Author: Emese Szabó
According to local press reports, the fifth edition of the Flow International Dance Festival was the most successful yet. There were more performances than in previous years, the program was more diverse, and the audience showed greater interest, surpassing previous years’ attendance records. In Saint George (Sfântu Gheorghe) the city places a big emphasis on culture, it hosts various festivals and events almost monthly. The presence of the M Studio Contemporary Dance Company and the Flow Festival demonstrate that there is a demand for contemporary dance in this small city.
I had the opportunity to watch the festival’s final three productions: Fiesta by the Ivan Vazov National Theatre, BLOT – Body Line of Thought, a coproduction of the Tangaj Collective and Action at a Distance, and Boys by FrenÁk Company. Each of these performances utilized distinctly different styles, aligning with Flow’s mission to showcase unique and diverse presentations from the international scene.
Andrea Gavriliu: Fiesta. Photo by Augustina Iohan.
Directed by Andrea Gavriliu (who was born in Saint George), the Bulgarian company’s Fiesta was performed on the main stage. Unfortunately, this choice made the production difficult to absorb. The original concept, as I later read, was quite different: the premiere took place in the Ivan Vazov National Theatre’s first-floor foyer, allowing the audience to be close to the dancers and avoid the black box effect. But in our case, we could only be simple voyeurs of the production which goes against the creator’s vision.
The concept shows us a party; we don’t know what the performers are celebrating. They are a distinguished group, dressed in beautiful evening gowns. Four men and four women sit around a long, formally set table, making it difficult to see everyone, especially those seated at the back. Even before the performance starts, we hear drumming that seems to approach from a distance and gets louder. This pulsating rhythm (music by Mihai Dobre) is present throughout the entire performance, it’s overwhelming, and monotone, like a techno party. The show gives us a glimpse into how these characters transform as the night progresses. At the beautifully set tables, the silver-colored glasses are raised to their mouths with grand gestures, indicating that they are drinking more and more alcohol. As they edge closer to complete drunkenness, the music includes increasingly off-key and weary trumpet sounds, mimicking the dizzying state of a drunken party musician struggling to breathe.
Initially, these upper-middle-class men and women behave very decorously, sitting upright as one would at an elegant dinner. Their movements are precisely choreographed and synchronized. As time passes, the dynamics of flirtation and seduction between men and women become apparent. The women’s hair loosens, they take off their shoes, while the men remove their jackets, ties, and eventually their shirts. This depicts general party behavior: men smoking big cigars in a cloud of smoke, women dancing seductively, they are often changing partners throughout the evening.
Andrea Gavriliu: Fiesta. Photo by Augustina Iohan.
There were no counterpoints in these behaviors; all characters acted similarly, performing the same movements and being equally seductive, presenting a generality rather than individual character distinctions. Men frequently stood in groups apart from the women, who formed their own groups. This stereotypical pattern of parallel existence between genders, who only approach each other in the dim light after a lot of alcohol, highlighted a purely sexual intention without any deeper connection. Obviously, these are existing phenomena, but these behavior patterns are more complex, individual, and nuanced from both male and female perspectives.
In the heat of the party, when everyone was sufficiently drunk, women sat on the men’s laps, and the men began drumming a common rhythm on the w omen’s buttocks. Meanwhile, the women were either moving their heads as part of the dance, shook their glasses, or stared at the men as if they enjoyed this prolonged drumming on their behinds. No one opposed this; they either tolerated it or pretended to enjoy it. Afterwards, the men left the women on the chairs and lit cigars. The performance allowed us to recognize how pathetically we can behave in spaces dedicated to entertainment and letting off steam. However, it did not delve much deeper into these insights, as we only saw generalized behavior patterns, mostly from a distance, missing the nuances of small gestures and facial expressions, so it remained a generalised representation of human behaviour.
Pál Frenák: Boys. Photo by Augustina Iohan.
Similarly, Boys also presented stereotypical behavior patterns. The title hints at the theme, exploring boyhood and masculinity under Pál Frenák’s direction. Five muscular, beautifully sculpted men danced in underwear — these rare, desired bodies inherently evoke admiration, envy, perhaps anxiety or longing. Three ropes hanging from the ceiling created a vertical movement space, rarely utilized in theater. Many acrobatic elements on the ropes showcased strength and physical capabilities, or perhaps invited us to consider another, unconscious dimension of thought, since the rope symbolized many things: a phallus, an umbilical cord, or a noose.
The performance starkly portrayed the stereotypes of men’s instinctive, animalistic side — recurring elements included roaring, crawling on all fours, and imitating fights — or being driven by their sexuality, as seen when the ropes between their legs were stroked like giant phalluses. But it also depicted sensibility and codependence, as these ropes could remind us of something else, an umbilical cord. The piece had a segmented dramaturgy, with performers returning to the ground and lying in a fetal position at the rope’s end, before transitioning into a new scene. This juxtaposition of stereotypical depictions — rawness and emotionless portrayals — with moments of tenderness challenged us to examine masculinity more deeply, beyond the simplistic view that “men are being men”.
In one scene, the performers, seated with their backs to the audience, caressed their bare backs. This touch was devoid of sexuality, instead expressing a longing for tenderness and care. Such alternating images brought to mind the societal issue of men trapped in boyhood, unable to mature fully. Hence, the title Boys rather than Men underscores this dissonance, which is further emphasized by the scene where the dancers, while tensed and flexed, suck on pacifiers like children. Ultimately, there is no means of maturing, leaving us with the monologue from movie Gangster No. 1 at the performance’s end, which was about a desire for dominance over another person’s life by means of a bloody murder and the narcissistic assertion “I’m Superman, I’m number 1, number fucking 1.” These portrayals — the raw honesty and the vulnerability displayed — help us delve deeper into the topic, moving beyond a simple resignation to stereotypical male behavior.
Simona Deaconescu, Vanessa Goodman: BLOT – Body Line Of Thought. Photo by Alina Usurelu.
Interestingly, despite featuring two naked bodies, BLOT – Body Line of Thought did not place femininity or the female body at the center of its narrative. The idealized male bodies in Boys and their societal roles lingered in my mind longer than Simona Dabija’s and Maria Luiza Dimulescu’s nude bodies in BLOT. In BLOT, however, despite the nudity, the relationship of the performers to each other and the audience, as well as to their own bodies, distanced us from this visual.
Their movements were fragmented, repetitive, and robotic. With microphones on their arms and smartwatches on their wrists, they maintained a constant reporting about the body. The performance included a lot of text, mostly surprising facts about the human body, such as how much we sweat daily and how much salt is in that sweat, and if this salt was turned into a mountain, how tall would it be over a lifetime. These facts were presented plainly almost like in a biology lesson, alienating us from what should be the most natural thing in the world: our own bodies. The performers visibly took deep breaths into their bellies, jumped rope for long periods without showing fatigue, and checked their pulse scientifically, stating the elevated pulse rates as if in a clinical observation.
When they looked at the audience, their gaze was glassy, mechanical, and detached. They never touched each other; at one point, they walked through the space as if representing a new being — one performer standing while the other bent forward from the waist, hands and feet on the ground. This created the impression of a new creature with two legs and two torsos, intensifying the artificial and unfamiliar sensation in the viewer.
Simona Deaconescu, Vanessa Goodman: BLOT – Body Line Of Thought. Photo by Alina Usurelu.
It was only during the curtain call that I realized how well the illusion of detachment from their bodies worked. Among the audience was a man who behaved very differently from the norm, standing up, clapping loudly, and shouting praises like, “Well done, girls, bravo, I had a great time.” Nevertheless, it raises the question for me: when a male audience member loudly celebrates such a performance, does it undermine the dignity of the women involved? This reaction seems to value the nudity of the women not in artistic or narrative terms, but as a sexual spectacle. Though his words lacked sexuality and did not mention nudity, we still felt that his boisterousness, breaking beyond conventions, was somehow more threatening in this context of nudity (or, maybe this man just jolted us out of our comfort zone, confronting us with our own conventions and prejudices as “theatre loving intellectuals”).
Anyway, the audience in Saint George, open to culture, has already seen many things on stage, including nudity or artists from various cultures. At this edition of Flow festival, Josef Nadj and Atelier 3+1, the Krakow Dance Theatre, Simkó Beatrix and Zoltán Grecsó, and the Central Europe Dance Theatre were present also. Mihai Dobre performed at the closing party. M Studio is also involved in the Beyond Front@: Bridging Periphery EU project, during which they organized a Dance Communication Lab at Flow, led by Simona Deaconescu. The M Studio thus assists its audience in gaining insight into foreign productions and the artistic perspectives of other countries. In a city that is scarcely connected to Europe by neither highway nor airport, I believe this is extremely important.
