Critical Correspondence

Moving Dialogue: LULU’S ROOM – THE (ARCHI)TECTONICS OF GESTURE

Gina Serbanescu

Thumbnail photo: Cosmin Manolescu

Lulu’s Room, the performance created and performed by Mihaela Dancs (Romania) at Judson Church on 25 October 2010 had its premiere in 2009 at the National Dance Centre in Bucharest. At that time, I published an article in the Romanian cultural magazine “Dilema Veche”(nr.283, 17 July 2009) about the importance of this solo within the dance and performance context of the 2008-2009 season at the National Dance Centre. Here you can read its English version.

If I had to analyse in detail what happened at the National Dance Centre in Bucharest during the 2008-2009 season, I would definitely have a very attentive look at the artistic quality of the premieres. If I had to choose only one performance to write about, I would unhesitatingly choose Lulu’s Room, the solo of the choreographer Mihaela Dancs. This performance which is poetical and rigorous at the same time represents now the peak of Mihaela Dancs’ search for a personal artistic style, in which the thought clearly matches the movement. Construction and dynamics, investigation of her own states of mind, building a mobile spatiality through very well phrased gestures – these are some main features of this solo.

I must admit that I had been waiting for some time for a new choregraphic style in Romania, a style meant to launch some challenges at levels like imagination, thought or sensitivity. I had my intuitions about Mihaela Dancs’ role in this respect, but I could see more clearly her gift as a perfomer than the choreographic strength. As she is that type of artistic personality that needs nothing else but simply being on stage to convey a message, her creations used to be somehow “shadowed” by her own stage presence. As far as Lulu’s Room is concerned, the awaited shift becomes visible: the choreography and the interpretation cannot be split, the inner discourse is effectively translated into movement.

Apparently, the performance has two parts: the first one is a choreographic part and the second is made of phrases selected from movies. In fact, the solo cannot be divided in two, for an obvious reason: the logics according to which Mihaela Dancs puts together “samples” from movies is the same that generates the dynamics of the gestures and the elements of choreography. The discourse is constructed according to a stream of consciousness, generated by images provoked by the phrases chosen from famous movies. The text and especially the way in which Mihaela Dancs delivers it (in a very self-contained, assumed and at the same time fragile way) will inevitalbly challenge the memory of the spectators to regain the key-moments from everyone’s personal history.

Lulu’s Room can be a generic title for the story of each member of the audience because, after all, we have constructed the space of our own identity through specific gestures. This is the place where we fortified the walls with hopes borrowed from a celluloid world. Through these walls we could hear a remote music to which we may have always been afraid to get. For the way in which Mihaela Dancs manages to interwine a rigurous dynamics of gestures with a dramaturgy of self-construction, for the intelligence behind the ellaboration of movement, for the meaning of the solo and especially for the courage to tell us the story of anyone of us, I don’t think I am far from the truth if I say that Lulu’s Room is the most valuable creation premiered at the National Dance Centre in Bucharest in 2008-2009 season.