Romanian National Theater Festival
20th Edition

The 20th edition of the National Theater Festival will feature the stage director Silviu Purcarete’s latest show: Exit the King, by Eugene Ionesco, an international coproduction. The show premieres on September 15 at the Ex Ponto Festival in Slovenia, and will later be presented in the RNTF, before going on tour in France, Italy, Montenegro, Macedonia and Croatia. In January 2011, the new building of Esch Theater in Luxembourg will be inaugurated with this production.

A great personality of European theater, Silviu Purcarete opted for an international team to stage Exit the King by Eugene Ionesco in 2010, after his 2007 success with Macbett, by the same author, at the Royal Shakespeare Company. This international coproduction is for Purcarete the opportunity of a new encounter with Ionesco, as well as with the music writer and close collaborator Vasile Sirli, and artists from France, Slovenia and Luxembourg.

An indefatigable researcher of Tadeusz Kantor’s work, Michal Kobialka has delivered many lectures about the great Polish stage director’s theater and writings. His presence in the Debates, Conferences, Meetings series, which invited Richard Foreman, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Aleks Sierz as guest lecturers in past years, is meant to add a new touch to the theatrical landscape of the last fifty years, which the RNTF has attempted to outline in its last three editions.
Kobialka is known as the first translator into English of Kantor’s writings, about whom he wrote a series of studies. The lecture to be delivered in Bucharest is an occasion to scrutinize the career path of the Polish artist in the company of a specialist, and view representative episodes from his shows, thanks to the screenings made possible by Dorota Krakowska and the Kantor Estate, with support from the Polish Institute in Bucharest.

The American stage director Lee Breuer, one of the greatest theater artists, will be present in November in Bucharest, as a participant in the Debates, Conferences, Meetings module of RNTF. Lee Breuer wrote an important page in the history of American theater. First with Mabou Mines Theater Company in New York, which he cofounded in 1970, then with other companies, Lee Breuer created award-winning experimental, unconventional, innovative shows equally acclaimed by critics.

The Scottish artist Billy Cowie will participate in the Bucharest festival with A Stereoscopic Trilogy, an installation show that combines choreography and video art, placing the viewer on the border between live performance and recording, between real sensations and the distance given by the screening.
Billy Cowie is a choreographer, composer and filmmaker. His work concentrates chiefly on dance/theater performance, screen dance and installation. With Liz Aggiss he has put up over twenty live perfromances as Divas Dance Theatre, a company that won him fame all over Europe. Sandler’s Wells Theatre and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, EMPAC in New York, and Bargate Gallery in Southampton are among the well-known venues of contemporary art where Billy Cowie was a guest. Also, major dance and film festivals compete to present his works and give him awards (Shoot Festival – Sweden, IMZ Festival – Austria, Cinecity Festival – UK, Temps d’Images – Germany). In 2006, Anarchic Dance, a book about the two choreographers, was published by Routledge.

Hey Girl! in Bucarest on 4 and 5 of November

The famous Italian stage director will present Hey Girl!, a production that brought together institutions from France, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Slovenia, Hungary and Italy, in the National Theater Festival in Bucharest.
An artist with a unique style, Romeo Castellucci combines stage directing and fine arts in a visceral way, and the outcome places him among the world’s top stage directors. After studying Fine Arts in Bologna, in 1981 Castellucci set up Societas Raffaello Sanzio, a company he still works with.