Posters for Unwritten Plays

Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that He dared to imagine everything.

—Henry Miller, Sexus

I was born in my parents’ home in Bucharest, under the spell cast by Miss Pogany’s mesmerizing bronze eyes. I must have thought she was my fairy godmother. This iconic symbol of modern sculpture by Constantin Brancusi was the soul of my grandfather’s art collection.

At nine-years-old I had my first exhibition, in the orchard in front of my grandparents’ summerhouse. I hung my paintings on a laundry rope, between two cherry trees in blossom. My grandfather ceremoniously attended the vernissage and he, the revered Maecenas of the interwar Romanian artists from Balcick, bought all my paintings.

At eighteen years old I was prepared to enter l’Institut des Beaux Arts. The day before the exam I inexplicably changed my mind and went instead to the Institute of Theatre and Cinema Studies. I graduated with honors in theatre criticism and got a job in the literary department of the National Theatre in Bucharest. I hated the censorship (Beckett and Ionesco were forbidden, words were under constant surveillance), but I loved the theatre. I loved what I imagined was happening between the words. In that invisible space of true freedom and solidarity. It was then that I met the legendary Ellen Stewart for the first time. It was a revelatory moment and, certainly, a predestined encounter in my life. Soon after, I managed to escape Ceausescu’s dictatorship. I flew to New York with a bandaged hand: my best friend, the dog across the street, bit me the night before my departure. In New York, while attending the PhD program in theatre at City University, my interest turned to playwriting. I then moved to California where I got an MFA in playwriting from the University of California, San Diego.

The English language became my playground and also my battlefield. In my plays language was always the main topic and I handled words as if they were three-dimensional. Objects of communication. Their power fascinated me. They could kill us and they could save us. I was often asked how writing in English affected me. It was never a handicap but rather an advantage because for me the English words always appeared fresh, their meaning was always shining through their worn-out skin, through their scale of clichés. I could see a new image in every word, even in prepositions, which I still get mostly wrong. Over the years I gathered suitcases full of words, full of images for unwritten plays.

Then a few years ago, I suddenly realized that life is too short. That I will never have time to write all the plays from my suitcases. So I went back to my first love—painting. Instead of writing my plays I was painting them. Images are so much faster than words. This is how the Posters for Unwritten Plays were born.

The original artwork consists of a series of paintings, acrylic on canvas, which I presented in my first solo exhibition at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal (2011). After that, the stories from the canvases expanded, in what I call Picto-montages. The uniqueness of these Picto-montages is that I manipulate the fragments of paintings and photographs not only to give them new simultaneous meanings but also to induce a dynamic theatrical perception of the composition. In addition, I use digital painting as a subjective marker, in the image viewed as an open text. All of them, the paintings and Picto-montages, appeared in the art and theatre volume, Posters for Unwritten Plays, published by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Bucharest. This volume was launched at La MaMa Galleria (May 2015), in an exhibit dedicated to Ellen Stewart. A circle was made. The same year, the exhibit traveled to my birthplace under the title Just Imagine! I dedicated the exhibit to my grandparents. I had come full circle!

WHAT IT IS THAT I ASK OF YOU WITH MY POSTERS FOR UNWRITTEN PLAYS

Because theatre could be the most alive place...