Singing Songs - Poesis Theatre

Emil Boroghina and a wonderful theatrical - poetic performance

Song of Songs - Premiere!
The first poetry theatre in Romania

On the initiative of Mr. Emil Boroghină, honorary member of the "Marin Sorescu" National Theatre, on September 25, in Craiova, the POESIS Theatre, the first of its kind established in Romania, was born. The first show of the new institution will be held on the aforementioned date, at the Amza Pellea hall, by the founder of the theater, Mr. Emil Boroghina. The premiere performance Singing of Songs, one of the world's great love poems, will be followed by a selection of sonnets from the works of Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Ronsard, Shakespeare and Eminescu by Emil Boroghină. About his personality, George Banu expressed himself with superlatives: "In Emil Boroghină, what captivates is a cello sonority /…: behind the lyrics we identify the subtly modulated discretion of an interpreter who exposes himself in all his humanity! The recital is also an affective x-ray."

In its current form, the POESIS Theater is a Program of the "Marin Sorescu" National Theater and the "C. Nottara" from Bucharest supported by the managers Alexandru Boureanu, respectively Marinela Țepuș, and the artistic director of the Craiova theater, Vlad Drăgulescu.

The launch of the new Poesis Theater Program represents, at this moment, a unique approach in the Romanian theatrical landscape; in Europe there have been several such theaters for a long time, such as the Maison de la Poésie in Paris or the Poème Theater in Brussels. The fusion of poetry with images and music, embodied by the presence of actors, creates a synthesis of the arts through the immediate, living language of theater.

The new recital of the actor Emil Boroghină, Honorary Member of the National Theater Craiova, has admirably enhanced and amplified a thematic nucleus thought and fulfilled under the guise of a binomial of an exemplary uniqueness of the human being: Eros and Poesis.
Unsaved - still - and passionately in love with poetry, served with a rare devotion for over six decades, provocative, as it remains, Emil Boroghină now proposes a kind of bet with a substratum of defiance of our memory suffering under the siege of a marked era of a generalized liberalization of superficiality and media frenzy. The bet subscribes to an interrogation, with a rhetorical substratum, namely if, in the paradigm of so many disavowals, under the pretext of stealing from the great lessons of tradition, Poetry is still possible and in what way. And how else can such a proud test be authenticated if not by associating it, especially under the sign of one of its most demanding species, the sonnet, Love.
Thought in this way, the show proposes a somewhat singular path from the unusual verses of the "Song of Songs", with their amorous sensualism integrated, with a still mysterious taste, to the Holy Scriptures, passing through Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Ronsard, Shakespeare and ending with Eminescu. A watch and some flow of a recitation with an apparently equal impedance maintain attention at the same level of acuity.
The most overwhelming impression of this show-experiment was, for me, that of an organic continuity that is equally verifiable under the aspect of poetics and the thematic vein. In this way, it seems to me, an axiomatic truth is decanted by which eros and poesis, as constitutive institutions of the human being, define Time and also transcend it through the victorious confrontation of death. Poetry, in glorious postures due to the human genius distributed to some of its most devoted recipients, finds its home in our most secret privacy, untouched by the irreparable flow of Time. And of the times.
The fact that the dialogue in love between the bride and groom led many experienced exegetes to give the Song of Solomon the epithet of ... poetic theater even more openly justifies Emil Boroghină's option. With Dante and Petrarch, the sonnet writer Michelangelo chiseling with a feather in the marble of the word, with Shakespeare vouching for the poetic eternity of love, canceling any temptation of existential finitude, but also with the relatively few, but wonderful Eminesian sonnets that should humiliate the detractors his post-modernized", the entire recitative course acquires, in turn, the measure of a hymn, a tribute, as well as a more than timely reminder of the creative spirit captured in a few exemplary pages of its history.
As on so many occasions, deaf to the demoralizing sirens of fashion and worldliness, Emil Boroghină maintains, with a laborious love, his constant attachment to the Great Library of Poetry, with a selective taste that takes his performance to the point of a singular evangelical of lyrically transfigured eros.

(George Popescu Word of Freedom, 16 March 2015)

In the grave, austere landscape of the canonical books of the Old Testament, often crossed by venerable, pious figures, there rises to the astonished eyes of the uninitiated, like an ever-open question, the superb, rare flower of the Song of Songs. The graceful love story between King Solomon and Shulamite, the shepherdess, is one of the oldest pastorals in the history of universal literature, preserving in its ancient structure all the freshness and spontaneity of the movement of souls calling, finding, losing and finding each other, according to the high unwritten laws of love.
As in the great poetry of the world, here we are no longer dealing with mere figures of speech, but with symbols that reveal the archetypal, unique, essential depths of love.
As with Dante, for example, beyond the sense of immediate poetry, of immediate accessibility, going beyond the elements of simple denotation, we pass to the steps of the highest poetry that transfigures. The hero thus becomes the eternal bridegroom, she is the eternal bride, and their meeting is the wedding, the hierogamy, the supreme mystery of union, with cosmic and deeply psychic valences, described as such in ancient philosophies. The force of love brings together the elements of the cosmos, cosmicises the world, fuses the elements, just as the absence of love generates pain, chaos, sterility. The call that resounds throughout the poem is one that announces and calls all the elements of the world, from the macrocosm to the microcosm and down to the depths of the soul, to the original unity, to the beginning homeland of the spirit. Love thus shines forth as a supreme promise of the restoration of the original being in its entire perfection. And the wedding, the supreme symbol, the true celebration of the spirit, crowns the great, mysterious love between creatures, parts, fragments that aspire to become unity and totality once again, in the metaphorical way that Plato and Paul of Tarsus, or even the medieval alchemists, used to say of the wedding of the elements. And this fullness of the promise of the spirit, added to the poetic beauty itself, gives the ancient Hebrew poem the value of a masterpiece of universal literature.
The sonnets reveal, as a page of exceptional lyricism, the results of immersion in the world of memory, expressed in musical and incantatory values of a unique suggestive quality.

Zoe Dumitrescu – Buşulenga