Romania Libera/Mihaela Michailov
Monday, 11 Ianuarie 2010
David Kozma and Romulus Chiciuc had been actors of “Andrei Mureasanu” Theatre from Sfntu Gheorghe Romania. You could have seen them in “Three Sisters”, the most controversial show of the year 2003, directed by Radu Afrim,a break up-show with the canons of Chekhovian text’s interpretation, a jar-show where the swishing innocence and an amnesiac world still wired to life’s thin coating were mixed together.
In 2003 they were also part of the project “Theatre of Consumption”, held at MONDAY Theatre at Green Hours. They performed in “KinkyZoOne, created by Radu Afrim alongside whom they depended their arch-acting creations. They performed in ‘David’s Boutique’ (2004, text and direction by Radu Afrim), a show clustered with linguistics frolics and smart buffooneries, where the names of the characters were the real name of the actors.
For several years they are living in Finland, where they’re continuing their theatrical projects. Defined by playful presence, scenic creativity, spontaneity , improvisational mastery, cerebral refinement of emotions, they are able to always create multilayered roles.
"Finnphonia 5.0" (performed in December 2009 at MONDAY Theatre - Green Hours) is created by the European Theatre Collective, company founded in 2006 by theatre professionals from Finland, Romania, Denmark and Norway aiming to connect the Finish theatrical space with the European one..
...A resonant sensibility, a complex audioscopy and a highly sophisticated research into connecting the sound with the text set Finnphonia 5.0. apart. "We searched for a way to express what Finland is. We were looking for that specific simplicity of the Finns from Aki Kaurismäki's films. Hence I kept only three components: voice - music-video. Or, if you want, we thought of cleaning up the text-theatre of any kind of dated and overworked theatricality. Each poem communicates a feeling about Finland. From the Winter War (Finnish-Russian war) to the frustration of living on the edge of Europe, and everything filtered through their sacred sauna”, David Kozma says about the concept and the structure of the show.
The poems, from classic to postmodern ones, are continuously connected with the musical interferences interceptions and with a syncopated architecture of noises. The sound perception works on many levels. Amid the poems’ audio-texture and the interpositions of the live music, loops and breakages in rhythm, a tension of correspondence and contrast builds up, a tension which runs through all the performance. The performance alternates between the video element - pictures of the Finnish public and private space (a pack of wolves, children with big smiles on their faces and adults following them around, piles of supermarket food), to a complex sound content and fragments of Finnish poems going from the eroticism to the paradoxical effect of the consumer’s bulimia: the global emotional drowsiness and the fever of compulsive accumulation.
Finland becomes an atmospheric sound text, a screen that expands its emotional thresholds and dilutes its status until you hear the pulse of a biorhythm that goes going under your skin. Salla Kozma is the type of performer who, without moving from a bar stool, drinking from time to time a sip of beer, succeeds to fascinate the audience. Her body is a stream of viscerally shaped sounds, sounds shaped under your own eyes with an amazing skill of changing the inflections of her voice sometime as a child sometime as a soprano.
"Finnphonia 5.0" brings a breath of fresh air into the Romanian theatre which is not so willing to invest in experimenting.
The theme of the next project of the European Theatre Collective is immigration in the European space. “Emigrant Hotel” is the provisional title and the opening night is set up for the autumn of 2010. The texts for the show will be written by dramaturges from different countries. In 2011, David Kozma says, we are planning a coproduction with Checkov Studio International, Los Angeles, the production of a Finnish text.
Original text: http://www.romanialibera.ro/cultura/a174234-finlanda-iti-intra-n-piele.html
Translation from Romanian Diana Bulboaca
Photo Nasser Sultan
©european theatre collective 2010