From iron curtain to theatre without curtain

At the end of 1991, the Odeon Theatre, directed by Alexandru Dabija after the departure of Vlad Mugur, premiered the show "...they put handcuffs on the flowers..." An event for the Bucharest theatre, a press scandal and a scandal at the level of some conservative officials, a show that propels Odeon and its makers to the forefront of the Romanian theatre movement. (It also won a prize of excellence at the UNITER galas.) At the origin of the event was the Romanian-born Canadian director Alexander Hausvater, who had returned to his childhood to find professional fulfilment and, as it turned out later, to stimulate the pool of talent and creative energy in his home country. This first and most powerful performance of his, made to shock but also to test the audience's ability to react freely after years of communism, was a manifest one. Not only because it brought a theme of very direct political and social impact in those years when theatre was running away from politics, but also because it was intended as a new proposal of engaged theatre, which some associated with the Living of the 70s, when the show went down to the streets, among the people. These notions had been heard of before in Romania, and some of the nonconformist and uncomfortable shows of the past had similar intentions in terms of stirring up a political, civic message, of a clear attitude. What was really new about Hausvater was his life-and-death style of theatre-making, the total, madcap way in which he asked the company to engage in the spectacular adventure, throwing out all conventions and prejudices. At this "...they put handcuffs on the flowers..." The first convention annulled was on nudity. So that the terrible suffering of the death row inmates in Fernando Arrabal's play could be experienced live by the literally humiliated actors, standing naked in front of the audience forced no less to the humiliation of watching them. With the precise intuition of the moment, namely the revelations about Sighet, Pitești and other terrible prisons of death, the director provokes here a direct confrontation with the psychic syndrome produced by the dehumanization experienced by the condemned, bringing them all together, actors and spectators, in the space of a real purgatory. (The ritualistic intention is visible.) Convicts and torturers, prisoners and guards, communists or Nazis, the actors in Hausvater's performance ultimately depict a paradigm of the concentration system with which man has been struggling since life opposed him, with or without doctrine, according to Hobbes' conclusion: homo homini lupus. In this way, the performance avoids theism, and discussions about the nature of the conflicts in Arrabal's play (inspired by the Francoist terror) are no longer relevant. After all, the text was just a pretext for Hausvater to make his point about engaged theatre and its relationship with society. To a large extent, however, the audience focused on the metaphor initiated by the performance, on the dream (the flowers!) constructed as an alternative to that world of degradation, of the subhuman from which the purest aspirations can often spring. It is the task of art to discover them and give them flesh, as this performance does by invoking what else but love. This is how passionate bodily calls are born on stage in the public eye, making bodies come together in step with the ingenuity of feelings. Of course, it was not easy for either the actors or the audience to accept this new way of relating to the human body on stage. The director later admitted that he had failed to warn them about a certain fanaticism that had begun to take hold and which later even led to changes in destiny, such as that of Dragoș Pâslaru, who became a monk. Perhaps, otherwise, the actors could not reach the incandescence of life required by the performance style of the show without falling into ridicule and blasphemy. And exploring territories within yourself that you've avoided exploring your whole life, as the director explains, would perhaps have required a longer initiation exercise to become naturally assumed. Nor was it easy for the audience to leave the condition of indifferent spectators in traditional theatre and accept the new situation of direct participant at the event. The show appeals to a different audience from the start. Entering the stage was done according to different rules, specific to the new scenographic framework shaped at the director's request by Constantin Ciubotariu. The pairs were separated so that each one could live the experience on his own, the seats were placed according to a random geometry but attentive to the involvement in the action. Then the music, designed to create a tension that was hard to bear throughout the show, became a character. Hausvater and the Odeon's brave team were among the first to take the step towards this kind of total exposure and participation in a performance that for many meant a unique experience.

The curtain, the curtain, disappeared as such from Romanian theatre, literally and figuratively. The theatre was in search of new truths, appropriate to the times of freedom that were being established. Unfortunately, all too soon these conquests turned against the theatre itself, through the excesses and lack of artistry found in many of its epigones. "...they put handcuffs on the flowers..." has, however, remained the good, quotable head of the series of such experiences to come.

Doina Papp

Chronicle

"...they handcuffed the flowers..." 30 years later

It has been a long-held belief for centuries that theatre is probably the most transient of the arts. And perhaps this ephemerality is somehow inscribed in its very condition of being, even if the performance as such today has the chance (sometimes turned into a misfortune, you see) to be fixed, by technological means, on a visual medium, be it film, videotape, DVD or who knows what other digital format. To convey something remotely similar to direct impact, in praesentiathe theatre needs the professional intervention of a team of adaptors outside the one who created the opera as such: a new technical direction, a specific cut, a staging direction, etc. that "rewrites" the dynamics, the lines of force, the centres of interest of the performance, transferring, as far as possible, the atmosphere and the meanings. In other words, filmed theatre, television theatre and other formats designed to preserve and disseminate the performance produce, in fact, another work in its own right, inevitably different from that perceived experientially by the live spectator.

"...they handcuffed the flowers..." by Fernando Arrabal, staged at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest by Alexander Hausvater in 1991, was not and could not have been filmed, for many reasons. First of all, because the very complex performance space, including the audience, would have allowed only limited camera intervention at that time, and that only under studio-like conditions. But what would have been the point of filming such a shot, as long as it excluded an essential dimension that was already involved from the moment you entered the theatre - that of the spectator's participation? Besides, in those years there was only TVR and only a few private TV stations were just starting up: the first one, politically controlled, would have had no interest in taking over the show (especially as it raised extreme problems because of the nudity scenes - I don't think the theatre and its actors would have allowed that either); the ones that were "starting up" would obviously not have had the necessary technology. That would have left, we think today, only the option of the theatre itself proposing a "witness" shoot. As far as I can remember, no one thought of that - let alone that it would most likely have required an investment beyond the powers of the institution. Why didn't it occur to anyone? The answer I would venture, in all subjectivity, is that subconsciously, all those involved in its creation, and even us on the fringes, felt that it would have been somehow an impiety, or at least a kind of betrayal of the spirit in which it was born.

Now, however, 30 years after the premiere, the Odeon has not denied its carefully guarded and augmented fame, hosting an unprecedented (I think) moment on 29 November 2021: the anniversary of this legendary show in a public event, meant to bring together, despite the pandemic, the makers (as many as could come from the four corners of the world, including several members of the extras team, at the time of the premiere students of the only acting class ever led by Marcel Iureș and Alexandru Dabija, at the Ecological University of Bucharest). The event as such was built around an editorial release, "... they handcuffed the flowers..." - revolution showsigned by actor-writer Mugur Arvunescu and published by Oscar Print in enviable graphic conditions.

Mugur Arvunescu's first achievement is not the first of such bravery: in 2003, he published in the same format and with the same publisher the splendid volume "La Țigănci"... with Popescu, dedicated both to the tenth anniversary of the premiere of the show directed by Alexander Hausvater and to the memory of the exceptional poet Cristian Popescu, author of the script after Mircea Eliade. Now, at the celebration... HandcuffsThe author has also released the second edition, revised and extensively added to, of the beautiful and so personal collection that retraces the creative and existential path of the show from 1993. The books constitute a precious and necessary tandem, and perhaps a replicable model of generous recovery of theatrical memory.

"... they handcuffed the flowers..." - revolution show is constructed by crossing three main trajectories: first, the evocation belonging to the author (who painstakingly retraces, from his own perspective, the destiny of the show, from the meeting with the director to the workshop rehearsals, the premiere, the effect on the audience and critics, touring, etc.); then the one in which the directors (director, set designers Constantin Ciubotariu and Viorica Petrovici, composer Mircea Kiraly and no less than 20 actors who participated either in the premiere form or entered during the few necessary replacements) are called to testify: Dan Bădărău, Ionel Mihăilescu, Florin Zamfirescu, Dragoș Pâslaru - yes, him! -, Marius Stănescu, the late Oana Ștefănescu - with a text fragment di volume The Gypsy -Simona Gălbenușă, Carmen Tănase, Camelia Maxim, Mirela Dumitru, Angela Ioan, Constantin Cojocaru, Adriana Trandafir, Mircea Constantinescu, Laurențiu Lazăr, Karl Baker, Sidonia Ganea, Adrian Ancuța, Bianca Zurovski); and a substantial collection of reviews.

The latter are all the more interesting in that, by their accumulation, they not only give an account of the troubled socio-political circumstances and the structure of the performance as such, but also transmit over time, in a very acute way, the state of astonishment, often even of perplexity that the spectator felt when being exposed to a directorial proposal which decidedly short-circuited all expectations and all comfortable comforts. And this even in the context in which we meet critics with a wealth of experience at the time, such as Victor Parhon, Cristina Dumitrescu, Valentin Silvestru, Alice Georgescu, Marian Popescu, but also with new voices in theatre criticism, who have since become authorities, such as Doru Mareș or Victor Scoradeț. In fact, there is almost no contribution from the press that does not attest, in one form or another, to the shocking force of the performance that subliminally forces the blurring of the boundary between contemplative and fully participatory spectatorship, shifting the stakes from the aesthetic weight itself (without cancelling it, but brutally resizing it) to the experiential value, of a fact of life, traumatic and purifying at the same time. (I would add here that, unfortunately, neither at the time, nor since, has there been any attempt at a detailed, multi-stage critical reading that brings the two landmark performances of the first two post-1989 seasons face to face, An ancient trilogy signed by Andrei Serban and ...they put handcuffs on the flowers..., including questioning their place, which has remained, as it were, suspended, without tangible consequences, both in the theatrical landscape of the last 30 years and, strangely, in the work of the directors themselves).

Finally, to the emotional and touching testimonies of the filmmakers are added some memorial revisitations of some critics, including Ion Parhon, Doina Papp, Ioan Cristescu or, again, Doru Mareș and Victor Scoradeț.

The volume compiled by Mugur Arvunescu, together with his colleague, At the Gypsy... with Popescu, now in its second year, is, I think, more than just an occasional celebratory gesture (although otherwise such festive gestures of substance are quite unusual here). They are living formulas for preserving and reconstituting, for the public of yesterday and today, the memory of cultural events that are as valuable as they are ephemeral if we do not keep them alive and keep their flames burning.

Miruna Runcan