The experience of the last year and a half has brought major changes in performing arts curatorship: the impossibility of making long term plans, the assumption of risk in matters of scheduling, the need to react with flexibility in the face of restrictions and regulations that appear overnight as the pandemic situation develops. And yet, in spite of the discouraging conditions, after a year of silence, some festivals have decided to renew dialogue with the public and meetings among theatre professionals. Even if the programmes are often visibly marked by the new reality, to organize such an event is in the first place a gesture by which we affirm our confidence that, especially in times of crisis, art can be the space of rational debate in which it is still possible to imagine a future together.

Inevitably, the life of a public cultural institution and the life of a festival are influenced by the flow of history, with all the economic, social, and political changes that it brings. The Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival is no exception to this rule. In the course of time, there have been moments of hiatus and even of “dormancy” for years at a time. The best-known of these began in 1985, when, because of the censorship that could admit the existence of no other Festival than Cântarea României (The Song of Romania), the Piatra Neamț Festival was forbidden to continue the tradition started in 1969; it was to be 1992 before the Festival could be held again. If before 1990, such a disappearance was the sort of thing that happened in a country isolated from the rest of the world, in 2020, the fate of Edition32 of the Piatra Neamț Festival was common to public events all over the world: either they were cancelled or they went online. We have gone through, and are still going through a period in which the performing arts have been associated with the term “non-essential”—whose connotations have shifted from “unimportant for immediate survival” to “useless”, “inefficient”, and even “a burden on the taxpayer”. In these conditions, to organize such an event is to signal that the performing arts have not yet given up the fight for survival in a society more and more under the spell of consumption and individualism, that they reaffirm their commitment towards local communities, and that they can offer a platform where theatre people and audience can meet to discuss, to think, and perhaps to reduce the social distances deepened by the pandemic.

“See you outside,” the slogan chosen for the Theatre of Youth 2020–2021 season, has also been one of the fundamental selection criteria for the national section, with preference given to productions designed for unconventional outdoor spaces or productions that, although conceived for indoor performance, have been adapted and performed outside too. Thus, audiences can rediscover urban spaces transformed into open-air stages: the façade and side yards of the Theatre of Youth, the streets of the city, the yard of the Calistrat Hogaș Memorial Museum, the garden of the Children’s Palace, the RubikHub terrace, the Princely Court, Casa Romașcană (in Roman), and the Citadel Park (in Târgu Neamț).
Apart from this criterion, the curatorial intention has remained the same as in the last three editions: to bring together a selection of productions that will stimulate dialogue on relevant themes and to promote projects based on contemporary texts and artists prepared to take aesthetic risks. The sixteen productions invited to the Festival are the creations both of state theatres and of independent companies. In addition the Theatre of Youth is presenting four of the productions of its latest season, all being premiere stagings of original texts. Significantly, the themes explored by the majority of the productions are connected to temporality, so that the title of the present edition, proposed by Theatre of Youth artistic consultant Daniel Chirilă, also serves as a common thread binding together very different aesthetic visions, artistic practices, and generations. We are here—in the POST-PRESENT, suspended in this unusual corridor of time, sometimes wishing things could again be “like before”, at other times hoping that we might discover new possibilities, fairer and better, that would never even have occurred to us “before”.

In the productions, these movements along the axis of time take the form of revisitings of the past or probing examinations of the present. There are artistic creations that investigate moments in recent or not so recent history, either from the personal perspective of memory (It’s Not Me, Romania Diary: 1989), or through mirroring and questioning identity (Stand up Lechaim!), or through revisiting historical documents (Gewalt in Darabani). The present time brings us face to face with global challenges that demand a response befitting their gravity: the reckless exploitation of resources and the visible and invisible corruption behind such practices (Green Felled), social inequalities and more and more precarious and abusive working conditions (The Field of Struggle, Delivery Rider Bucharest), poverty and alcoholism in the countryside (alcohol, light and a little death: a case study, The Titanic), domestic violence and lack of communication between the generations (The Queen of Cakes, Pattern), and anxiety and alienation in an atmosphere ever more contaminated by polarized discourses, discrimination, conspiracy theories, and weird and wonderful prophecies (I Laugh Wildly, It Happened One Thursday, Never Touch the Victim, Mother). As for the future, it may be glimpsed by accessing the stories of the past in a particular space, in this case the city of Piatra Neamț itself (Future of the Past), dystopic visions (TO BE CONTINUED: On Planet Mirror), or the searchings and unease of young people expressed by themselves (Hey, You, Neighbour!).

In addition to the story workshop coordinated by the writer Adina Rosetti, the youngest theatre-goers (and of course their parents and grandparents) will be able to meet in the open air both Bobo Burlăcianu’s musical CATs 2 of and the Living Statues created by Mihai Mălaimare.

The Festival continues the regional initiative through which the cities of Roman and Târgu Neamţ also take part in the event.
Limitations on mobility have forced us to reinvent the International Section, with the result that instead of selecting productions the Festival has commissioned international artists, inviting them to create, in a very short time, especially for this event, what we might call “hand-luggage productions”. Those invited are, without exception, artists who create or present their work at the international level. Some of them are constantly on the move between their countries of origin and other countries to which they have chosen to move or where they have been invited for various projects. In their careers, up until the moment of the pandemic, mobility was something normal, part of everyday life, this type of artist being a vector of communication in the global village. It is important that the dialogue between artists and international structures should continue, because it is clear that we are experiencing a moment in which the answers that count will be global ones. Our invitation to artists working in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Kosovo, Moldova, and Poland (but also elsewhere in the world) takes the form of a proposal to prepare a production of lecture performance type, in which the words alone, this weightless, but also priceless luggage, will attempt to evoke images and stories in the minds of the Festival audience. Unlike the productions staged on international tours, in which generally the authors of the concept (directors, writers, choreographers) do not appear on stage to interpret it, this time it is they who are coming to perform in front of the audience: either the ideas behind a production already created, but impossible to present on tour, or those behind a production that they have been unable to stage in this period, or simply the sketch of a production they dream of or a meditation on the present. These essay-productions, statement-productions, lecture-productions, maquette-productions, or performative director’s notes make up this year’s International Section, which we have entitled Something to Declare, confident that there are human goods more precious than those that have to be declared at all the customs posts of the world, and that these goods increase exponentially in value when they become common property—in the moment when they are shared with others.

Edition32 keeps the atmosphere of a meeting between various arts and means of expression, between the audience and the invited theatre people, between different generations of creators and theatre-goers. The meeting spaces will be opened around some very special offers of communication: the documentary film The Exit of the Trains, by the director Radu Jude and the historian Adrian Cioflâncă; the documentary film Justice Unseen, a Dela0.ro&Vagabond Film production with the support of the Leaders for Justice community (with a discussion moderated by the activist Codru Vrabie); the travelling exhibition “The Heroines” from the Czech Centre in Bucharest, which will bring to the Art Museum of Piatra Neamț a series of profiles of women of the past and the present in Romania and the Czech Republic whose contributions have marked the fields in which they were or continue to be active—the opening will feature Adina Rosetti, author of the volume Nespusele (The untold), together with two young high-school graduates from Piatra Neamț. “POSTER PRESENT” is an exhibition of theatre posters (and posters about theatre) designed by the visual artist Levente Benedek especially for this edition of the Festival. Launches of relevant books and periodicals, together with some of the discussions with the artists invited to the Festival, will be hosted, in the mornings, by the Museum of Art (inner courtyard). The “Critical Spectator” programme will once again open a space of dialogue for young people from various high schools in the city, who will discover together “why we like or don’t like” a theatre production, in a workshop led by Mihai Brezeanu. Three of the young people will be involved in the running of the Festival from start to finish as members of the High-School Students’ Jury, and will offer a prize to the production that they consider most relevant for their generation.

In the first part of the Festival, during the day, passers-by in front of the Theatre may become witnesses to a process of artistic creation in real time by a famous Romanian artist whose work can be seen in the leading galleries of the world. “Entrance Drawing” is a site-specific project bearing the unmistakeable mark of Dan Perjovschi.

As a gesture of solidarity with the independent sector, which has been worst affected by the crisis triggered by the pandemic situation, Dan Perjovschi will donate his fee to a young artist or independent group present at the Festival. Thus, starting with this edition, the Cătălina Buzoianu Award will celebrate the memory of the most important woman director in the history of Romanian theatre—and one whose activity in the 1970s and ’80s was very much linked to the development of the Theatre of Youth—, will salute the courage of the young artists who articulate in their creations innovative and creative visions about theatre and about the world, and will uphold dialogue and solidarity between Romanian artists of different generations.

The Theatre of Youth thanks its funder, Neamț County Council, for appreciating the importance of this event for the community of theatre-goers in Neamț county and giving it their support in a difficult moment for cultural institutions all over the world.

Welcome to Edition32 of the Piatra Neamț Theatre Festival!
(And don’t forget to have a warm coat handy for the open-air productions. In the POST-PRESENT, the evenings can be chilly.)