Gianina Cărbunariu,aged 37, is probably the most successful young female stage director in Romania. She graduated from the Faculty of Letters, but also has a degree inf Stage Directing. She is a founding member of the drama company and enjoys the freedom of staging her own plays.

This summer, she took part in the Avignon Theater Festival with Solitaritate, staged at the Radu Stanca National Theater in Sibiu.

This fall, in the National Theater Festival (NTF, 24 October-2 November) you will be able to watch two of her shows, both from the Bucharest Odeon Theater: For Sale and Typographic Capital Letters.

Adina Scorţescu: What was different about the Avignon experience compared to other festivals?

Gianina Cărbunariu: As you know, the Avignon Festival is a place where artists, theatre professionals from France and all over the world meet.  

It is a festival of meetings, very dynamic due to both the events scheduled in the official selection and the variety of offers in the Off Festival, the latter becoming increasingly commercial every year.

Besides the connoisseurs, theater critics and promoters, the festival has a special audience that carefully selects the performances it wants to see. Most of it is not local, but comes from all over France and abroad. My show Solitaritate, which was included in the official section, had eight performances, all of which were to us like a premiere, since the audience is so heterogeneous.

As with any premiere, you can’t possibly know how the show will be received. Luckily, in the first minutes of the first performance we felt the interest of the audience and this was the most important thing: what we had to say, myself and the actors, reached its audience, an audience that proved very warm to us.

The press reacted quickly, a lot has been written, is still being written, in various French theater magazines and more, which means great visibility for the show, the team of artists, and the producers.

The show was accompanied by other artistic events which in my opinion have also amplified its visibility: Dan Perjovschi’s exhibition that goes with the show in the project Cities on Stage, the screening of Alexandru Solomon’s film Kapitalism, Our Secret Recipe (in the Territoires Cinematographiques program), the distribution in bookstores of Solitarite suivi de La Tigresse, published by Actes Sud, as well as the reading of La Tigresse in the reading program at Chartreuse.

This year’s edition was special. It was Olivier Py’s first term as a director, and the direction he clearly wanted to impart to the selection was that of political theater, one that brings into discussion conflicts of contemporary society, at the same time offering a broad space for very different voices and aesthetic views.

The edition was also marked by protests and strikes against measures taken by the French government that condemn artists and technicians to an ever-precarious status.  

Image from the show Solitaritate, presented in the 2013 edition of the National Theater Festival. Photo: Paul Băilă

Personally, I had the feeling that local issues regarding strategies (or rather the lack thereof) for culture and education need international answers and solidarity, because they can be found, in different forms, but with the same harmful effects, in all the societies around the world.

From this perspective, the festival was an opportunity for me to enter into a dialogue on subjects that concern me with various artists, technicians, members of the audience.

Both shows that you staged at Odeon were part of international projects. What does this type of organization mean? Are subjects imposed on you, do financial worries decrease?

Such an international project is usually conceived by a team starting from an idea, a concept. The team identifies artists fit for the job (that doesn’t mean stylistically similar artists, most of the times the intention is precisely to have artists with different voices), and looks for structures interested in joining these co-productions and financing sources.

Of course, each artist is free to put on his or her show considering his or her own sensibility, cultural context, personal themes. Project initiators know each artist’s career and usually invite them based on this information. 

For instance, the invitation to the project Parallel Lives also came due to my project on Securitate files at the Paintbrush Factory in Cluj, I had studied files for the show Xmm from Ykm, which the Slovak producers had seen, and this is how they coproduced Typographic Capital Letters.

The same happened with Cities on Stage: I had already staged shows about life in various communities or cities (20/20, Roşia Montană Physically and Politically).

And the same happened with For Sale: the German co-producers knew my shows. I didn’t contact them, they invited me to be a part of the project. I haven’t changed my vision at all since Stop the Tempo in 2004. I wanted to do a show about what was gong on around then.

Themes have changed, of course, over the ten years since I graduated, but the urge is the same. As for financing worries, these projects are a lifebelt to many artists around the world who do not succeed, or do succeed, but with great difficulty, to access funds in their countries or be produced in local theaters. This is my case too.

The financing is modest, it cannot compare to our state theater budgets, but thanks to them I managed to survive as an artist.

You document your shows like a journalist (you research files, do interviews with people involved and experts) but, as you said in an interview, you do “fiction shows.” Why, then, is documentation important, what is the truth that is (not) lost on the way?

I do not plan to search for the truth because, in fact, I do not do journalistic investigations, although I use methods such as the interview or documentation. I do not believe in an absolute truth, but in opening real public debates, unlike those in which major issues are mashed by the media grinder.

The value of the documentation is in the closeness to the subject, people, stories that enrich both the human and the artistic perspectives. During the documentation process I often come to understand even less than at the beginning of the process, things get more confusing, and it is precisely this feeling of puzzlement faced with reality that I’m trying to bring on stage, rather than reality itself.

An exercise of imagination: if tomorrow you were receive substantial financing for a show and you’re told: Do what you want! What subject comes to your mind, what place, which actors?

First of all, I would ask where the money comes from. Who the financer is matters to me. If I accepted that financing, I’d do what I’ve done so far: of all the themes that interest me, I’d choose the most urgent, the one that comes to mind every day.

I never start projects from the budget, but from a theme and a place, from a team of actors with whom I set out.

I did turn down a project or some financing because at the moment I did not have a theme that preoccupied me so much as to provoke me to start working. Or the working conditions weren’t suitable. It also happened for me to pay from my own pocket to carry out an independent show. So, the idea is that I do what I want to anyway, with or without financing.

I prefer studio-type spaces because the closeness between the performers and the audience seems to me one of the strong points of a theatrical show, especially today, when society puts ever greater distances between individuals. I would like to work with actors who inspire me and are open enough to set out with me on that project.

The two shows at the Odeon, For Sale and Typographic Capital Letters, scheduled in the National Theater Festival, have a number of actors in common (Alexandru Potocean, Gabriel Răuţă, Mihai Smarandache). Is this by chance?

I don’t leave much room for chance when I select my collaborators. As rehearsals for my shows often begin with documentation and discussions rather than script reading, this period can be pretty confusing for actors formed in a system in which things are established and clear.

That is why sometimes I try to have by my side the actors with whom I have previously worked in similar projects, or who have worked in such projects with colleagues of mine (e.g. Alex Potocean, who worked on several shows with the director David Schwartz).

Their patience and confidence are contagious, and impart positive energy to the other participants.

Alex, Gabi and Mihai got along very well at the rehearsals for Typographic Capital Letters, without having worked together before, without my having worked with them before.

It seems vital for me to create teams for each show that I put on. I believe I have succeeded in doing that both with Solitaritate and For Sale. I like it very much when talented actors dedicated to a project look at each other with admiration and respect during rehearsals, enjoy it when others succeed, manage to control inherent tensions, and tactfully draw everybody’s attention when they feel that things might not go as they should.

Four years ago you wrote and staged Sold Out at a Munich theater. What have you learned from the experience with a different system? What was it like working with foreign actors?

I was 32 and facing a powerful structure, the Kammerspiele Theater in Munich, with very experienced actors who work with the most important German directors of today. At the beginning, it was not easy to adjust to each other. There was a language barrier too: we communicated in English, and the assistant director would step in only when we were all “lost in translation”.

In the process, I realized that it was not about words alone, but also about translating a reality to which they hadn’t had access – the communist period of Romania and the sale of Romanian Saxons and Schwabians, about which there had not been much talk either in our country or in theirs.

And the other way around: I was not fully aware of the traumas left by World War II among various generations of Germans. I worked with an extraordinary actress who was 70 then, and had lived through a  reality that is hard to put into words. Eventually, I think we managed to build a common language and meet in that fiction.

The result was a show that did not look like shows staged in Germany. Nor did it look like the shows I had made in Romania. It was the result of continual negotiation between the director, the actors, the set designer, the dramaturge (in the German sense) all coming from different cultures, with different life experiences.

The first discussion with the audience was a total surprise for the German actors too: the individuals from the audience, whom I had interviewed during the documentation, recognized their stories, the objects on the stage (I borrowed objects from the interviewed people and included them in the show), they were at last willing to talk publicly about their traumatizing past.

The dialogue with the audience was like our work process: now in Romanian, then in German, then again in English. The translator was having a hard time following this complicated reality, expressed in so many ways, but one thing was clear: the wish to understand a phenomenon from scraps of stories, from documents and objects.

Which is the most touching theater show that you have seen this year?

This year I’ve seen thought-provoking, moving shows both in Romania and at festivals abroad, but if I had to choose only one, it would be La Re-Sentida’s La imaginacion del futuro, directed by the Chilean Marco Layera, presented this year at Avignon.

It is a political show that investigates the recent history of his country, the iconic image of Salvador Allende, in order to speak about the present. Simple, but efficient and very surprising theatrical means, an irreverent tone, acid irony at times that are extremely delicate – all this seems to me the most powerful approach for a theater that speaks about the wounds of a contemporary society.

In theatre, I’m moved by the intelligence of artists tackling a serious issue by taking a distance that does not rule out either exasperation with reality or the zaniest of humor.

How important are discussions with the audience after the performance on the stage is over? Do they bring about any changes in the next performances?

I did some shows, like 20/20 or Xmm from Ykm, in which discussions with the audience were part of the concept. In this case, the discussions are in fact an extension of the documentation through the personal stories told by the audience.

These testimonies help both me and the actors to more deeply understand the already fictionalized situations in the show.

But there are also shows after which I did not feel the need for discussions with the audience, it seemed more appropriate to leave the show to “work” alone in the spectator’s mind. As a principle, discussions after a show have one goal: to concretely understand that theater is made by ordinary people with specific preoccupations for other ordinary people with the same preoccupations, but also for people who are open enough to discover the relevance of a subject that hasn’t been a priority in their daily lives till then.

Photo: Angelique Surel

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18 August 2014