Măști din D’ale carnavalului pe scena extrem contemporană
Carnival’s masks on the extreme contemporary scene

Summary/Abstract: Romanian theatre only sporadically recovered the tradition of the popular mask, left behind by the omnipresence, on the urban stages, of salon dramas and localizations of Western bourgeois plays. However, with roots in commedia dell'arte or in the burlesque farce, the quid pro quo and the disguise have a rich local history, continuing up to our post-drama era. Ball masks, sequins, fans, fancy glitters – accessories which could stir scandals in the Theatre Square, a century ago, as signs of modernity’s otherness – engendered, in time, their own narrative and recently came back as props of retro-camp stagings. Some productions – Metamorphoses (dir.: Silviu Purcărete), The House with Meerkats (dir.: Radu Afrim), or Itineraries (dir.: Eugen Jebeleanu) – reinsert them in a rhetoric of oneiric surreality. From the frivolity of carnival masks, represented in I.L. Caragiale’s old comedies, to the fluid reality of contemporary shows, where feathers and veils construct unisex, uncertain bodies, the presence of the mask has circumscribed a selfstyled history of corporeality. Today, masks are associated with themes of identity/ identification and manifestos of gender or race politics. This paper aims to showcase the changes of the mask status and function in the recent theatrical productions.

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