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Rhinoceros

Eugène Ionesco, regia Robert Wilson

Duration: 90 min.

Music: Adam Lenz

Genre of the show: drama

Translation: Vlad Russo and Vlad Zografi

Premiere date: 02 Iulie 2014

Decoration: Robert Wilson

Technical direction: George Dulămea

Prompter: Bogdana Dumitriu

Proiecții video: Florin Chirea

Documentare video: Emilia Chirea

Traducerea în limba română: Vlad Russo and Vlad Zografi

Set design and lighting concept: Robert Wilson

Costumes: Jacques Reynaud

Regizor asociat: Charles Chemin, Tilman Hecker

Scenograf asociat: Adrian Damian

Lighting design: John Torres, A.J. Weissbard

Video: Tomek Jeziorski

Music: Adam Lenz

Sound design: Daniel Drăgoescu

Playwright: Konrad Kuhn

Assistant Director: Bobi Pricop

Costume Assistant: Adriana Dinulescu

Stage manager: Gina Călinoiu,

Din distribuție: Laurenţiu Tudor   Martorul, Logicianul | The Whitness, a Logician     Ilie Gheorghe Bérenger                        Valentin Mihali Daisy                               Iulia Bleonț Jean                                 Claudiu Bleonț Dudard                            Valer Dellakeza Soția Băcanului | The Grocer’s Wife        Tamara Popescu Băcanul | The Grocer       Angel Rababoc Domnul bătrân | The Old gentleman         Nicolae Poghirc Gospodina | The Housewife                 Raluca Păun Chelnerița | The Waitress                    Monica Ardeleanu Patronul Cafenelei | The Cafe proprietor        George Albert Costea Domnul Papillon | Monsieur Papillon               Cosmin Rădescu Botard                                Constantin Cicort Madama Boeuf                Mirela Cioabă Un pompier | A Fireman                                Dragoș Măceșanu Vecinii bătrâni | The Old neighbors            Iulia Colan, Ion Colan   Kneeplays 1 + 2             Corina Druc, Anca Ghiță, Geni Macsim, Natașa Raab, Costinela Ungureanu, Romanița Ionescu; Alex Calangiu, Cosmin Dolea, Claudiu Mihail,   Adrian Andone, Marian Politic, Eugen Titu, Cătălin Vieru Kneeplays 3                    Raluca Păun, Tamara Popescu Kneeplay 4                     Cosmin Rădescu   Regia tehnică| Head of technical staff    George Dulămea Operator lumini | Head of lighting staff    Dodu Ispas, Ştefăniţă Rezeanu Inginer sunet | Sound engineer         Tom Brânduş Sunet | Sound staff                               Valentin Pârlogea, George Udrea Proiecţii video | Video projection                          Florin Chirea Documentare video /Video documentation      Emilia Chirea Machiaj | Make up                                       Minela Popa, Mihaela Guran Asistent Machiaj | Make up assistent    Oana-Veronica Popa, Anca-Maria Ghiţă, Costinela Ungureanu, Adrian-Cristian Ţîrcă Sufleor | Prompter                        Bogdana Dumitriu Stagiar | Intern staging                 Crista Bilciu Stagiar | Intern light design         Rui Monteiro Stagiar | Intern dramaturgy        Luiza Mitu Stagiar | Intern stage management    Marina Cozeca Maşinişti | Technical crew   Costel Miu, Cristi Petec, Alin Stan, Marian Camen, Nicu Guran, Robert Deca, Fane Rotaru, Toma Stratonie, Mihai Nărămzoiu, Toni Cojocaru Lumini | Lighting crew      Vilică Ruiu, Radu Săndulescu Recuzită | Props                 Nelu Păşescu, Nina Răducanu, Marieta Mierlă, Sandu Cotea, Tavi Popescu Cabine | Dressers              Lavinia Petec, Elena Cotea, Mirela Nicolae, Mariana Săceanu   Inginer şef: Gabriel Mănescu Şef serviciu producţie: Marian Mandache Croitorie bărbaţi: Jane Cîrciu, Melania Cîrciu, Trandafir Chiurtu Croitorie femei: Angela Dumitraşcu, Marieta Bobîrnac Pictură: Daniel Nae Mecanic: Emmanuel Voichiţa, Dumitru Mierlă Tâmplărie: Traian Ghinea, George Andrei Tapiţerie: Ştefan Rotaru

"Rhinoceros" Synopsis Act I – Strange heads appear from underground, while disturbing noises are heard. The lines intertwine: "I don't like to wait!" "Make an effort of will!" "Incredible!". The stage is crossed by the characters of the play, to a happy overture music. The characters freeze in panicked attitudes. A market in a small provincial town. Movement, city bustle. A character with a black hat sits at a table, reads and writes. He will read most of the characters' lines. It is a character invented by the director, who may be the author. Jean enters and sits at a table on the terrace. His friend, Bérenger, cherchelit, also appears. They start conversing. They talk, they drink, they are old friends. Bérenger has already gone beyond measure. Other characters also appear, a housewife with a cat, the grocer and his wife, an old gentleman. Daisy, Bérenger's colleague, who he is attracted to, also passes by. The waitress comes to take the order, but the screams of the rhinos make her drop the tray, the patron appears, scolding the waitress. The housewife appears with a basket, she overturns it in fright. The old gentleman intervenes to help her. Everyone is frightened by the appearance of rhinos in the city. The Logician appears, played by the same actor who plays the role of the author, and tries to explain what is happening. The housewife reappears crying, holding the cat crushed by a rhinoceros. The feeling of terror has already set in. Intermezzo: six rhinoceroses appear, laughter and voices are heard to the point of absurdity, repeating the lines heard at the beginning of the scene. Act II – The headquarters of the company where Bérenger works. Piles of files and papers scattered everywhere. The press articles about the rhinoceros invasion are commented on. The head of the office, placed above, supervises. Dudard, Botard and Daisy express different opinions. Jean shows up, he's late. The boss demands discipline, active work, forbids comments, wine labels do not suffer postponement. Daisy frantically taps on the machine as thousands of meaningless words appear on the screen. Mrs. Boeuf, the wife of their office colleague, runs in, telling how he became a rhinoceros. The screams of the rhinos make everyone climb the ladder brought by the fireman. Rescue can come from "above"... Intermezzo: The housewife and the grocer's wife talk on the phone in a caricatured English, gossip and comment on the appearance of a rhinoceros at... Auchan. State of stupor and incapacity for coherent dialogue, deranged senses. Act III Scene I At Jean's house, sick at the head of the bed, visited by Bérenger, stooping to pass under the low door. Talks about Daisy-Jean and Daisy-Bérenger. Bérenger is affected by his friend's suffering. Dudard also appears. Cheerful, Daisy brings the picnic basket, but also news of the transformations outside. The logician retreats from the beginning to the back right corner, in front of the huge lighted window. He stands with his back to the audience. When Bérenger is alone with Daisy, he begs her to be together in these moments. She flees, Bérenger withdraws to the right, joining the Logician. Intermezzo: Mr. Papillon, having become a rhinoceros, gives a lecture about the known species of rhinoceros and about some of their lesser-known characteristics, in a didactic-ironic, ridiculous manner. Tableau II In the end, the Logician becomes a rhinoceros, he keeps, however, his straw hat pierced by a horn. The logician-witness, with his back to the audience, waits for Bérenger, they both look out the huge window facing the future. Behind them, Bérenger took one last dramatic look at Daisy. The world is left without hope, but all is not lost, perhaps. Despite any aggression, the last man left untouched by the rhinoceros refuses to become like all the others - "I don't give in"...   RHINOCEROS - critical references

·        John Elsom, the magazine of the "Marin Sorescu" National Theater from Craiova - SpectActor, 1/2014
"The new staging at the National Theater in Craiova is a triumph. Wilson is a painter, architect and visual artist. He has a fine ear for the kind of music that replays in the mind long after it's stopped in the speakers. The production had many memorable visual and auditory moments, but for me, the most impressive feature was the characterization of the team of actors from Craiova. Each actor provided a personal vignette that was funny, accurate, and with a sense of inner rhythm that gave the impression of a live dance. Bérenger really resembled Ionesco, whom I once met when I asked him to take part in the London conference, and whose courtesy andgravitas, used for comic effect, stayed with me in mind ever since."
“Robert Wilson’s new staging at the National Theatre of Craiova is a triumph. Wilson is a painter, an architect and an artist for the visual stage. He has a keen ear for the kind of music that repeats itself in the mind long after it stops on the loudspeakers. The production had many memorable visual and aural moments, but for me, the most impressive feature was the characterisation from the Craiova acting team. Each actor gave a personal vignette which was funny, exact and with a sense of internal rhythm that gave the impression of a living dance. Bérenger even looked like Ionesco, whom I met once, when I asked him to take part in a London conference.”
·        Andrei Șerban, interview,  „Mozaicul” review, Craiova)
"It's like a kind of painting, sculpture in motion, an explosion of contemporary art, of very refined visual art, at the highest level. Going to the theater and seeing something so refined and abstract is interesting not only for the Craiova audience, but also for the Bucharest audience, because they have never seen anything like this."
„It is like a sort of painting, a moving sculpture, an explosion of contemporary art, of very refined visual art at the highest level. To go to the theatre and see something as refined and abstract is interesting not only for the public in Craiova, but for the one in Bucharest as well, because they’ve never seen something like this.”
·        Cristina RusieckiRobert Wilson`s  rhinoceros leather glove, „Cultura” review
"It has been said that Wilson's theater is one of "mobile sculptures", that the actor is above all a form in the fine geometry of the director, one with its own rhetoric, alternation of space and non-space, full and empty, which the setting invaded by scholarly lights illustrate. The show in Craiova by the architect Wilson, a suite of living paintings, amazes with the beauty of the forms. A hanging chair in one scene, a suspended receiver in another, scraps of crumpled papers in the next, platforms with stairs, a modern-cut white divan with the same back where emptiness has replaced matter, all cancel out the dramatic convention based on illusion, character and empathy to replace it with a self-contained visual rhetoric.
“It has been said that Wilson’s theatre is that of “mobile sculptures”, that the actor is especially shape in the refined geometry of the director – one with its own rhetoric, an alternation of space and non-space, full and empty, which the light-infused décor illustrates. Architect Wilson’s show from Craiova, a suite of vivant paintings, stuns through the beauty of shapes. A hanging chair in a scene, a suspended receiver in another, stacks of crumpled papers in the next, platforms with stairs, a white divan with modern cut, with the same backrest in which the empty has replaced matter, all annul the dramatic convention based on illusion, character and empathy, only to replace it with a self-standing visual rhetoric.”

·        Tompa Gabor, interview, „Mozaicul” review, Craiova

"It is a special scenic poetry of Robert Wilson, which is found in these images, the poetry of light, of the depth of space, that cyclorama that is used permanently and cuts the space very nicely, but there is also a precision of light that Wilson cares a lot about , is very rigorous in this regard. Also, we observe a kind of decoupage of the movement as a result of the fact that the director has this root in dance, in choreography, this being one of the strong points of his world."
„This is a special scenic poetry of Robert Wilson, which is found in these images: a poetry of light, of the depth of space, that panorama that is permanently used and which crops the space very nicely, but there is also a precision of light that Wilson cares deeply about, it is something he is very rigorous about. Moreover, we notice a certain cropping of movement as a result of the fact that the director has roots in dance, in choreography, which is one of the strong points of his world.”

                     Haricleea Nicolau, “Methods of Composition of the Absurd Dimension in Rhinoceros lui Wilson”,SpectActor (no. 2 (28), May-August 2014)

“Like Mondrian, Wilson prefers repetitive geometry and minimalist and post-minimalist details. Mathematical forms of scene construction emphasize pure form, geometric frames of horizontal and vertical lines are filled with primary colors – windows to a bright beyond – the horizon, Dalinian blue, to a beyondbloody or clear – generating emotion through the essence evoked. The light is fecund, it imprints rhythm and volume on the surfaces, deeply painting the stage space. The simple revelation of such images produces a terrible impact, immediate and disturbing, releasing an energy of color and form, so that the perfection of the image is not just a beautiful polychrome, perfectly geometric creation, but a living painting of space."

The world premiere of the play ˝Rinocerii˝ took place at Düsseldorf, on November 6, 1959, the text being printed the same year at the Gallimard Publishing House. Since then, the play has been performed in hundreds of performances, on all stages of the world.   In Craiova, Robert Wilson will be accompanied by a team of collaborators with whom he usually works for his acclaimed shows on international stages: playwright Konrad Kuhn (Austria), costume designer Jacques Reynaud (France), co-directors Tilman Hecker (Germany) and Charles Chemin (France), light designers A.J. Weissbard (Italy) and John Torres (Canada), video artist Tomek Jeziorski (Poland) and composer Adam Lenz (USA). They will be joined from Romania by director Bobi Pricop (assistant director), scenographers Adrian Damian (set assistant) and Adriana Dinulescu (costume assistant). Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where he focused on architecture and design. In 1968 he had already founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and was working and playing with the group in an apartment building at 147 Spring Street in lower Manhattan. In 1969, two major Wilson productions appeared in New York City: King of Spain at Anderson Theater and The life and times of Sigmund Freud which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 1971 Wilson received international acclaim for the revolutionary Deafman Glance, a silent opera created in collaboration with Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf-mute whom Wilson adopted. After the premiere in Paris, the French surrealist Louis Aragon wrote about Wilson ˝he is what we, from whom surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and reach beyond us˝. In 1979 he collaborated with the composer Philip Glass to write the landmark opera Eisenstein on the Beach, which was presented at the Festival d'Avignon and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, and which has since been revived for two world tours. In the early 1980s, Wilson created what is still considered his most ambitious project today: the multi-national epic the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. Although the epic was never seen in its entirety, it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Over the past two decades he has brought his unique vision to the traditional dramatic and operatic repertoire, creating and directing operas for La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Bastille, and many others, including The Ring, Parsifal şi Lohengrin de Wagner, Flautul Magic de Mozart, Madama Butterfly by Pucini. It also presented innovative adaptations of works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein or Henrik Ibsen. Throughout his career, Wilson has collaborated with various artists, such as Heiner Muller, Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, David Byrne, Rufus Weinwright, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and Jessye Norman. Recent work for the stage includes The Ring de Wagner, alături de dirijorul Cristoph Eschenbach (2005-2006) şi The Passion of St. John by Bach, which premiered in 2007 at the Châtelet in Paris. Between November 2013 and February 2014, the artist was honored in Paris by presenting four different shows (Lecture on Nothing, Peter Pan, Einstein on the Beach, Madame Butterfly) and an exhibition entitled "Living rooms" at the Musée du Louvre. His last production, ʺ1914ʺ, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, took place a few days ago at the National Theater in Prague.   Articol Ioana Moldovan – 4 nov. 2014 Articol Mircea Morariu – Adevarul blog   ROBERT WILSON   Of Wilson’s artistic career, Susan Sontag has added “it has the signature of a major artistic creation. I can’t think of any body of work as large or as influential.” A native of Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and arrived in New York in 1963 to attend Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Soon thereafter, Wilson set to work with his Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds and, together with his company, developed his first signature works including King of Spain (1969), Deafman Glance (1970), The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). Regarded as a leader of Manhattan’s then-burgeoning downtown art scene, Wilson turned his attention to large-scale opera and, with Philip Glass, created the monumental Einstein on the Beach (1976), which achieved worldwide acclaim and altered conventional notions of a moribund form. Following Einstein, Wilson worked increasingly with major European theaters and opera houses. In collaboration with internationally renowned writers and performers, Wilson created landmark original works that were featured regularly at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, Der Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne in Berlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Salzburg Festival, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. At the Schaubühne he created Death, Destruction & Detroit (1979) and Death, Destruction & Detroit II (1987); and at the Thalia he presented the groundbreaking musical works The Black Rider (1991) and Alice(1992). He has also applied his striking formal language to the operatic repertoire, includingParsifal in Hamburg (1991), Houston (1992), and Los Angeles (2005); The Magic Flute (1991) and Madame Butterfly (1993); and Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1998 & 2006). Wilson recently completed an entirely new production, based on an epic poem from Indonesia, entitled I La Galigo, which toured extensively and appeared at the Lincoln Center Festival in the summer of 2005. Wilson continues to direct revivals of his most celebrated productions, including The Black Rider in London, San Francisco, Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles; The Temptation of St. Anthony in New York and Barcelona; Erwartung in Berlin; Madama Butterfly at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow; and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at Le Châtelet in Paris. Wilson’s practice is firmly rooted in the fine arts and his drawings, furniture designs, and installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Extensive retrospectives have been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has mounted installations at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, London’s Clink Street Vaults, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. His extraordinary tribute to Isamu Noguchi has been exhibited recently at the Seattle Art Museum, and his installations of the Guggenheim’s Giorgio Armani retrospective have traveled to London, Rome, and Tokyo. Each summer Wilson decamps to the Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts and humanities in eastern Long Island. The Watermill Center brings together students and experienced professionals in a multi-disciplinary environment dedicated to creative collaboration. A gala benefit and re-dedication of the reconstructed main building takes place every summer. Wilson’s numerous awards and honors include an Obie award for direction, the Golden Lion for sculpture from the Venice Biennale, the 3rd Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Premio Europa award from Taormina Arte, two Guggenheim Fellowship awards, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship award, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the Golden Lion for Sculpture from the Venice Biennale, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has been named a „Commandeur des arts et des letters” by the French Minister of Culture.

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