THE WALTZ of the DOGS

Nona Ciobanu - For quite a while I had been waiting to take up a text by Andreyev. The questions that haunted me after the first time I read the text gradually grew into the show itself: what is the limit of the road that a strong consciousness is willing to take? Can life be planned in advance?

Henrik Tile - a bank clerk, receives a letter from his fiancée, in which she lets him know she has married someone else. Up to that point, Tile had minutely planned his life. Liza's letter shatters his plan. Tile wants to touch the absolute. He does not commit suicide when he gets the letter because he wants to understand. Suicide is not the reaction of a neurotic mind, it is not an impulse, but the Conclusion; and in order to reach the conclusion, you must take a certain road. The punctiliousness with which he does his accounting is similar to the way he plans his house and his life with wife and children. He is sentenced to calculate. But life resists calculation. His calculations fail him. The million and its virtual embezzlement are another calculation for a life surrogate. The million is only a forced alternative to the failure of life. Tile plays a farce on himself. We sometimes do that with our own lives. This is the source of Andreyev's particular blend of comedy and tragedy.

Journalist - What is your impression of Andreyev's characters?

NC - Tile is not very Russian (not according to the cliché), as none of Andreyev's characters is. Tile has a melancholy aloofness, a melancholy which Andreyev opposes to the cliché of Russian melancholy. Andreyev mocks Russian melancholy. He is looking in a different direction than Cehov.

Journalist - What were your intentions with this show?

NC- With Andreyev, everything is simplicity and amplitude. Nothing pretentious, nothing derisory. His character is humanly fulfilled because of his total participation in his destiny. His consciousness becomes almost palpable because of the circumstances he is under, because what we see there is our own ego taken beyond our normal thresholds. Together with the actors, I have tried to highlight the naturalness of life on stage. The natural gesture is that through which the spectator opens to the stage, showing him things he or she had not suspected, making him or her wonder at the potential of an apparently fixed situation, as opposed to that gesture which makes the spectator fall back into habit. The show raises questions about the inability of people to be together, about lies and crime, locating the story in a space, which each one of us could inhabit.

Journalist - Do not miss "The Waltz of the Dogs", directed by Nona Ciobanu. It is both the character's confrontations with his destiny and the director confronting a rich text.

Magdalena Popa Buluc- Curentul

Theatre lovers will undoubtedly enjoy a masterpiece performance - "The Waltz of the Dogs", a splendid text by Leonid Andreyev, staged by the very young and talented Nona Ciobanu, with Alexandru Repan at his best.

Silvia Kerim - Formula AS

The "The Waltz of the Dogs" - an incursion of Nona Ciobanu into the Slavic world, a performance of a great success!

Felicia Mihali -  Evenimentul zilei