THE PAST IS DEAD!?

The theme of the 2014 edition of the Independent Platform of Performing Arts, The Past is Dead!?, is questioning how the performance in Romania deals with rewriting the past in terms of ideologies of the present and the tense relationship which society maintains with its own memory. On the one hand, we live in the era of deep attachment to the first half of the twentieth century and a reference exclusively in black and white to the period 1945-1989, on the other hand, we enthusiastically embrace social principles that abandon, one by one, the idea of the social contract and hard won civil rights (the right to fair payment of labor, leisure time, free association, freedom of expression, protest …). The individual body, the social body and the politic body are each wrestling fields between what “was” and what will be. What do we keep and what do we throw away of our past as a society? How we do it and why do we do it? What means the past and memory today and how are they rewritten artistically?
Iulia Popovici