"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel."
May 30, 2009
May 29, 2009
Sibiu
the Town Hall of Sibiu in the Large Square
Sibiu's Radu Stanca Theatre
inside the Theatre
The Evangelic Cathedral situated in the Huet Square
a beautiful stained glass in The Roman-Catholic Church
view of The Roman-Catholic Church Tower from The Small Square
a look down from The Stairs Passage
near the Lies Bridge in The Small Square
May 27, 2009
theatre lovers at Sibiu
May 25, 2009
La cireşe...
May 24, 2009
dance night off
May 23, 2009
to be remembered
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Johan Ibsen; 20 March 1828 – 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright of realistic drama and poet. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama" and is one of the founders of modernism in the theatre. Alongside Olav Duun and Knut Hamsun, Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians, and one of the most important playwrights of all time.
His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many contemporaries.Ibsen introduced a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality.
Life and writings
He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian Theater in Bergen, where he was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer. During this period he did not publish any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.
Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of Christiania's National Theater. He married Suzannah Thoresen the same year and she gave birth to their only child, Sigurd. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864, he left Christiania and went to Sorrento in Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years, and when he returned it was to be as a noted playwright, however controversial.
His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a measure of financial success, as was the following play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard Grieg famously composed incidental music and songs. Although Ibsen read excerpts of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and traces of the latter's influence are evident in Brand, it was not until after Brand that Ibsen came to take Kierkegaard seriously. Initially annoyed with his friend Georg Brandes for comparing Brand to Kierkegaard, Ibsen nevertheless read Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Ibsen's next play Peer Gynt was consciously informed by Kierkegaard.
With success, Ibsen became more confident and began to introduce more and more of his own beliefs and judgments into the drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas." His next series of plays are often considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence, becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.
Portrait from around 1870
Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868, where he spent years writing the play he regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the blind acceptance of traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.
Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts (1881), another scathing commentary on Victorian morality, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she had hidden the evils of her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her then fiancé despite his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But she was not to receive the result she was promised. Her husband's philandering continued right up until his death, and the result is that her son is syphilitic. Even the mention of venereal disease was scandalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of morality had no protection against it, that was beyond scandalous. Hers was not the noble life which Victorians believed would result from fulfilling one's duty rather than following one's desires. Those idealized beliefs were only the Ghosts of the past, haunting the present.
In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. The Victorian belief was that the community was a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the People Ibsen chastised not only the right wing or 'Victorian' elements of society but also the liberalism of the time. He illustrated how people on both sides of the social spectrum could be equally self-serving. An Enemy of the People was written as a response to the people who had rejected his previous work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of Ghosts. The protagonist is a doctor, a pillar of the community. The town is a vacation spot whose primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water used by the bath is being contaminated when it seeps through the grounds of a local tannery. He expects to be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease, but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism. It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor, due to the community's unwillingness to face reality.
As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs and assumptions—but this time his attack was not against the Victorians but against overeager reformers and their idealism. Always the iconoclast, Ibsen was equally willing to tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.
The Wild Duck (1884) is considered by many to be Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the household income.
Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the "ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.
Interestingly, late in his career Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much less to do with denunciations of Victorian morality. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892) Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that transcended a simple rejection of Victorian conventions. Many modern readers, who might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic and even clichéd, have found these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder center on female protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for those around them. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the present day. There are a few similarities between Hedda and the character of Nora in A Doll's House, but many of today's audiences and theater critics feel that Hedda's intensity and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public life.
Death
Ibsen died in Christiania (now Oslo) on May 23, 1906 after a series of strokes. When his nurse assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen sputtered "On the contrary" and died.
He was buried in Vår Frelsers gravlund ("The Graveyard of Our Savior") in central Oslo. In 2006 the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death was commemorated in Norway and many other countries, and the year dubbed the "Ibsen year" by Norwegian authorities. On May 23, 2006 - the occasion of the hundred-year commemoration of Ibsen's death - the Ibsen Museum reopened a completely restored writer's home with the original interior, original colors and decor. Also in May 2006, a biographical puppet production of Ibsen's life named 'The Death of Little Ibsen' debuted at New York City's Sanford Meisner Theater.
May 22, 2009
May 21, 2009
"Portugal"
May 18, 2009
"Ivane, Ivane...nici Moartea nu mai vrea sa auda de tine!"
ora 12.oo si inca un spectacol de la 19.00
what the audience say...
Ivan turbinca, omul care a pacalit moartea... sau nu
Cei din Baia Mare carora va place teatrul nu ratati spectacolul Ivan Turbinca. O combinatie de fum, muzica, proiectare video, lumini, balet, dans, si joc scenic foarte bun. Si in acelasi timp amuzant.Premiera a fost aseara si a fost un succes. Starurile cele mai ovationate: Ivan (evident), Aghiuta (un drac cu dubla personalitate), si moartea pe role (la propriu).Raiul si cerul se vand la supermaket.Moartea poarta peruca.Dumnezeu e intr-un scaun cu rotile.Petru e cam nerabdator si razbunator din fire,Iar Ivan... Ivan, ei... e prea pacatos pentru Rai, din Iad l-au dat afara, iar moartea fuge de el. Ce sa mai, fiu' ploii. Dar o comedie de prima mana. Razi cu lacrimi (sau poate lacrimile sunt din cauza grenadelor fumigene care invadeaza sala (asta fiind unul din putinele puncte slabe). Dar cantecul lui Ivan intr-o franceza sobra si intr-un costum mov lucitor te face sa treci peste toate neajunsurile si la urma sa canti impreuna cu el: PASOLNA TURBINCA!Toata lumea PASOLNA TURBINCA!p.s.: ce mi s-a parut foarte tare a fost faza ca la sfarsitul piesei Ivan trecea de cealalta parte a cortinei din tuburi metalice care reprezenta capturarea cuiva in turbinca. Nu stiu daca a fost gandita aceasta mutare cu acest scop, dar impresia pe care mi-a lasat-o e ca Ivan a prins publicul in turbinca :D.p.s.2 am intrat pe o usa am iesit pe alta, prin poarta raiului :)
May 16, 2009
and nothing else matters...
May 15, 2009
This are the real people!
May 14, 2009
some stage make up play!
May 13, 2009
going back time...
Here I was the oldest sister, Olga, from Cehov's play, "Three sisters". I loved so much this character! I had a lot in common with her...
A more challenging task was to personify Rowena from "The Biloxi Blues" play. I had a lot of fun doing it!
Another play that led my acting study to a highter level, was "The Vagina Monologues". Dressed all in black, I was a girl that was abused in her childhood many times, but with a beautiful ladie's help, managed to find her way ... That monologue is just for those people who have a HEART.And this one, was a character that lived only, probably, an hour...it was a mime mask that I did during Stage Make up lessons. Loved it too!
instead of an end:
“Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art” Konstantin Stanislavsky
and
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” Thomas Merton
the 2 a.m. memory snack
old beautiful childhood moments...
May 12, 2009
old friends...
Sometimes I wonder if I just had some more time to develop a friendship, what would of happen?
.... maybe if I could have a second chance... at least to see those persons I used to be friends with...and something, somehow... happened and now it's a world between us...
If only I could see that face again! Just once!
I would try one more time - and afterwards live with no regrets...
I miss old friendships...I miss those faces...
- this is a pain too...
May 10, 2009
emptiness
simţi cum deodată toate obiectele din casă îi strigă numele...îi simţi parfumul pe tine, pe perna pe care îl aştepţi cu nerăbdare să-şi odihnească chipul...
dar nu vine...azi nu, mâine nu, poimâine nu...
... e interesant cum, atunci când ne doare ceva, chiar dacă e vorba de o durere fizică sau de una sufletească, noi, oamenii ne ghemuim, de parca am vrea sa fim iar fetusul din pântecele protector al mamei...
sinonimul singuătăţii în materie de reacţie corporală...e tocmai poziţa fetusului. Ca şi cum am vrea să ne regrupăm micile particule rupte din noi...care se mai ţin foarte firav de corpul nostru...de parcă am vrea înapoi în braţele acelei persoane care ne poate oferi siguranţă, protecţie, putere, iubire, acea senzaţie de "măi-măi" (cu care el m-a învăţat, de care am ajuns dependentă...şi pe care o vreau acum...)
în noaptea asta o să adorm, sigur, ghemuită...învăluită încă în mirosul lui, simţindu-i mâna caldă...
.... "măi- măi, măi-măi"....