Conferences

On Sunday, October 20th, 2019, from 11.00 am, the NTB Black Box Hall will host the conference Sever Voinescu in dialogue with George Banu. Returns. Old friends or former friends? within the project NTB Conferences.

About the Conference

For the ancient Greeks, friendship was "a virtue" achieved thanks to the intellectual and emotional exchanges between "good people", as the evaluation of the partners serves as a foundation, but also as a guarantee for the relevance of this interpersonal connection. The discourses on the status of friends were constituted as a passing in time of the relay from Aristotle and Cicero to Montaigne, Nietzsche and so many others, as Blanchot and Derrida. Most of these interpreters consider the friend to be "another self", a "third" that accompanies the "double" from which any being is built, or even an "alter ego". But people come and go, the lives of all are journeys in the proper sense of the word. What happens to friends whose roads go to different countries? But with friends who break up? But what about future friendships?

A rich life, like that of Georges Banu, can very well be the beginning of a reflection on the topic of friendship. And especially because George Banu's life is impregnated with theatre, and all his friendships are related to theatre, we can even use the experience of theatre to marvel together at the experience of friendship. Sever Voinescu

          Sever Voinescu (b. 1969, Ploiesti) graduated in 1992 from the Faculty of Law of the Bucharest University. Since 1994, he has been a lawyer in the Bucharest Bar. 1994 - 1996: Teaching assistant at the Department of Law of the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest. 1998 - 2000: Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 2000 - 2003: General Consul of Romania in Chicago. 2004 - 2008: Coordinator of the Foreign Policy Programme at the Institute for Public Policy. 2008 - 2012: Member of the Romanian Parliament, for the entire term of office leading the Parliament Delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. As of January 1st, 2016, he has been the editor-in-chief of the Dilema Veche weekly cultural magazine and, as of the same year, he produces the weekly programme Christiana Europe on Trinitas television. Since 1993, he has published over 3,000 articles, comments and essays in cultural or daily publications such as Dilema / Dilema veche, 22, Observator Cultural, Cotidianul, Evenimentul Zilei. He has contributed to the content of several volumes and is especially proud of a book dedicated to opera, entitled Canta che ti pasa - talks with Virginia Zeani.

        George Banu (b. 1943, Buzau) is a professor of drama studies at the Sorbonne, honorary president of the International Association of Theater Critics, honorary member of the Romanian Academy. Editor-in-chief of the internationally prestigious magazine Alternatives théâtrales and director of collections at Actes Sud Publishing House, he has published a wide number of volumes devoted to modern theatre and its protagonists, such as Peter Brook, Klaus Michael Grüber, Giorgio Strehler, Antoine Vitez and Ariane Mnouchkine. He is the author of a trilogy on theatre and painting: Le Rideau, L′homme de dos and Nocturnes. He worked with the famous scenographer Yannis Kokkos, publishing the work Le scénographe et le héron. His work Rouge et or is a reference work for the poetics of drama à l´italienne. He is the author of the Mémoires du théâtre study and a volume dedicated to the Japanese play L′acteur qui ne revient. He has won three times the best book award in France. His texts are translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Slovak, Romanian. He produced two films, dedicated to Shakespeare and Chekhov, both of which were awarded by UNESCO.

He is an honorary doctor of several universities. He received the UNITER award for his work. The Sorbonne dedicated him a tribute volume Travels or the horizon of theatre, signed by Peter Brook, Andrei Serban, Eugenio Barba, Radu Penciulescu, Niky Wolcz.

Translated by Simona Nichiteanu