studia universitatis babeş – bolyai dramatica teatru, film, media 2

CRISTIAN RUSU
CR: Because it’s a kind of a perpetual happening.
MB: Yes! And changes which penetrate your space: you don’t decide,
they decide! The same rules will stay: you see, when street artists choose a
certain background, or the entrance of a church, or something like that, they try
again to create their own little theatre in whatever shape of form.
CR: Apropos of these rules: you said ‘geometry’. I interpreted them
as a hidden geometry of the stage. What can you tell me more about this?
Is this geometry a stabile one, or it could be invented each time when
somebody is doing a choreography? Because you already have mentioned
about right-left, up-down, diagonals, things like this. It looks like it is a kind
of invisible structure.
MB: But I think it’s depending on the point of view of the one who is
looking at this…
CR: Well, the public.
MB: Ok! There are two behaviors here: that of the one who’s doing and
of the one who’s looking. The person who is doing needs to have an extremely
conscious behavior about where he is going to move on the stage.
CR: To express a certain thing.
MB: The one who’s looking at it should not have this awareness,
because than, something is wrong. If the person who is looking at it, says:
“Aha! This geometry is right”, it’s correct! And when it’s not correct they would
feel something uncomfortable, but of course, they could not tell what is wrong.
The example that I came with, ‘Talk to the Gods’, I mean its basis is always
made on the gesture towards the diagonal-up over the first balcony. If you feel
the devil coming in, the gesture will be down, somehow on your right side.
Cause you always see the devil coming on the stage from left. You will deal
with this. I think people have an incredible good sense of space. The audience;
they just don’t realize that’s all calculated, how you deal with it. You just get the
feeling of it; but they can’t tell “why and how”, most of them. I don’t think we
should share the secrets of the theatre with the audience.
CR: I agree! Because that’s laboratory and laboratory has to be
hidden. Because if it’s revealed, the magic is gone!
MB: Yes! So it is like artists with some tendencies saying ‘how hard
we work’. Nobody will give a shit, you know!
CR: OK! Another question that I would like to ask you: what is
harmony and proportion in dance, in relating a body in movement with the
space or environment in which it moves?
MB: I think we always go back to the same thing. If you need this
harmony you will unbalance everything. If you need harmony you will, for
example, make a strait line. “The River Dance” is a good example of harmony.
Why do so many people like “The River Dance ”? Because it’s all about
harmony. It is harmony put in balance: five people on the right, five on the left.
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