ORPHEUS, or HOW TO UNDRESS the FEATHERS

Orpheus, or How to Undress Your Feathers *****

Project Upstairs

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. Doomed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice are joined by another couple who are sometimes Persephone and Hades, sometimes Dionysus and the Maenad. These wicked tricksters manipulate the lives of Orpheus and Eurydice, who express their love through gracefully acrobatic dance and the moving, surreal poetry of Gellu Naum. The performers are uniformly excellent, especially Liliana Gavrilescu as Eurydice, but perhaps the real stars of the show are the impressively inventive video projections with which the performers constantly interact. Combined with Alexander Balanescu's beautiful Michael Nyman-esque music, the result is a production of astonishing beauty and grace.

Anna Carey

Irish Times

Star turns

***** Excellent

**** Good

*** More good than bad

** More bad than good

* Bad

Orpheus or How to Undress Your Feathers 19-Sep-2005 to: 24-Sep-2005

The Dublin Fringe Festival in association with the CityArts will present a play from the highly acclaimed Romanian director, Nona Ciobanu. Orpheus or How to Undress Your Feathers has already been a sensation in Europe with minimal text and an extensive use of multimedia. This is a moving production that involves concepts of love and death, desire and yearning to understand life in a concrete way. The audience will enjoy a performance that uses little text and instead focuses on expression through music, movement and multi-media. Orpheus or How to Undress Your Feathers is a modern interpretation of the eponymous hero and his love, Eurydice. A talented composer named Alexander Balanescu who has collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys, Michael Nyman, Kraftwerk, David Byrne and Philip Glass has composed the score to Orpheus. Nona Ciobanu is an acclaimed director working as Resident Director at the Mic Theatre in Bucharest. She is also the Co-Founder of Toaca Cultural Foundation which is a non-profit non-governmental organisation which promotes contemporary arts and offers young artists training and support. Orpheus or How to Undress Your Feathers is a visually stunning and powerful show received rave reviews in Romania and in Europe. To coincide with this powerful production a panel discussion entitled Theatre and the City:Dialogue and Dissent will take place on Thursday, 22nd September at 2pm in the Project Cube. The speakers will include Nona Ciobanu (Toaca Cultural Foundation, Romania), Michael Klien (Daghdha Dance Company, Limerick) and Aisling Reidy (Irish Council for Civil Liberties). Admission is free to this panel discussion.

DUBLIN THEATRE

www.dublinlinks.com

Looking in the Mirror… - fragment

Developed in theatrical reading seductive in its visual richness, the original melodic outline and the poignant reflection of the show break apart from a complacent homage (substantially, still there, 90 years after the birth of the poet), as well as from the encomiastic paraphernalia of radio theatre, honing on the identity of vocation, in a show that we will unreservedly describe as exceptional.

The script stems from Naum’s poems and excerpts from his novel Zenobia that are as synthetic as they are intelligently mixed. It opens the way for a kind of experiment that is spared excessive gesticulation and re-conceptualizes important questions of the modern world. Technical means become ‘actors’ of archetypal foundations. As it traverses the history of civilization, the Orphic myth alternates with folk Romanian love spells, manipulated to build up a contrasting continuum. Similarly, the impression of video images on set design objects or on the bodies of actors effects the switch from dream to its reverse, from the image of vertical infinity to that of enamored hands transgressing distances. The set design is conceived as symbol and springboard for the dynamic of the performance and its provides the framework for a geometrically configured improvisation, in tandem with the director’s vision.

The show starts from these sparse elements and proceeds by transfiguring props through acting and letting acting be transfigured by them. There is a constant flow between movement, gesture and symbol, on which successive layers of meaning become superimposed, in an existential parable about limits and endlessness. Love-death-rebirth, ascension-fall-finding oneself through the other, border space of silence and speech – all these channel the discourse in the direction of restless quest and essential memory. The show works in the space defined by the opposition between gods and mortals, fruitful for a performance that is never gratuitous and reveals a remarkable distinction of thought.

VALENTIN DUMITRESCU

22 Magazine

Feathers make it much better – Orpheus or How to undress your feathers

It would be naïve to imagine that human bodies are completely featherless. Someday, a poor poet comes along – his name is Orpheus and he has a triple citizenship (primitive, classic and Greek). Orpheus starts talking in a language everybody believed dead after an international traffic accident, and people realize they have always been covered in feathers, which is very good. Yet, to quote another poet, Naum to be exact, it’s much better to have leaves, to remain somewhere full of leaves, with a protective plank of wood tied to your backbone and a maternal polenta, it’s much better to have leaves and feathers and masks and an orange voice in which there is a lot of lovemaking going on – it’s all a question of partners. Orpheus had one, he had Eurydice. But one day, a day as bad as the worst days in the world, a snake comes to Eurydice and bites her and she dies and a desolate Orpheus starts roaming the world, playing his cithara, taming beasts and humans – which is really the same thing. And those two poor humans, every time the same and other, who preserve love in the world, who love each other desperately, have their regular hands and feet, their regular, endless planks, their shoulders full of leaves, their hair of corn and walk around with Nigredo hieroglyphs on their faces and so on. And the bearded one, with the gentleman appearance, talks with his mouth full of smoke and fog and allows a lady lather soap on him and the lady starts cursing when you most expect it. Those bastards love each other like sentimental rags and she dies and he’s desperate and music tames explosive snakes, lure insecure pelicans and green lions – to make the story short, there is general lament and absolutely charming grief. Coming back, with our feet (covered in feathers) planted in the ground, I must confess it’s been a long time since I saw something as beautiful as this performance.

IULIAN TANASE

Caţavencu Academy

How to undress your prejudices

With Orpheus we have an ambitious project inspired by the texts of the great poet Naum and fulfilled with remarkable, forward-looking refinement by the director Nona Ciobanu in a collaboration between the Toaca Foundation and Mic Theatre.

The video projections, light design and graphics of Iulian Baltatescu (also performing), the puppets and masks created by Liliana Gavrilescu (also performing) and Viorel Pater, as well as Alexander Balanescu’s evocative music play exceptional parts in this performance of surprising syncretism. These are almost never used solely as illustration, they are more often complementary or in exciting counterpoint with the lines of actors, sometimes prolonging expressively the movement and hand language (splendid moments, recalling the ‘mirror’ scene in David Esrig’s ‘Rameau’s Nephew’), other times uncovering fragments of corporeal plasticity and mimic, penetrating the intimacy of protagonists or imbuing with poetry and mystery the silence on stage. These fast-paced images and meandering fascicles of light very often convey interrogation and lyrical meaning. Naum’s writing is both subtle and frank, narratively poignant and playful – and this oscillation is reflected on stage by the permanent glissando between an attempt to reinterpret the myth of Orpheus and the raw familiarity of Romanian love spell, by the exquisite story-telling which makes recourse to images and very few props (a screen, a few benches) and by the convincing alertness of the puppet and mask play, in which each of the two performers acquire a triple identity – actor, mask and puppet.

The overly discussed and frequently diluted phrase ‘image theatre’ finds a strong and fortunate claim to legitimacy in Nona Ciobanu’s show –through its intellectual and emotional tension, the generosity of the 4 actors, through its rigorous blend of art and technology, shatters the prejudices which normally block access to such heterogeneous forms of expression in contemporary theatre, contributing to enhance the interpretive skills of the audience.

ION PARHON

Romania Libera

Theatre and avant-garde poetry

One of the most exciting and simultaneously not easily described premieres of the season happened recently on the stage of Foarte Mic Theater. Orpheus is surprising performance, conceived and directed by Nona Ciobanu after a few texts by the great Surrealist poet Gellu Naum.

The production actually opened in Cambridge at East meets east Festival and received excellent reviews in the British press. ”A wonderful show of discipline, adventure and technique…, wrote The Times, while the Sunday Time spoke of a“pure theatre, impressive and fluid.” The background is ensured by the Romanian-born violin player and composer Alexander Balanescu, while Nona Ciobnanu’s vision transports viewers to a territory of exploration, of completely free expression and irreversible sensorial upheaval, an area where instinct and reason meet in music, poetry and image. Naum’s poetry nourishes the relationships between the actors, while the arduous choreography of the actors is accompanied by the use of puppets and masks. Orpheus is a show which subjects audiences to a dizzying avalanche, perfectly mastered by Nona Ciobanu, of video projections, fantastic light design (which tames technology to an impressive artistic forms, often highlighting details of movement and the expressiveness of actors), Iulian Baltatescu’s graphics and the puppets and masks designed by Liliana Gavrilescu.

Romanian Reality

Antigona’s Sandals - WHAT ARE THE CULTURAL WAGERS OF ROMANIA TODAY?

The show staged by the tandem represented by Nona Ciobanu and Iulian Baltatescu concentrates –  in a refined, intelligent stage discourse –  a whole gallery of cultural signs whose common denominator is thus brought forth. This show is directed both to the spirit and to the soul, engendering a practially inescabable fascination. The chorus’ role is taken over by the musical support, while the characters are distributed and acting in twos, very rarely interacting. But all this ancient art scaffolding serves Nona Ciobanu and Iulian Baltatescu for constructing a multimedia show with numerous levels and whose roots reach deep in Gellu Naum’s avant-garde art: here you have a show that manages to speak about death, love and art. The ideas of the tandem are embodied by a theatrical team that is amazingly well trained. The measure of the exactness and milimetric precision underpinning the scores and interacting with the multimedia universe – consisting as is known of a number of parallel worlds which are nevertheless empowered to represent the mundane time of the characters which bears their aspirations and defeats – all this grants to the show its peculiar rhythm, spanning between dream and desire, between imponderable floating and mute pain.

EUGENIA ANCA ROTESCU

The Cultural Observer, No. 278

A show in which poetic speech in the pure Surrealist vein acquires concreteness without losing its ineffable edge, thanks to a visual ambient – designed by Iulian Baltatescu, where technology modestly and effectively serves art, and thanks to an almost tangible sonorous atmosphere and the (seldom syncopated) harmonious performance. A show about love, death, poetry and the poet – and, still, with very few words. We applaud, go on our ways and our minds return to it.

ALICE GEORGESCU

Sunday Magazine – Supplement of Financial Newspaper

Poetry, light and sound in “Orpheus”

BUCHAREST - An evening of light and sound, a poetics of drama was what the Teatru Mic theatre company of Bucharest in cooperation with the Toaca Studio offered for the first performance of “Orfeu sau Cum sa te dezbraci de pene” (Orpheus, or How to Pluck Yourself of Feathers), an extraordinary stage mounting of Nona Ciobanu, her own creation inspired from a text by Gellu Naum. The world premiere of the show happened on March 8-13 at the 2005 East Meets East festival in Cambridge. “It is an aesthetic relief to watch a piece of pure theatre, in which technique and discipline were fundamental... this is impressive work,” The Sunday Times said about the show. Nona Ciobanu’s staging is replete with ideas, including the idea of life, of love at all costs, of betrayal and death. This is an ocean of ideas, poetry of ideas and sound, of good, special music created by Alexander Balanescu, a renowned violinist and composer, music that perfectly combines images and moves in a whole, with a short text that also neatly fits in. All the electronic effects used for the show seamlessly complete the sense of the story with a special kind of visualisation, generating sensations, emotions, pleasure and even an eerie relaxation, with all the deep-going problems presented by the play. Contributing to the complexity of the show are also the actors, who are working hard, because this is one of the hardest plays, despite seeming a child’s game. This is a superb show that has to be carefully watched to discover its subtleties and depths. Sharing most of the burden are four actors that take themselves very seriously, being fully aware that they will have a hard task telling a story that the public should perceive as thus. They are Dana Tapalaga, Liliana Gavrilescu, Adrian Ciglenean and Iulian Baltescu, all of whom have won unanimous acclaim. Leaving aside the Orpheus myth, the images of the show are focused around a popular bad luck breaking song from Sanda Goloentia’s “Desire Machines” and a fragment of Michael Nyman’s “String Quartet No. 3.” This is a hard to stage and hard to watch show, and the public is better advised to expect amazing surprises, where there are masks, puppets, shadows and the serpent tempting to sin. Costumes are by Adeline Pater, technical staging by Costel Bud, light engineering by Corneliu Dragan and Roxana Docan, light design, video and graphics by Iulian Baltatescu, puppets and masks by Liliana Gavrilescu and Viorel Pater.

Mihaela Dordea

Nine O’Clock

New version of Orpheus myth on Bucharest stage

One month after it was successfully presented in Great Britain, the Foarte Mic Theater show, "Orpheus or How to Strip Off Feathers" will premiere in Bucharest on Friday. The show is based on Romanian poet Gellu Naum's interpretation of the story of Orpheus and is directed by Nona Ciobanu. The director says she was interested in finding new ways of looking at the myth of Orpheus, especially from the 21st century man's point of view. "Orpheus is the story of harmony, art and a desire to fulfill oneself through love. The actors will create this story, without concealing the more technical side of the art creation process," Ciobanu admitted. The director has always been interested in showing the public the less visible side of theater, explaining that directors have to show the way in which magic is created in theater. She has done that before in "Three Oranges in Love," which premiered in 2004 at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. Ciobanu had her breakthrough at the Edinburgh Theater Festival with a theater version of the classic Romanian fairy tale "Ageless Youth and Deathless Life. She has since staged successful shows on Bucharest and Piatra Neamt stages. Some of the best known are "As You Like It" by William Shakespeare, "Orgasm" by Vlad Zografi and "Melissa" by Nikos Kazantzakis. The absolute premiere of "Orpheus or How to Strip Off Feathers" was in Edinburgh and several other towns in Great Britain between March 8 and 13. The show features young actors Dana Tapalaga, Iulian Baltatescu and Liliana Gavrilescu, and also makes use of masks and puppets Music is an important element in "Orpheus," and Ciobanu worked with British musician Alexander Balanescu, who left Romania in 1969 and is now a well-known violinist and a prolific composer. Balanescu previously wrote theater music for several shows in Liege, France and Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro.

ANA MARIA IANCU

Daily News