The title is, actually, very accurate. The show is about the act of twisting and turning. As with all metaphors, it’s all in the how.

It opens to grand Hollywood airs, the ‘30s type you expect grand cabaret ballet corps to flood the stage on, plumed, long legged and all smiles. It’s the Overture from Funny Girl, but the setup is rather austere, an all encircling white screen and two metallic bars suspended midair, perhaps recalling bird swings.

The two dancers that do emerge, in just as grand, reprised tours of the stage, cut definite, all black silhouettes against the white screen. Their explorations, however, could not be more different. One is angular, Matrix like, ample and pointed, the other is undulating, a wavering body.

The light then dims, and Hanauer’s precise and edgy contemplating the rebellion movement takes us into a moony, trance inducing state of mind. A dancer from Solaris, I catch myself thinking. Then Joudkaite enters and proceeds into orbit like twists in space, for what must be over a minute. The two intersect in perfectly timed hugs. Is she searching for the hug, is that a refuge or a random collision? In black leotard, Lora fills the stage in beautiful floating and I have the time to recall images of all things twirling and twisting: a dervish, a ballerina in a box, a planet, a whirlwind, a vortex, a spinning top. She occasionally varies the rhythm, her arms waving in hallucinating ellipses. When she stops, she shows no inertia, stepping away in full control.

Hanauer balances that with movement in perfect sync with Nina Simone’s Feelings, anchoring her body and the audience in a welcome change of rhythm and reality. From where I stand, she looks like she’s wearing loose pants and a tank top, plus a really cool, wide, bracelet on her left arm. It’s actually a prosthesis, but I only see that when we meet after the show.

When Joudkaite returns for a second act of torsion, we are let in her story. She spins and tells a tale of sisterly love, childhood emotions sharable or impossible to, of freedom and letting go. The internal dialogue I echo at times – as Joudkaite compares spinning with watching through the train window, I recall the excitement of my train trips as a child – is then symmetrically closed with Funny Girl’s Overture.

“It was intriguing, there was a lot going on, it almost felt impossible in terms of the physicality of it. The fact that it stayed intriguing all through the one hour was fascinating. For me it’s not something that I understood very well, and maybe that’s the beauty of it. I did not really get the story, but visually it was mesmerising, you can’t keep on spinning like that, you can’t do that, it’s next to impossible,” says Ajay Naqvi, who sometimes goes to contemporary dance shows with this friends.

“Wonderful. When you see show after show for nights on end, you are generally left with a mood, rather than the memory of a gesture. This kind of play, you carry with you for a long time. It also takes you back to your own childhood, to your own states of being, and, what is after all wonderful in theatre and particular to dance, it transports you. And it also slightly challenges your imagination to get in the shoes of the character. You find depth beyond the complexity of movement or its homogeneity. It’s a structure that works with minimal means to give a ravishing set of feelings specifically because the challenge is within, not only on stage. I liked it very much. It is, as I was saying, memorable,” adds Andrei Țărnea.

How can the human being spin for so long, I ask Lora Joudkaite. “I don’t know how to answer that, I don’t know what it means to not turn. I’ve been doing this since childhood. The idea of talking came in rehearsal. Rashid [Ouramdane] said “just speak.” And then I start to turn and speak and explain, travel in my mind, to my childhood. And it’s so private, my sister heard this when I played in Lithuania and said “it’s good at least you didn’t say my name. This is our story, why are you saying this?” I spoke a lot and Rashid made it shorter and then I needed to learn it. I said it in English, in German, I am learning it in French, for he Africa tour. Russian, too. The turning bars are Rachid’s idea, but for us, we are calling our friends, they are also spinning, the world is spinning, Earth is spinning, I am spinning. For me it’s a symbol, this is metal, machine, and I am human. For me it’s about this.”

Annie Hanauer doesn’t “speak directly to the audience, but I feel like I have a quite direct connection with the audience, I am sharing a lot with them with my focus and my movement. I feel like there are elements of my personality behind that, being a bit light and not serious, but actually behind that there is something deep and meaningful. Particularly for me the Nina Simone [bit] has a lot of emotional layers and amazing sound and her voice layers everything in there, it’s really nice to work with that. I felt a nice focus from the audience, they were really with us and it was a pleasure to be here, so it’s kicking of the tour in a nice way for us.”

“People say that [the arm does not look like a prosthesis] sometimes and I don’t know because I kind of don’t believe it, I can see what you mean, for me it’s really part of me, it’s not something I think about, really. My body has given me a particular perspective. Sometimes we just see a dancer.” That’s all there is to see.

* TORDRE by Rachid Ouramdane was the special guest show of the Contemporary dance season, on the occasion of FranceDanse Orient-Express Romania, on Thursday 2 November 2017.

**Text written with the occasion of the Contemporary dance season CNDB – Bucharest in movement, 2017.

The Contemporary dance season CNDB – Bucharest in movement, 2017 cultural project is supported within the cultural program Bucharest participatory city, by the Bucharest Mayor’s Office through the Bucharest Cultural Centre ARCUB.

There is a pace to the action, too. Five performers cover the entire perimeter, moving from statuary groups to insular action, declaiming, reciting, dancing, singing and interpreting for the non-Romanian speaking audience. It takes me a while to get into it, but luckily, of that, there is plenty. Delicate instruments of engagement plays on continuously for four hours.

I follow searching for meaning through a speech on the political resistance of Chile from a contemporary hero (whose name, alas, escapes me), a confounding book launch discourse from one of Romania’s ministers of agriculture, whose ineptitude sets the German tourists across the hall off in unrestrained laughter, a reenactment from Romania’s 1989 live revolution I’d watched on TV as a child, a Wailing Wall sequence where we are encouraged to release a secret into the confidence of one of the performers, and a human search engine inviting any question. I go for “orange” and get a motley of vitamin C stats, grandma’s cake recipes with orange zest, and references to Communist scarcity thereof. Another member in the audience tries on “notion,” and reboots the system. “Would you like to search another word?” replies a member of the engine after about a minute of silence. Not much is new, but the interaction is uplifting.

Actually, the interaction is where the performance, or whatever the precise definition is, does it for me. Eventually, I figure out I am witnessing a puzzle. But the kick is in understanding the puzzle moves with me. Or rather for me. Let me explain.

A performer invites anyone in the audience to participate in an artist’s installation. You will have your ears covered by the performer’s hands for over a minute, experiencing closeness and touch in a perfectly noninvasive way. Our eyes either do not meet, or, when they do, I am not provoked in either way. The human installation is there to serve me. Later, the said Cindy Crawford, i.e. Paula Gherghe, delivers Titanic’s “My heart will go on” eyes glued on me throughout. Embarrassed at first, I just let go and take it in. It feels like an act of generous acknowledgement of my presence.

And of course, the first reason of all: the action is structured in four parts. Upon each completion, anyone in the audience is invited to choose a new beginning, and the flow goes on. I go for the covering of the Guernica tapestry at the United Nations during Colin Powell’s speech, advocating for the American intervention in Iraq, in 2003. The options are Erdem Gunduz’s “The Standing Man” passive resistance protest back in 2013, the “Confused Travolta” meme and Rembrandt van Rijn’s “The Abduction of Europa,” painted in 1632, but in this context, more of a pretext for meditation on nationalistic threat.

It actually feels like a human version of the online world, with functions structured along the same principles of interaction, with calls to action with one or several options. Would you like to search for a word? Would you like to choose your next story, better yet be a part of it? Would you like to post something anonymously? Would you like us to read or play something for you? Just click. Or say so. Alexandra Pirici has reenacted the internet. And it is a rather delicate subject in nature. Revolutions have resulted off it.

“The work is not a “performance,” rather an “ongoing action,” says a seriously overbooked Pirici, engaged, ironically, online. “Delicate Instruments…..” re-transmits a mix of pop culture, art and politics in various dramatics the audience can select from.”

Maria Mora, one of the performers and a self called product of CNDB, gives a sneak peak into the creative kitchen. “The performance is multilayered, also an endurance exercise, you must be physically and psychologically fit to take it on. It becomes repetitive and you see yourself better, perhaps today your voice is weaker, it’s a rather meditative exercise, rather minimalist and clear. Nuances arise as you feel the medium, the country. In Russia, we had a super empathetic audience .At the Wailing Wall people lined up to each one of us. They were speaking in Russian and it was not really about secrets, but an exercise to see what it’s like to talk to us. Nobody came in Germany.

The audience is very important. Observing has become an almost scientific discovery for me. When the audience steps in, the whole work is transformed. We try and play with the space, get them out of the passive mode, where they come in, sit on a chair and wait for the end. That’s why we play with the zero point, when our face is turned to them. We move further and closer, to get them to move.”

Alexandru Paul “liked it, although I can’t say why, I think it was more of a mood thing. At first I couldn’t understand, but then I did and it even moved me. Maybe it’s theatre, maybe it’s dance, it’s a performance actually. [The question to the human search engine on Alexandra Pirici] was a trap I set for them, but it did not work, they were circumstantially OKish. I came in a bit reticent, many times I am bored and/or aggressed by this kind of performances, but this was good, it did not tend to aggress me, to confound me.”

*Text written with the occasion of the Contemporary dance season CNDB – Bucharest in movement, 2017.

The Contemporary dance season CNDB – Bucharest in movement, 2017 cultural project is supported within the cultural program Bucharest participatory city, by the Bucharest Mayor’s Office through the Bucharest Cultural Centre ARCUB.