Dissecting the European Fairy Tale - A week in Timișoara

 The next week, your correspondent is reporting from Timișoara, Romania, and the project “Centriphery”. This EU project promises to unite a swathe of volunteers from different backgrounds for various workshops, events, and happenings over the month, centred around a public premiere of the work “Everlasting Youth & Life Without End” in Timișoara’s Liberty Square (Piața Libertății). Friday’s open-air premiere is based on the works of Petre Ispirescu, perhaps Romania’s fabled storyteller who collected many folk myths as a publisher in the 1800s while rarely venturing from his hideout in Bucharest.

If it sounds a complicated scenario, it is – the Banat region, of which Timișoara is the unofficial capital, comprises ethnic Serbians, Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans, and spans the first three countries. It’s a very European project, promoting a sort of impossible multicultural situation that absolutely should not function. The choice of Ispirescu as a foundation for this work seems to skew Romanian, however, as he is seen as one of the linguistic founders of today’s Romanian state. Moving Fireplaces is a lead-in project for Timișoara’s anointment as European Capital of Culture 2023 – a cycle which is sure to bring an elevation to this region’s distinct cultural richness.

At this intersection between cultures, states, peripheries and centres, your correspondent hurtles his usual way forward, the squeak of he CFR train soon to be replaced by the incessant drone of Romanian traffic. 

 

 Bringing such a massive project to light is a huge community undertaking, and it may be that your correspondent is more there as a support than a critical voice. Nevertheless, I am , as usual, guided by certain questions: What (deeply embedded) role do folk tales play on the formation of culture? Are they escapable? And in re-creating them for the stage, do we undertake to reproduce the (often undesired) underlying meanings in their construction and ideology? Is returning to the source – as many of these folk tales are first encountered in childhood – a way of re-claiming and re-invigorating them, using the stage as a distancing frame or a mirror for reflection

As the train makes its final lurches in to Timișoara, I can’t help but be reminded of the time an esteemed colleague told me about a Romanian myth where a guy sets his wife in the concrete of the walls to punish her. While there may be radical readings of this action – a feminist perspective might reclaim it by indicating a certain feminisation of the structures, for example. A queer reading might usurp the gender binary by re-casting it as a simple performance of gendered violence deriving from two individuals trapped in their roles, where the expression of a violence patriarchal control is a means of resolving the internal conflicts within, that can only be expressed by a learned violence. Class analysis might read the two as trapped in a sisophysian struggle by their inability to develop authentic solidarity that would overcome their circumstances. But in whichever perspective, the horrific violence against women seems to jump out of the story – suggesting that such myths are the starting point for the cultural normalisation of many political gestures in today’s Romania.

All of which makes taking them on a dangerous game. The next week I look forward to the events, happenings, and meeting the Banatians and their history. Is myth a trap from which one can be released?

Stay tuned!!

Should Faki Festival 24 have happened?

Sitting at my little wine-stained wooden desk in Berlin, it finally feels like there is a bit of time for your correspondent to rest. It's been a long few months, which the absence of writing activity proves. Summer is normally easier in Berlin, but this time seems like an exception - the challenges mount, there is no end to the work, most of it seems urgent, and looking back only seems like a trail of missed opportunities for intervention.

The thing is that, as I have previously mentioned, from my little desk I observe a period in which a particular version or idea of culture dies. Depending on your point of view, this can be an extreme thing or not. What does it matter that performing artists are not able to continue their practice anymore? What does it matter that training has stopped, or that our collective cultural fitness has been lost? Is it a problem that we have forgotten how to talk to each other without a screen, that people have retreated into little bubbles, and the ability to cross those bubbles -  to access spaces and situations that enable that - have been removed?

As much as I might try to navigate around it and produce optimistic and resistant actions, the last 18 months have been a feeling of not only watching much of what I love die, as so many artists give up their traditions and culture becomes a strange surfac-y mix of Netflix, Zoom conferences and live Sport. There's also a heavy sense of despair and fear for this great unknown - what happens when you remove the openness from communities? What happens when they can no longer change? What happens to our resistance when culture and its workers are implored to just roll over and die? What about criticism - what becomes of our critical thinking, when there is nothing to write about - nothing to discuss? Can we reflect anymore on phenomena in our situation? Or are we too close to it, too involved, too intertwined with the headline to even respond with anything other than hot-blooded outrage?

Of course, there are nuances the story I have told here, and many exceptions. But for me, it is difficult to avoid this narrative, and I see it everywhere around me.

Happily, on a purely personal note, things have been going along pretty smoothly and the next period will also see me do quite a bit of writing, which I am excited about. I will detail these projects as they come up. For now, I want to dedicate some writing space to a particular event that has occupied a lot of my thinking lately, and which strikes at a few of the questions I have outlined above.

FAKI FESTIVAL 24: SHOULD IT HAVE HAPPENED?

In December 2020, I was invited to be Artistic Director of Faki Festival 24, the festival I have visited and written about on this platform and others for the last 7 years, and where I claim to have seen the best theatre in Europe. To say this was a dream come true is both an understatement and also an absurdity - it's a festival that is pretty painful to love, being run on few financial resources in a former factory in Zagreb, Croatia. Artists stay in squat-like conditions, perform in makeshift stages or found spaces, and the entire festival is without fees and staffed largely by volunteers. It is 100% dependent on exactly the community togetherness that I have detailed above as being obliterated during the pandemic.

Big Koala, unofficial mascot of Faki Festival 24