The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary

The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name.

This paper will try to sketch some hypothesis about the becoming of the relationship between theatre texts, performances and audiences in Romania after the World War II, and the profound and substantial changes of that relationship in the last decade. The special case of Romanian theatre’s evolution could be an exemplary one due to the unique political conditions in the second part of the last century: behind the closed doors of communism, theatre had to reshape its limits goals and expression on mediated grounds, almost like in an experimental laboratory, using most of all the few literary and press materials about drama and performance’s “vanguard” in western counties who managed to cross, in a way or another, the iron curtain. After its falling down, the Romanian theatre enjoyed in the western tours a tremendous but paradoxical success: the western audiences were exposed to a strange meeting with their own – deformed - image on an aesthetical ground, after two decades of self oblivion. But, like in a wax museum, the “texts” (the plays, the scripts) of the Romanian theatre were never about Romania or Romanians, and never even written by Romanian authors: most of them were classics like Shakespeare, Molière or Chekhov or, at least, western celebrities from the sixties, like Ionesco or Beckett. But were these performances really based on these authors or were they personal-and-collective commentaries on the writers’ works?This paper will try to offer a mapping of the Romanian-specific process of separation between drama (seen as a source for the performance) and performance itself. And will try also to propose some hypothesis about the U-turn of this process, by the new movement of re-linking the new generations of audiences-authors-directors on text grounds.

Keywords: theatre, audience, reception, performance