In 2010 as a representative of the Underground Theatre  Festival I  took part  in a few European programmes for  theatre professionals. Here are some thoughts about this experience.

SPACE “Programmers on the move”

SPACE is an abbreviation for the project “Supporting Performing Arts Circulation in Europe”. Training  “Programmers on the move” united  in 3 groups 33 artistic directors from  20 European countries. I was lucky to join the group  which had  sessions in Germany (Mulheim-an-der Rhur, festival Theater der Welt), Belgium and France (Kortrijk-Lille, festival Next). In Germany we talked about mechanisms  of including a festival both into already existing national cultural landscape and into a real urban landscape of the city. In a word we started with the festival concept and finished with the way it could  be related to concrete city venues.

In  Belgium  one of our tasks was to create  a new festival model from scratch. Somehow I convinced my colleagues to choose Romania as a platform  for our experiment and together we invented  a “Trans-festival” with the total  budget of 5 million euro and with the most bold programme you could ever imagine. I still keep this concept and who knows, maybe one day…!!

Of course SPACE was not only about dreaming but about learning some concrete things as well.  So we talked about what  performance one should choose for the  opening and what would be the perfect close of the festival, how to initiate a scandal for attracting mass-media, what do you do with prejudices of your public and what is the perfect way to combine local tastes with European trends without becoming a parody on a big world.

When I found out that our Underground was the only Romanian festival chosen for SPACE (in total there were 105 applications from 26 European countries)  my first thought was: “Oh. That’s a challenge”. 2010 edition of the Underground Theatre Festival brought to Arad 36 performances from 12 countries and demonstrated perfect collaboration with Polish Institute, Czech Centre and city volunteers.  But would it be enough to impress  Europe? I feared  whether my experience of working with independent companies in a provincial city close  to the Hungarian border would be of any interest to other participants.

It turned out that  Romania still remains some kind of terra incognito for the rest of EU. Everybody was curious about what’s going on here  but nobody had  serious expectations about Romanian theatre. Silviu Purcarete, Theatre festival in Sibiu, Cosmin Manolescu, Gianina Carbunariu, Stefan Peca  - this what theatre professionals from other countries named me when I asked them about Romania. This is great, but it does not give you a whole picture. There are  still two many gaps in this coordinate system.

Of course the  difference between cultural budgets and funding opportunities plays a terrific role.  For example in the Netherlands  there are more than 500 private funds offering support for artists. In Romania  the system of the  support of the independent cultural sector  has started to develop only a few years ago.  That is why I could not help smiling when people from NY, Berlin or Vienna were saying: “I run a small and poor festival”… You are poor?! No, you are not poor. We are poor!

Whatever, being poor must not stop you from being active and searching for a new knowledge. I had been the only representative from Romania in the “Programmers on the move”  but a few months later SPACE  organizers received already 6 Romanian applications for “Writers on the move”: a  training  dedicated to critics and theatre journalists. So I think that  with time Romanian presence in European cultural stage will become more and more visible.

Symposium “East-West passages”

Being chosen by International Theatre Institute from Berlin as a participant for  the meeting in Leipzig  during the famous Euro-scene festival was one of my  most interesting experiences of 2010.   

The main impulse  of my group was “How does culture survive the financial crisis?” It started like a real psychotherapy of common complaints about projects and programs  sacrificed  in different countries. But then we realized that crisis  has positive effect as well.

Ex-competitors  turned  into  new partners because surviving together  is always  easier. The artistic offer has changed as well while producing with a minimum of cultural funding made us listen more carefully  to our  local community. For me it was absolutely fantastic to find out about examples of a social-artistic  and voluntary work done by my colleagues from Slovenia. Or about the way such a  small Baltic country as Estonia  managed to become one of the EU leaders in selling theatre tickets.

The whole Symposium was dedicated to these differences between Eastern and Western Europe. Do they still exist or are we all Europeans now? I think the way of Poland as a country which made fantastic economical progress and both kept and developed  national cultural identity  could be a vector for Romania as well.  But here we come to the problem  of the change of  generations in cultural management.

In  2010 I also  took part in  the project of professional exchange organized by European Network of Cultural Centres. I spent two weeks in  Hungarian cultural centre  in Pecs,  the city which managed to win a title of the  European Capital of Culture.  Pecs and Arad have economical and demographical similarities, these are twin-cities. But with equal start positions cultural potential of Pecs  surpasses Arad enormously. Firstly  because of the joint work of all cultural institutions in the city. And secondly because of mentality. Hungarians live with the thought that they must be competitive to the rest of Europe and they are quite strict with themselves.

I came to Romania 5 years ago and I still have a feeling that 75% of population live here looking back, and not forward. I think this is a secret of Gianina Carbunariu’s (playwright and director) popularity among young public: she is the one who lives here and now and  makes theater for people who live here and now as well.

In Leipzig we discussed  the most popular European subjects: consumerism, consumerism, whole Europe is nuts about it. In the last edition of our festival we had three performances with the use of shopping trolleys. But is it really relevant for Romania? I don’t think so.  The culture of consuming is what is missing. It’s not only what do you need, but what do you really deserve.  And stimulating people for  being smart consumers we stimulate their self-respect and developing of our society in common.

Would I like to change something  in the structure and concept  of the Underground Festival after my training? Yes. And I would like to talk about it very soon.