Adriana Chiruta
Even if I admire the work of laboratory theatres and of some visionaries of the so called postmodern dance, in training actors and dancers as well, I do believe that our next professional focus should not be the performers` trainings, but training and empowering the spectators` mindsbodies as political tools for freedom and for non-discriminatory regimes. How shall we do that, especially now, when we seem disempowered by COVID pandemics? Maybe by devising other performance species, some radically participatory ones. Maybe by using nowadays multiple crises as creative solutions stimulator. Maybe by asking ourselves what kind of political gymnastics and social hierarchies was our art encouraging till now, so many times offering trainings for? Did we use our art as a nicer ornamented duplication of the common political show, by inviting people to admire us while we offered them another training for shutting up and for keeping themselves unnoticed and in the dark? A training followed by some applauses (votes) and ended with them going quietly home without disturbing the good image about our valuable existence? Are there some other possibilities, even with the professional risk of getting out of any aesthetic genres? What about changing completely the paradigm of performing arts and of our relations to the public to a nonlinear, fractal like, polyphonical, more complex one? And how about using our art to train people to occupy the stage of their own life, both personally & politically, instead of just applauding others’?
a fragment of fitness for dreamers manifesto / from 2013 - ongoing
Contact:
adrianachiruta@yahoo.com
Performing arts professional, post-conceptual artist, philosopher & cultural manager
passionate by the laboratory theatres phenomenon and postmodern dance for their complex approach to the performer`s training, intercultural practices and hippie attitude toward life, she initiated in 2008 the International Center for Performing Arts (Cluj, Sibiu) that hosted master classes led by artists from the most long living theatre laboratories of Europe: Yoshi Oida (C.I.R.T.), Jean-Jacques Lemêtre (Théâtre du Soleil) and Frans Winther (Odin Teatret). In 2011 she created PASAJ, a performing arts laboratory gathering actors, dancers, visual artists and musicians. The company was located in the Paintbrush Factory (Cluj), one of the main contemporary art spaces in Romania. Using performing arts as an artistic form of psychosocial experiments, during 2012 she directed with PASAJ a political performance: 4FAUST & The Brainwashing Machines and a participatory physical theatre performance focused entirely on the relation performer-spectator: FEED(me)BACK. She also led a series of workshops on improvisation techniques, physical theatre and postdramatic theatre playwriting, publishing in 2010 Improvisation Handbook. 85 Theatre Games, to encourage the use of performing arts techniques in education in Romania. Since 2014 she start inventing a new country and `emigrate` in it (Sibiu area). This country for artists and scientists is called Carambach and it will provide the infrastructure for a contemporary art ecolaboratory. Carambach`s first project Building Ecostructures for Other Performance Species, consisting of a performative research on CARE FOR OTHER(nes)S / altruism theme, won the Cultural Management Academy prize, being supported by Goethe Institut, ColectivA and Heritage Contact Zone. Since 2017, she`s working on creating a tool box combining performing arts techniques, logic, political and urbanism`s philosophy, in order to help architects & urban planners integrate the polyphony of our differences into spaces of cooperation, converting thus the geometries of power into geometries of non-discriminatory democracy and switching our society to more collaborative mindset & reflexes. The Alive Space. Non-modernist exercises for architects | a workshop book and Fragile Penguins on the Edge of Gravitational Waves / a performative architecture nest will be its outcomes. Besides theatre directing, she studied philosophy with a main interest in political philosophy and on conditioning humans through their cities in modernist urbanism (bachelor thesis The Cities of Reason. From Descartes` Project to Modern Urbanism Program, 2003) and in logic and epistemological patterns (master degree thesis The Identity, 2004). In 2019 she emigrated into the visual arts zone after the curator Anca Verona Mihuleț welcomed her as part of the group of Romanian and French artists in ”A villa of one’s own”, Romania-France Season 2019. The results of this two months of artistic residence were, in France, Tasting Life Series a corpus of 3 pieces of sound/video & performative installations: dancing with Woolf, reality is a matter of taste, 3 minutes of nothing to do and in Romania a workshop and performance FITNESS FOR DREAMERS | Kids laboratory of research and practice of anarcho-surrealist languages. In 2021 she presented Techniques to get out of the needle for those who believe they are butterflies, a performative installation consisting of video, sound, 11 micro-movement techniques in CHRONICLES OF THE FUTURE SUPERHEROES, an international 6 months exhibition curated by Anca Verona Mihuleț @ Kunsthalle Bega, Romania. 2022 started with a residency at Tranzit Bucharest on Performing Survival. Carambach`s Lesson and with Love as political power or how to rewrite our future with our breath in TRIUMF AMIRIA. The Museum of Queer Culture at Suprainfinit Gallery, Bucharest. In june 2022 she was part of Platforma de arte vizuale PAV produced at Sibiu by Dan Perjovski in the frame of Documenta 15 with a 3 pieces of video ecofeminist reminder: The kiss | Piece (peace) for women and pollinating insects | We all cry the same way. Then followed a participation with in Now the impulse is to live! curated by Raluca Voinea with Sit on Something at The Order of Architects, Bucharest and with the first tests of How NOT to plant a baobab in Greenland | a game for postapocalyptic relations at Topocentrala, Sofia.