TOSCANA

… just what do we see? Two superimposed heads framed by feet, which seem to have lost their anatomic origin: is it a family portrait, a potentially offensive love scene, the staging of a fetish or a premonition of mourning?

In “Toscana”, desire, or obsessive desire, neutralises these differences and blends them into the search of delusive satisfaction. Obsessions have their own space and time which they impose upon whatever circumstances have triggered their enactment. Obsessions carry their own screen of carnal opaqueness, unto which anything can be projected – previous or virtual fragments of reality.

The poet is a spectator, fascinated by the power of his fixation. He is a supermarket Adam – his dubious, triple Eve is born from a frozen rib (next to a frozen snake). They travel through the derisive Tuscany of supermarket products, play on the surface of eroticism, convert their perversion into philosophy, exhaust themselves in compulsive repetition and lose the coordinates of their bodies.

The finale will necessarily be open, formless. When one reminisces of Tuscan glory or lost virility, one cannot really decide between eggs, toilet paper, raw meat or beauty & love lotions.

Mihnea Mircan

Evenimentul zilei

Coming of age as a theatre director, Nona Ciobanu confirms with every show the praise that met her early exercises. After a long trail of prizes and European collaborations, her cultural foundation and the Toaca theatre have found in Casa Eliad a perfect setting to develop and broaden the scope of those early ideas.

Nona Ciobanu's vision of “Toscana” enhances the particular aura of Vladimir Holan's texts that lingering “holiday sadness” described by one of the characters. Holan unfolds the avatars of an essentially masculine sadness, as the narrator/poet realizes he is but a phantasmatic construction of femininity, a projection of his “muses”. Initially, the three women seem to be only the mobile background of virile exploits, perhaps even “film stills” of manly anguish, as their grace brings forth an undertone of suffering. But, as the play brilliantly shows, the text is actually in its turn generated by this “live” context, by the energy and enthralled dance of feminine bodies.

This humorous play on consumerism and destiny, confusing buyer and product, the gaze of man and that of woman takes place in the remarkably ingenious set designed by Iulian Baltatescu. The frantic movement of three trolleys articulates between the first room, corrupted by the images of the supermarket, and a kind of Venice of the subconscious, a subterranean world of seduction. ln their passionate drive through these spaces, the male characters appear as modern versions of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The joy of deciphering the text gives way to the joy of seeing and hearing. Interpretation is replaced by touch and the poet abandons his noble quest, enmeshed in the sensuous meanderings of Venice.

Doru Mares

Observator cultural

“Toscana” belongs to the international trend of theatrical projects crossing the boundaries of dance and multimedia techniques. Nona Ciobanu gives equal importance to text and movement, as she seems progressively interested in exploring the body's inner freedom, the pressure exerted by the body upon the words that attempt to hide it, to keep corporeality from becoming ob-scene.

What we do see on the scene is a play about writing poetry, about silencing with words the pulse of the body. The poet is relegated to the task of an actor who continuously rehearses the role of writing, the dazzling moment of inspiration. But the reveries of the actor render ineffective the search for ideal form of the poet. The women are an unsettling presence, never deciding between the stance of the muse and that of the wife. The monologue changes into a dialogue about the difficulties of communication and the poet loses his way in the supermarket where memories are on display, on colorful shelves.

Claudia Lipan

Teatrul azi