Iasi, Romania, October 2008

Christian Nae

Through the wide open doors of a student house facing a large square in the centre of Iasi, passers-by could catch a glimpse of an unusual phenomenon during a week in October. This place, with connotations of ‘youth’ and the rhetoric of ‘future generations’ (suggesting learning and becoming), is in fact an ancient communist building now open to the public. In a sort of metonymic reference, the history of the edifice and its present-day gesture suggest a state of perpetual transformation undergone by Romanian society in the last twenty years and the rhetoric of change accompanying them.

A row of stairs in front of these rarely used entrance doors make this space look like an enormous theatrical scene, although not many people actually stop to take a look at what happens inside it. At the end of a long corridor on the first floor, a group of amateur dancers and theatre students from Iasi were taking part in a choreography workshop. They were gathered together on an improvised ‘stage’, half-way between a shooting-range and a rehearsal room. The workshop was produced with the help of a group of musicians and a professional choreographer, and it was recorded with the help of three cameras moving around the scene. By using their bodies, their movements and gestures, the dancers were learning to coordinate their actions, confronted by a series of specific, ordinary situations. At the same time, they were able to express themselves as individuals.

Few passers-by were aware that this ‘rehearsal’ stood for Johanna Billing’s contribution to the Periferic 8: Art as Gift contemporary art biennial taking place in the city.

This was not the first time Billing had proposed a collaborative work involving non professional groups of people gathered together voluntarily in a rehearsal situation. Moreover, it is a manner of working which raises questions about the representation of community and its relationship with the individual. The use of amateurs challenged the relationship between staging a ‘social body’ and spontaneous communication among individuals. Being a ‘rehearsal’ stressed the incomplete and dynamic character of this social phenomenon, closer to a ‘work-inprogress’ and suggesting a never ending task It may also be worth noting that the workshop, by its choreographic and therefore performative nature, was, through its location, set against a particular historical background. During the communist regime, many artists tried to achieve individualism by means of performance – regarded as individual resistance to ideological pressure. However, this was mainly a private exercise, often performed in the intimacy of one’s own home or in other, non-institutionalised and publicly unacknowledged, places. The individual’s body was regarded as the ultimate battle-ground for the exercise of power and control from the totalitarian regime. Choreography was mainly used in mass festivities, specific to communist times, which involved thousands of anonymous people gathered together in order to perform the megalomaniac dreams of that delirious social machinery. In this historical context, to enact a choreographic exercise today also meant, in an oblique way, to invite an audience to a collective exercise of recollection and to suggest a test of societal cohesion for the participating individuals in this situation.

But its location and character also related to present-day Romanian society, marked by collective uncertainty about the future. Using non-professional dancers assured the authenticity of the workshop and avoided the possibility of a ‘mannered’ artistic expression. In Romanian society, choreography is still an under-represented profession – a situation shared by many other collective artistic practices. Therefore, even if unintended, by focusing on rhythm and mutual coordination, the workshop implicitly questioned the present-day blurred reference points of young Romanian groups. It also highlighted their fragile collective cohesion in a society characterised by a recently emerged ideology of ‘change’ and ‘Europeanisation’. Besides the fascinating poetics of the performance and the deeply emotional character of the music which accompanied the experience, perhaps it is this uncomfortable but necessary self-questioning of what a collective performance means and how we adapt to changing social conditions that Billing brought as a ‘gift’ to the local context of Iasi and its social self-representations. But the anonymity of the dancers involved in the situation created by Billing means the event defies any particular narrative and easy categorisation.