A Dialogue about Romanian Theatre and Directing from an International Perspective

Abstract

Dana Rufolo is the executive director of the Theatre Research Institute of Europe (TRIE, asbl), Luxembourg. She is the editor in chief of the well-known theatre magazine Plays International & Europe since January 2016; it is owned by TRIE and operates out of Constance, Germany. She graduated from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) with a B.A. in English and American Literature. Her Masters (on Adolphe Appia) and Doctorate (on Edward Albee) are from the University of Wisconsin at Madison; she also specialized in Art Therapy and in Drama Therapy. She ran a professional practice as an art therapist in Luxembourg in English and French for several years. In that context, she presented and published on several lectures and workshops, including a drama workshop in Georgia for Azerbaijani, Georgians, and Albanians involved in peace and reconciliation that incorporated concepts of psychodrama in it, and gave training in her methodology at the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in Stadtschlaining, Austria. Her most notable publication to date in the field of Art Therapy advances her theory of Aesthetic Empathy (“Aesthetic Empathy and Salutogenesis through Beauty” in Gestalten-Gesunden, Zur Salutogenese in den Künstlerischen Therapien, ed. Heinfried Duncker & Ruth Hampe & Monika Wigger (Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2018)

Her credits as author include the two-act play Hurt, Dignified, produced in a professional context for the European Capital of Culture 2007 in Luxembourg and numerous street theatre events that she wrote and directed for Amnesty International Luxembourg and African Women’s Association under the production wing of TRIE called TRIE Justice (try justice). She also authored essays poems and short stories.

 Anca Măniuţiu PhD is professor at the Theatre Department of the Faculty of Theatre and Film at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj. Her main research field as well as her teaching activity focuse on the innovative theatre theories and stage practices of the XXth century European directors, on the contemporary tendencies that emerge in nowadays performative practices and on the mutal influences between theatre and cinema, since the beginning of cinematography. She published 14 volumes of translations fom French, English and Spanish authors, numerous critical essays and four volumes dedicated to the Belgian playwright Michel de Ghelderode, a complexe comparative research implying Bakhtin’s categories of the carnivalesque, Artaud’s „Theatre of Cruelty”, Meyerhold’s „scenic grotesque” and „Theatrical Theatre”, as well as the plays and manifestoes of the Futurist and Dadaist artists.

In 2006, Anca Măniuţiu was invited as a visiting professor at the Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales, Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle (France), and in 2008 she was granted a Senior Fulbright post-doctoral fellowship for lecturing and research at the University of South Carolina, Columbia (USA). In 2016, she received Lifetime Achievement Award from UNITER.