NTF / optimistically, about the world of tomorrow

“Champagne is flowing, but so is time,” goes a theater saying. The NTF is halfway, with five days left out of ten, as performances and events are gathering momentum. Thursday, 31 October, at 18:00, and Friday, 1 November, at 20:00, Comedy Theater’s Radu Beligan Hall is hosting a show that comes all the (long) way from Satu Mare: PAPARAZZI or Chronicle of an Aborted Sunrise by Matei Vişniec, presently the best known Romanian playwright, whose plays are the most often staged abroad. A production of North Theater in Satu Mare, directed by the young Ovidiu Caiţa, the show is included in the Theater of tomorrow section / an artistic-directorial “tomorrow”, but also one of life threatened by apocalypse. An almost comical vision that, nevertheless, makes the characters / and us / take off their masks and work out some of the meanings of life. So that the sun may rise…

Enabling us to enjoy the world we have today and to make it better for those who will come tomorrow seems to be the objective of book publishers and cultural publications too. Therefore, every new launching deserves appreciation. Wednesday, 30 October, at 13:00, the quarterly cultural magazine Infinitezimal will be launched at Löwendal Foundation. Director: the critic Sebastian-Vlad Popa, joined for the occasion by fellow theater theorists and historians Ion Cazaban and Marian Popescu, as well as the stage director Alexander Hausvater and the composer Vasile Şirli.

Also at Löwendal Foundation, at 1 Piaţa Gh. Cantacuzino, Thursday, 31 October will see the launching of a new book published by Nemira, the first volume of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky’s The Work of the Actor on Himself, in a new translation by Raluca Rădulescu, with a preface by the stage director Yuri Kordonsky. The event will take place at 11:00.

Another change of time: Friday, 1 November, the international conference Theater Critics/Criticism / Extinction or Transformation? will start at 14:30 in Bucharest National Theater’s Multimedia Hall. We will get back with details on the event, as well as on the whole schedule of the National Theater Festival, now underway.