Produced by NTB in co-production with Art Production Foundation and Gigi Căciuleanu Romania Dance Company with the support of JTI

How else could the "cheerful Alecsandri" be celebrated, now 200 years after his birth, if not with a staging about the famous Lady Kiritza, the character who crowned his long career as a playwright with success? Master Gigi Căciuleanu returns to the NTB stage with a dance-theatre challenge: "Kiritza or the Game of..."

The game of... Love?... Diva?... Conquering?... Singing? Imagination - it must be! - to enter the game proposed by the director-choreographer, to savour Alecsandri's texts translated into spoken word and sung word, to unravel the tangled web of Kiritza's intrigues, now a charming opera diva - Kiritza changes her voice, but not her habits! - endowed with the most brilliant and dizzying high notes. Together with the distinguished soprano Oana Berbec, the superb DanceActresses and the wonderful DanceActors of the National Ballet, Gigi Căciuleanu creates a performance with exceptional scores, full of charm and fun, which transpose into gesture, movement and rhythm, the flavour of the language and speech of an era with its cosmopolitan mentalities.

"Kiritza or the Game of...", a reverence from an aristocrat of dance to an aristocrat of the 19th century pen.

Chapeau bas!

"Despite appearances and regionalisms, Lady Kiritza has always seemed to me (since the first time, as a child, I saw Miluță Gheorghiu playing her) an exotic and sophisticated character. In fact, all those men (and women) who have impersonated her have been very complex personalities. The fact that the character was originally conceived as a transvestite shows the need to represent her as "something" out of the ordinary. Excessive. In the sense that the "excesses" of a soprano are represented by high notes or that of a ballerina by dancing on pointe. But what's more "out of the ordinary" than an opera diva?... entertained by an operetta caid... In reality, blurred by the diva's "exotic plant" personality. That's why I wanted Bârzoi to be represented by the ubiquitous absence (sic) of a painting (like that of some dictator hanging on every wall), and a voice-over. And the play as a gearing trembling between the two poles, Kiritza and Bârzoi, its protagonists being held at the end of the strings by the puppeteer Alecsandri. The roles are resolved first through movement and gesture, and only then through the polyphonic interplay of voices.

Why "The game of..."?

Because, in fact, the characters do not exist as such, but as members of a troupe of actors shaped by the one of Shakespeare’s "Dream..." where each of them can step into the shoes and costume of any of the characters at will.

Why Kiritza with a "K" and a "tz"? To emphasise the character's almost painful longing to become Europeanised, to no longer belong to a province or a country but to the whole of the world, dominated from above, from the balloon...

Just as Charlie Chaplin's character didn't always make me laugh, but rather a tear trembled in the corner of my eye, the character of Lady Kiritza has touched me since I discovered her. Like that of a "gentlemanly bourgeois" mollycoddler in the feminine, eager for emancipation at any cost. Desiring with all her soul to leave her condition to "go to the moon and the stars"...

I think that, if Alecsandri had lived in Gagarin's time, Lady Kiritza would certainly not have flown in a balloon, but in a cosmic rocket..."

Gigi Căciuleanu

                                          *I dedicate wholeheartedly this performance to Pino Caramitru

                                                                                                                                        Gigi 

Photo Florin Ghioca