The Stone Circle

or Two Decades… of Equinox

 

 

 

 

    With the performance „The Stone Circle”, the Equinox Theatre celebrated not only, as it happens every year, the autumnal equinox, but also two decades of existence of a theatrical movement which became an original school. „As far as we know, there is no other similar movement in our country. It is therefore necessary that the „phenomenon from Ploiesti” should be known and acknowledged, as it is meaningful for what we understand by a modern and innovatory approach of the stage act” – were the words written by the dramatist Dumitru Solomon in 1987. That these words are still up-to-date is proved by the synthetic character of this performance, which brought to the public absolute values of this theatrical approach.

    Made of a number of evocations of some imaginary protoromanian rites, the performance „The Stone Circle” (which totally corresponds to the other performances belonging to this project – The Romanian Mythology Theatre) reveals, during an hour and a half, its recovering force just as it discourages, pedagogically speaking, all hasty contact with the symbol. To understand the open but well-oriented character of the symbol is to have the chance of fully intercepting the message, which is no other but the search for the sacred.

    An archaeology of what is specific to the human being, whose means are the characters on the stage, the stage itself (half of which was brought among the public), the gesture, the music, the objects, the more humble they are, the more fundamental they become: the stone, the water, the light, the wood, the branch, the leaf…

    „…a symbol always reveals the fundamental unity of the apparently irreducible sides of the reality (…) No other type of thinking can replace the symbolical thinking. Through the symbol, man, even contemporary man (though unaware of it), is given access to the universe, to the world, to his own life. The understanding of one symbol equates with a window that opens to a universe of meanings, which otherwise remain obscure, mysterious, even completely ignored.” The bet made by the stage manager Mihai Vasile, the one who is responsible of this theatrical adventure which has been lasting for two decades, is a result of Mircea Eliade’s ideas.

    Decomposed and recomposed on the stage, fundamental human activities like work, love, sacrifice, the passage into the other world, seem to be ordered by a superhuman „programme” that the public is invited to experiment in an unostentatious, natural way, which is the result of a long process of refinement of the artistic gesture. Religious, yet far from any institutionally identifiable religion, the artistic approach of the actors of the Equinox Theatre and of their stage manager, screenwriter, actor, musician and „magician” Mihai Vasile, is located in that area of the essential for which the experiment is the most serious and the most profound act in the world.

 

Arthur Teodorescu

(journalist)

23 sept. 2000

 

 

 

 

DE DEEP SENSE OF THE WORD

The performances belonging to this magnificent project (unique – I dare call it – in today’s European culture) can take us back to the innovatory ideas of Artaud and Grotowski. What we have sun this evening at the Equinox Theatre was so moving, so human in the religiousness that goes with this art, that we might predict a better future for theatre. The stage manager Mihai Vasile is right to openly state that the dramatic art (wich can be considerd as the oldest of all arts) needs this perspective on the future, a perspective coming from this mysterious past, which is the origin of all things. This performance fascinates everybody irrespective of the place or culture they come from, as the place in which it has its roots is the very starting point of humanity, where we are all together. As a philologist, I may say that this articulate language that the actors used, combined with the stage manager’s ability to clearly express his ideas, was very familiar to me. There was no need for me to ”translate” it even if my language and the Romanian language are sisters. These primordial sounds, these primordial, or if you prefer primaty, in the deepest sense of the word, gesture and attitudes thrill us just because they make reference to what the humanity has from each of us: a resonance to pure feelings which nowadays progressively and surely lose their emotional values.

I feel priviledged because I was given this amezing chanse to be present here today and to enjoy this performance!

 

Paolo Nicolini

(professor – Italy)

23 sept. 2000