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!!