Embracing The Phantom Or The Imaginary Show
Embracing The Phantom Or The Imaginary Show

Summary/Abstract: Hundreds or maybe thousands of ghosts haunt our theatre. When I say ours, I do not want to refer to the Romanian one, but neither to the territory proposed and researched by Monique Borie in her already famous book dedicated to spectres. All my shows, and here we talk about more than seventy performances, now appear like ghosts to me. They were played sometime and constitute, not only for me, but for thousands, or tens of thousands of spectators, memories, true glimpses of moments, sometimes beautiful, sometimes sad, relics that begin to fade into a mnemonic mechanism of decomposition of the sensations once arisen by the scenic action and the image proposed through the presence of the actor. Thus, the spirit places the theatre under the protective wing of the document-memory, remaking, for those who were not in the position of witnesses, the way of late understanding for the one who can only imagine. The Romanian theatre does not have too many moments, perhaps astral, that could elucidate us on a certain artistic approach or against another. Too often the document-memory is activated by chronicles that bear far too many subjective opinions or timid analyzes on the work of a profession that deserves more in this regard. A very important director of the end of the last century, a student of Professor Radu Penciulescu, defined his own phantasma through the imaginary shows he left us. Blessed is he. Aureliu Manea’s writing allows us to imagine more than the chronicles of his shows played on Romanian stages could do. The document-memory of these documents concerns me and holds me in an embrace that I feel violently present.

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