by Diana Nechit
Thirty years ago, I started being a part of the best experience of my cultural, theatrical but also personal life, as a volunteer and translator: the FITS experience, back then the Festival of Young Professional Theatre.
For the young, twenty-year-old Literature student from a university town with no recent history, and with a cultural dynamic that was nowhere near where it is today, a new universe was opening up: performances and theatre companies that I had only ever heard or read about, personalities of the cultural environment, European drama schools, a creative effervescence and a contagious lust for life and for togetherness.
But beyond the novelty of the lively contemporary show, beyond the open lesson in performance and playwriting, my love of theatre translation started taking shape, and the understanding of certain resorts and terminological and translational mechanisms strengthened over time in the translation booth, during conferences.
I would practice more French and Italian in ten days, than in an entire year during classes. I wouldn’t miss any conference or theatre performance, and it was about that time that I understood that theatre and cinematography are indeed learned from books, but particularly from these experiences as an informed spectator, which grow every year through living contacts, unaltered by any kind of aesthetic, ideological barriers.
My professors knew that I would tend to disappear from the university, but they were very understanding and approving of my theatre “madness”. Around twenty years ago, I started attending the festival legally! Had I not had this festival experience, had I not attended thousands of conferences and interviews, had I not discovered ideas that I could later on develop through my own readings, I would probably not have gotten the taste and the courage to write, to make the joy of theatre, and performances in general, my profession.
I read and am still reading specialized books, I believe in the overwhelming importance of documentation, of continuous education, but without this living extension with performance, with representation, with reading itself, it wouldn’t mean much. I’ve been writing for the festival’s official magazine, “Aplauze,” for years. It was great practice for my writing style and especially for my “endurance” in the performative chronicles. It helped hone and sharpen my writing, it made me overcome my fear of the blank page and gave me the courage of concision and of eliminating metaphorical “dead weight”.
It’s very difficult to concentrate an experience of over thirty years in just a few paragraphs: from unexpected, providential encounters, privileged relationships, such as the one with the incomparable and late George Banu, who granted me the honor of translating his words, true snatches of the “memory of theatre”, to those moments, when you try to hold your breath in the darkness of the auditorium, because you know and feel that you are witnessing an overwhelming theatrical and aesthetic experience. All your memories focus on the power of perceiving and preserving the ineffable and the immediacy of the performance act in all its extensions.
There are people that I’ve become friends with, that I have started projects with, such as the Anthology of Francophone Theatre inspired by the editorial genius of Emile Lansman, the man that trusted our ability to make a selection from the variety of forms and themes that contemporary dramatic discourse implies, but especially to restore the orality, the immediacy of the theatrical text, to (re)create in Romanian the voices of Francophone theatre: Belgian, Canadian, African, Maghrebian…
From 2017 to date, over sixty translated theatre texts, ranging from theatre for young audiences, to retellings of myths, to emerging female voices in contemporary theatre, texts that fill a need, whether it’s editorial, dramaturgical or thematical.
Enjoy the theatre performances, steal some words, images and emotions, and grow through and with this wonderful festival, which continues to resonate with the uniqueness of each of us, as well as the diversity of the contemporary performance.
