise during the first stage of a production, inspiring her “in getting the depth of the literary material” on which they are working. Towards the end of the process, she edits the findings, selecting what is essential and shaping the final version of a production (Ciobanu). 

Her shows have gained Ciobanu international recognition as “a director who views theatre as a place for poetic transformations” (Welsh). Although they are usually based on a written script, the text is only a starting point for creating performances that are mainly visual.

Diana Manole - pp 257-258