News

Sunday, 3rd June, at 11.00, at the National Theatre's Amphitheatre Hall, Mihai Stănescu will hold a conference with the theme 100% Humour. The price of a ticket is 23 and 10 lei. Mihai Stănescu, established as the most redoubtable caricaturist from before '89, when he was interdicted, will close the present season of the National Theatre's Conferences with a discussion about humour, satire and irony, about the subjects at which Romanians still laugh or if jokes are still made nowadays. The artist will offer autographs on 100 Best of Stănescu and Code Orange albums, which he will give to the participants at the conference.       

Sunday 27th May, at 11.00, at the National Theatre's Black Box, Ion Vianu will hold the conference entitled Carl Gustav Jung, a thinker of the crossroads. The price of a ticket is 23 or 10 lei. The conference offers a closer look on the life and work of the great founder of analytical psychology, of the influences which crossed him, of the crossroad character of his work, where science meets religion, agnosticism meets mysticism, tradition meets modernity. The conference examines the extent in which Jung's inheritance could contribute to the salvation of the "profound man", who is opposed to the contemporary flat and superficial individual. Jung could become an even more important reference for the 21st century than he was for the preceding one.   

Sunday 20th May, at 11.00, at the National Theatre's Black Box, the Academician Solomon Marcus will hold a conference with the title The Need for Entertainment. The price for a ticket is 23 or 10 lei. Everything that stirs the attention, everything that surprises or enchants is entertainment. Sometimes we look for it, other times it takes us by surprise. As soon as people forget their worries, many fall into boredom. The salvation? In entertainment. Potentially, it is everywhere. But how many of us are able to see it? There are too many who look for it in the oblivious, even trivial part of life. Is there an alternative? An incursion in history and a radiography of the present can help us. Acad. Solomon Marcus

DVDs with the recordings of the NTB Conferences can be now also purchased from the Bastilia Bookshop. An ambitious program launched back in 2006, the cycle of Sunday discourses The TNB Conferences - followed by discussions with the audience - held by remarkable personalities of the Romanian culture on various themes, is a constant success. All the 50 conferences held up to the present were recorded on film and transposed on DVDs, which also have attached a brochure with the text of the conference. Similar to rare books, these DVDs will become in the future, real collection items for the ones who had the chance to buy them in time. The integral collection can still be found at the National Theatre's Ticket Agency. The following conferences were newly added to the list: Alexandru Tocilescu - About theatre and its own; Dorana Coşoveanu - At that time when the paintings were shot; Bujor Nedelcovici - Writers and the exile; ASR Principele Radu - The wise ruling. The unique purchasing price is 25 lei.   Translated by: Izabella Feher, MTTLC, Bucharest University

A last meeting with Ion Caramitru and Horaţiu Mălăele in Bucharest... Before the summer break! At the request of theatre lovers from the Capital, the most applauded representation of the year will be performed once more, in an extraordinary edition, on the Great Stage of the National Theatre from Bucharest, on the 28th Mai, at 20.00. Because the available tickets for the meeting from 16th April have been sold out in only a few days, although there are still very many requests, Ion Caramitru and Horaţiu Mălăele accepted to step on the stage for the second additional representation in Bucharest, the last one from this season. The two friends have a common passion for verses, they are both enthusiast poetry researchers, which is a sensitive territory in that many scenic, theatrical virtues are hidden, along with many virtues of the soul. More details  

Sunday 6th Mai, at 11.00, at the National Theatre's Black Box, Dan Dediu will hold a conference on the theme About travesty in music. Ticket prices: 23 and 10 lei. Is it possible to imagine the travesty in some other way than metaphorically outside the theater? Probably not. But because theatre meets music in opera, then music can dare to take over the travesty and extend it into the area of sounds. Starting from the idea that the travesty is an unsuitability between what we see and what we hear, Dan Dediu researches its various facades in music. The defining area of this unsuitability is the one of the sexes: to look like a woman and talk like a man or to look like a man and talk like a woman are phenomena that surely create a tensioned waiting for the audience. But if we dig further and ask: if we do not talk but sing, isn't this initial unsuitability a shocking contradiction between how we look and how we sing? Firstly, the travesty is differentiated from disguise and various examples from the opera's tradition are reeled out (the castrated boys from the baroque opera, the travesty of Mozart and Beethoven, and of Richard Strauss). Afterwards a jump is made to the speculation of music with the help of music's definition as theatre of affects, and the role of the two sexes is taken over by the vocal and instrumental music genres. The journey goes on in an unexpected manner, revealing dazzling travesties, methods of concealing the essence, immersions in the double musical memory and many other ideational recesses, which eagerly wait to be brought into light.  

On the 25th and 26th April 2012, at 19.00, theatre lovers can watch in Bucharest, within a bilateral cultural exchange, a remarkable show of the Csokonai Theatre from Debrecen, suggestively called The Fabulous Winged Men. The human's dream to fly constitutes the theme of the show The Fabulous Winged Men. This theme is presented in various aspects: from the concrete one (the conquest of the cosmic space), to the spiritual - metaphysical one (to access ones own deliverance through an initiation process in the search for the celestial Heaven and the meeting with Jesus). The specialty Hungarian critics have compared this show to the emblematic movies of the director Andrei Tarkovski.

On the 25th and 26th April 2012, at 19.00, theatre lovers can watch in Bucharest, within a bilateral cultural exchange, a remarkable show of the Csokonai Theatre from Debrecen, suggestively called The Fabulous Winged Men. The human's dream to fly constitutes the theme of the show The Fabulous Winged Men. This theme is presented in various aspects: from the concrete one (the conquest of the cosmic space), to the spiritual - metaphysical one (to access ones own deliverance through an initiation process in the search for the celestial Heaven and the meeting with Jesus). The specialty Hungarian critics have compared this show to the emblematic movies of the director Andrei Tarkovski. The Hungarian director Attila Vidnyánszky (who is also the general director of the Csokonai Theatre) proposes - on a collage of texts written by Miklós Szénási, Oleg Jukovski and Ödön Lénárd - a show that is built like a scenic ‘symphony' on several voices. He also ‘conducts a huge installation, in an exemplary discipline, with an amazingly expressive fantasy. The entire show is a visual arrangement, in that the historical-scientific, political, and mythological spheres are intertwined in a single aesthetic unity' (cf. Tamás Koltai: editor-in-chief of the magazine Szinház - The Theatre). On an unseen scenic construction, colourful and ample, that arches over historical epochs, the audience takes part in the show's action by sitting on a turntable in the middle of the theatre's great stage. The revolving stage shifts their attention from one stage to the other because there is something happening in every corner and this makes the show be alive, with the action constantly throbbing. The cast: György Cserhalmi, Anna Ráckevei, Zsolt Trill, Nelli Szűcs, Oleg Jukovski, Attila Kristán, László Tóth, János Mercs, Árpád Bakota, József Rácz, Viktor Ivaskovics, Lajos Pál, Eszter Pál.   Directing: Attila Vidnyánszky Setting and costumes: Oleksandr Bilozub Art director: Ghennadii Gogoliuk The spectators can listen to the translation of the text through headphones. The two representations take place on the stage of the NTB's Great Hall, on the 25th and 26th April 2012, at 19.00. Tickets will be available at the National Theatre's box office starting with Saturday, 7th April 2012. Exclusive price: 40 lei. *Original title: Mesés Férfiak Szárnyakkal   Translated by: Izabella Feher MTTLC, Bucharest University

Sunday, 22nd April, at 11:00, at the National Theatre's Black Box, Acad. Marius Sala will hold a conference on the theme How I became a linguist. Ticket prices: 23 and 10 lei. The guest of the NTB's conference from 22nd April 2012, the academician Marius Sala, linguist, with a PhD. in philology, is, without a doubt, one of the most complex personalities of the nowadays academic world from Romania. ‘...I think that my nephew Radu Călin Cristea made the best description of me in a book that was dedicated to me when I turned 70, admitted Marius Sala  in an interview: ‘A Sala element from a table which some Mendeleev in linguistics would have to reinvent. Where Marius already has re-served a box about which I don't know much, but I guess that it has to be a combination of mercury and phosphorous. Similar to his life: fast and intensely burning.

The already sold out show Caramitru-Mălăele, Spinning a yarn will take place on Monday, 5th March, in the Great Hall of the National Theater from Bucharest. Taking into consideration the great number of ticket requests, the actors Ion Caramitru and Horațiu Mălăele have accepted another challenge - an extraordinary edition of this show that will take place at the National Theatre from Bucharest on 16th April (the second day of Easter), at 20.00.