by Mihai Lukács The Soviet director Vsevold Meyerhold employed theatre to consciously help the post-Revolutionary effort in the 1920-1930s Soviet Union and to manifest solidarity to workers and to the communist ideals. Radical changes in his (before and after the Revolution) theories prove the politically motivated development of his theatre-making: by rejecting the pre-Revolutionary theatre and its bourgeois baggage based on oppression and inequality, the former theatrical knowledge was abandoned and un-learned, while at the same time new subject positions and a revolutionary theatre could emerge. By connecting his theatrical explorations with the popular scientific ideas of the time, Meyerhold…
“I made jam in Barcelona from the strawberries picked by our ‘căpşunari’”[1] Interview with Matei Bejenaru The representations of labor and the image of the worker – ignored in post-socialist art – constitute the main research topics chosen by visual artist Matei Bejenaru. In his photographs, installations and performance projects, the artist analyzes the transformations of the contexts of labor in Romania and abroad. Construction sites, factories and strawberry fields are just some of the spaces which define work and power relations within the social art put forward by Matei Bejenaru. In the interview conducted by Mihaela Michailov, Bejenaru emphasizes…
by Mihaela Michailov Play-writing in the 50s and 60s centers on the image of the worker and on the new geography of labor in factories, enterprises and mines. The worker and work undertaken in often precarious conditions represent the themes of playwrights such as Lucia Demetrius, Mihai Davidoglu, Ion D. Sârbu, Maria Banuș etc., playwrights for whom the theatre functions as a means to mobilize class consciousness and create contexts in solidarity with the realities of the times. The workers in the plays of the aforementioned authors believe in the Communist ideals, in the value of the labor shared by…
R. has worked as a set photographer for various Romanian film production companies and movie studios. Dissatisfied with the work conditions, he agreed to give this interview in order to speak about the power ratios that define the work relations in such environments. What’s the most recent project you worked on? A commercial filmed by some foreigners in Buftea, at MediaPro Pictures. A more ambitious project, with a big team, on which I worked for a week. I’d start in the morning at six o’clock and work for twelve hours, but the schedule wasn’t always observed. There were days when…
“We had no solidarity between intellectuals and blue collar workers, neither before nor after 1989.”
An interview with Radu Aldulescu One of the most important contemporary Romanian writers of prose, Radu Aldulescu (born on June 29, 1954, in Bucharest) made his debut in 1993, at the Albatros publishing house, with the novel Sonata pentru acordeon (The Accordion Sonata), for which he received the Romanian Writers’ Union Award. Since, he has published the novels Amantul Colivăresei (The Funeral Cake Maker’s Lover), Îngerul încălecat (The Mounted Angel), Istoria eroilor unui ţinut de verdeaţă şi răcoare (The Story of the Heroes in a Land of Green and Chill), Proorocii Ierusalimului (The Prophets of Jerusalem), Mirii nemuririi (Immortality’s Bridegrooms), Ana-Maria şi…
Review by Ionuț Sociu ForTheWin Performance by Bogdan Georgescu, with Andreea Eșanu, Andrei Ioniță, Sânziana Nicola Corporation v. community ACTIVE ART Galeria 26 (OTA), Bucharest In ForTheWin, there is a lot of talking about death (a ski accident, a case of suicide due to debt, a case of overworking), but the manner of speaking is detached and bland, lacking in voice variations. Here, death seems to be just another piece of information among others, and one of the merits of this performance is that it captures a type of homogenous communication in which banal observations are in the same league…
Cristi Badea is a props master for films, TV series and commercials. He has been running his own business since 2005 and works with various production companies to construct stage props. In 2011 he sued Tandem Film production company for failing to pay what they owed him. I talked to Cristi about working conditions in the film/commercial production industries, about the (im)possibility of unionizing and about taking production companies to court as a method of fighting back. (David Schwartz) Did you ever discuss with other props masters the possibility of unionizing, or maybe just adopting some common work principles, to…