 Welcome everyone in rainy Bucharest, beautiful city and we are very sorry that we couldn't offer you the weather that it normally gives over here. It's exceptionally cold and wet, but well, you all experienced yourself. It is the good temperature to stay inside and to have a very fruitful meeting, I guess. May I ask those people who identify as an artist to raise their hands? That's quite a good representation. Thank you. Thank you for being here and we hope you will be willing to share your experiences of being an artist with us today because that's the topic of this meeting. Then as you may know, some parts of the globe at this time, the life of an artist is governed by policies of withdrawing governments, meaning subsidy cuts, forcing artists into entrepreneurial modes. In some other parts of the globe, we see that the artists are feeling reinforcement of the governmental grip on their work, so it's two opposite directions that governments take and in these parts of the world, the artists fight to be able to follow their own agenda and not only fit into political agendas of the ones that are paying them. What unites those two worlds is that we are both represented in Europe and I'm sure that we are also both represented in this whole. That's another thing that binds us and that is that the independent artists, those artists that work not commercially and make contemporary arts, are always the worst of. They are the ones that live the most precarious, under the most precarious circumstances. I think it's good that us, all that didn't raise our hands, realized that we can make a living thanks to the fact that they have a talent, that they are working under in many circumstances, precarious circumstances for low incomes and insecure circumstances and I wish that also the administrators and the ministers would realize that they can make a living thanks to the fact that we have the artists that are still sharing their talents with us. Before we will have our first speakers, I would also share with you that you may have noticed that this meeting has been created with some challenges. We were a bit late with being able to communicate the program. We were a bit late with communicating that we could be in this wonderful space, the National Theatre and it was only thanks to a handful of people that were working extremely hard, that were extremely generous to receive us, that we are able to sit here and for you and for me to stand here and first of all I would like to introduce to you to Mr. John Karen Mitru, who is the managing director of this wonderful theatre. He is also the president of Uniter, the union for the performing artists. He is a great director besides that and he is one of the oldest members of ITM. He was the oldest member here of Romania in ITM starting in 1992. Please give a warm hand to Mr. John Karen Mitru. Thank you very much for your kind introduction and welcome for you all. I look around and I see so many young people and I am very happy that theatre world is under the control of such a wonderful crowd. I say so because in 1994 as a member of ITM I've been invited to Brussels next year to Spain to represent my Romanian structure as ITI Romanian Uniter and I remember we were in trouble in this country at the time because of the neo-communist regime coming in power as a result of an anti-communist revolution. It's a bit of a joke about it but it was really dangerous for our life and for the new liberty. So in 1995 I moderated in Sevilla a group of ITM with this main proposition official structure and a new vision of culture, strong movements against the new liberties. It was at the origin of a letter I presented finally to help our liberty in Romania signed by all the members of ITM at the time and published in Romania, published in foreign newspapers and having a really important echo into the structures I mentioned to you. So I still remember ITM is a wonderful body, it's a strong, important European family so as soon as it's possible you have to remember this friendship and this unanimousity help we had. On the other hand we called this new, I mean we called our National Theatre after the reconstruction new theatre for a new audience, for a new public. So you are the newest visitors and public, I hope you are coming to see our shows these days and the reason of telling such a slogan for our activity is that we open large doors for the young generation. We have in this very moment seven different stages. One is the work in progress on the roof for the summer time, seasons for 300 seats. Another new one is the media hall you visited recently this morning and this afternoon and the little stage which is for 130 seats given exclusively to the young generation experiment theatre and exclusively I say for those having no jobs into the theatre. In this very moment in Romania in the drama department of our cultural activity we have about 4,000 jobless actors and 50 theatres all around Romania. They are 4,000 because after the revolution every university centre is open drama school so every year there are about 350 people living in the university and having a diploma as a bachelor in art. There is no room for them into the professional theatres. This independent activity is still very in Romania, I mean still very timid and no money for them, no rules for them, most more or less nothing and from nothing you do nothing but talent exists so we decided to give these stages for them to follow their talent and to invite them to perform into our productions later. We have in this very moment 230 young collaborators into the theatre but they are 4,000. That's a moment of thinking for our society but I don't think there is an horizon of them. So then is this stage you are now here which is unique in Europe? Probably someone could tell you earlier that this stage, this room is transformable. In 22 minutes the stalls is lifted coming to land on the stage making a free open space here these two walls move backstage and from behind if you open the two small doors you will see two packages of seats coming and finishing an arena stage. In 22 minutes it was done in 1968 by the Romanian engineers after the Vienna technology we invited at the time to do what was very modern in the theatre technology they refused to do it. Finally it was done by our Romanian engineers. If you like to see a show it's Saturday evening half past seven a play written by Mattei Vichniak a famous Romanian playwright living in Paris called Engagement of a Clown you'll see in the first part like that Italian stage the first part then we are going downstairs to see a real circus show and coming back for the second part you'll be in the arena and to see the second part of the play in the arena and I can't tell you more because you are here for a few days you can see with your own eyes everything I want to tell you now. I'll give an end to my speech telling you that we hope to have at the end of September the last week in September a showcase of our productions and those interested could tell us if they want to come. Thank you very much and be welcome. Thank you Mr. Caramitro. As I said we were organizing this meeting in quite a short time and there was a driving force behind it that is called Corina Suteu unfortunately she is not here yet but she will arrive this evening and you will definitely meet with her. She proposed us to our local co-organizer Vava Stevanescu who is the director of the National Center for Dance having a very interesting history that she will definitely share with you probably at another moment than now because she only now gets five minutes and she can talk an hour about that I can tell you and it's a very interesting history of the dance of the contemporary dance in Romania that she has to share. Give a warm hand to Vava Stevanescu who with her team her whole team really made this possible. Thank you very much for this introduction and I'm Vava Stevanescu and I'm running National Center for Dance in Bucharest which is a very new institution. It's not like National Theatre here. It works only with independence which is interesting and because in contemporary dance in Romania you can be only independent as an artist and we find ourselves in a very new situation as an institution to be happy organizers of the meeting of IETM here but if you would wait for two years we could organize that in the new venue which is the Omnia Hall which will be ready to welcome you in 2019. So we are very happy to announce that. So I'm very happy also to say welcome and go see all performances programmed and there are a lot of performances theatre and dance performances which are not in the program but at the desk you can find information about more of that. We had the situation was that we couldn't put everything in the program for you but especially independent work worth to be seen. So also I hope you will visit our venue which is marked on your programs. I hope you have it. We have three performances programmed and I'm not good with speeches so welcome and have fun in Reini Bucharest. Thank you Vava. Thank you. Maybe I show with you this I mean the fact that we are organizers, co-organizers it was possible because of the National Cultural Fund which put quite a little bit of money for making this possible so now maybe you will introduce. Then I only have to because indeed no meeting without a bit of money and the generosity of the National Fund for Culture Irina Chos please give her a hand. Good afternoon. I'm very happy you are all here and I'm very happy I could lend a hand to the realization of this important meeting because I have to tell you I know about ITM since the early 90s and it's very important that Mr. Karamitri is here because he was the one to plant the seeds of ITM in Romania not only of ITM he planted the seed of UNITAR, he planted the seed of the National Cultural Fund. He is someone who launched many paths in contemporary culture in Romania especially in the performative field. I have to say that what impressed me most about ITM was the title and it was the fact that it was an informal European theatre meeting and I think this is very important to keep in mind although the profile of ITM changed and now it became an international network with professionals from all the performative fields. I think that the informal aspect is what brings most of creativity and what enables connections and collaborations throughout countries and throughout cultures. I'm not going to take much longer of your time but I would like to quote Dragon Klage who said cultures do not dialogue with each other they complete clash fight interact and mutually influence each other so cultures are not alike cultures are different and it is important to stay different so I hope this ITM meeting will be for all of you an opportunity for creative engagement and I wish you all a good stay in Bucharest. Thank you. Thank you. There are two more thank yous. One is for George Iwascu from the Municipal Metropolis Theatre which is the theatre that offers our welcome drink that we will have after our keynote downstairs near the registration desk and the other one is Timasuara Capital of Culture 2021 I just saw them arrive and they will offer our farewell brunch on Sunday in the National Centre of Dance. This will also be the moment when Timasuara will present their provisional programme so please come in time. We start 11.30 sharp I told them so if you want to know more about Timasuara please be in time 11.30 national centre for the dance on Sunday. Another moment that we really would love to have you together joining us is at the General Assembly on Saturday afternoon because we need a quorum otherwise we won't have a full board next year. So in order to have a good governance of ITM you are really needed. That's one of the reasons. The other reasons is that I'm very happy that if I could share with you our new strategy for the next four years because we got the new Creative Europe grant so ITM is safe for the next four years and it will be nice. It's always good to hear your comments on the programme also in the General Assembly and afterwards in the talks and listens. Okay and then now we came to the moment that I can introduce to you our keynote speaker well-known poet and author from Romania, Mr. Mircea Caterescu. You see I'm always stumbles at one moment and that's the most important moment. Please give him a warm applause. For the French I'm Mircea. For the English I'm Mircea. For other people I'm different. But for my compatriots I'm Mircea, Mircea Caterescu. Mircea is a male name in our country though it ends with an A and this is why it happens to me all the time to get the letters addressed to Mrs. Caterescu. I'm very much used to it and I'm not complaining anymore. Actually you know it only too well that the artists have actually a double sex. All of them are in a way or another androgynous. Good evening. I'm really really very glad to be here with you. I feel really very honored because I really admire you. I admire you very much. I admire the artists. I admire the people whose body listen to them. I have always wanted to be one of you. I have always wanted, since I can remember, to know how to dance, to be able to sing, to be able to perform, to be somebody, to have a talent, to be somebody in the other people's eyes, to have an audience, to have people that get joy from what I do. And I think I tried mostly everything. When I was very young I tried to play ping-pong, for example. I thought I will make a career out of this and I was pretty good. But I never got to be a professional. Now I can beat most of you. But the people that went to a club for, I don't know, one year have no problems with me. So I couldn't do this. I tried to play the guitar like everyone. I tried to be a star in the summer camps and to gather the girls around me. I couldn't do it as well. I tried to sing, I tried to dance, at least in my family, at family parties. I couldn't do the dismay of my wife and other partners. Because I don't know, my body is against me. It's against what I tried to order it. And because I was such disappointed, so much disappointed with me, I started to write, when I was about 15, I started to write how disappointed I was with me. Because I had no talent. And paradoxically, this proved to be my only talent. Saying that I have no talent, that I cannot dance, that I cannot talk as somebody sings. The only thing about me was the way I walked. And writing fiction, writing prose for me is actually, I don't think of it as a talent. I think of it as the way I walk. It's something so natural for me that it's like the air I breathe. I never think about it. I still keep in my mind the sadness of not being able to make moves with my arms, with my feet, with my fingers, with anything but with my mind. I cannot dance, but my mind can. Writing poetry is dancing. You see, a mind dancing naked in front of you, whenever you read a poem, a real poem, a good poem, you see a mind performing in front of you, whenever you read a very good short story. This is the magic that happened to me. And it's my very small consolation, because consolation of the fact that I cannot do anything else. I'm not good with anything else. So I'm a sort of an artist myself, but a very special kind of artist. I don't know if you thought about it, but you are the performers. You cannot perform without a public around you. You have to have a public, Mr. Karamitru, who has been an actor all his life. I don't know if he can perform in his bathroom alone. I doubt it. I doubt that any of you can perform only for yourself. But a poet always does this. Poetry is an art of silence. Fiction is an art of silence, an art of solitude, an art of isolation, an art of, I don't know, of intuition. You are always alone. You are like a motherless child. You feel the loneliness person in the world. When you are doing your job, when you are performing, when you want to see people cheering around you and nobody cheers, you never hear someone cheering when you write a poem. Of course you can read it afterwards in a literary circle or on a stage or in poetry slam. And you get some hint of what this art actually should have been and what this art actually was all the time. Because you know, Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize last year for poetry, for literature. Though he is a singer, he is a songwriter. He has never been like, for example, Leonard Cohen was a real poet on the paper. But let us not forget that all the old performers were like that. Homer was like that, Homer, sorry, was like that. I don't know, Propertius was like that, Virgil was like that. They were performing their poems. They were not writing them on the paper for people to read. They were singing them. That's why we call lyrical poetry the poems of love, for example. Because they were sang and accompanied by the lira, by some kind of chord instrument in the antiquity times. So in ancient times, poets were also performers. But after that, they isolated themselves like leper people. They felt themselves guilty about that. And they always tried to escape this condition and never, never succeed. And more, I would say more, the greatest of the writers are the people the most lonely of all. Think about Franz Kafka. Kafka, like Virgil, 2000 years before, didn't want to leave anything for the people. He only wrote hundreds of pages just to be destroyed after his death. He only wrote for himself. He never wanted to publish. He never wanted to be acclaimed. He never wanted the wish, the desire of the other, as we say. He did his work as a solitary monk. He was a sort of a martyr of the idea of literature. So literature is, in a way, going in the other direction as compared to all the other arts. It's a sort of a, I don't know, pick-headed art. It's sort of a background, backwards, sorry, art. A very strange kind of expressing yourself. But it still, it still is art. And a poet is also an artist. Because she or he shares with a real artist, with you, with the performers, one thing. If a poet has no audience, no real audience, as you are in front of me now, he has or she has that little thing that cannot miss from any art, which is grace. Grace is the most essential thing of the arts. You have grace or you don't have grace. You have this kind of levitation. You can put your mind in levitation and put the other's minds in levitation. You can show them a glimpse of a wonderful and huge world, because we are very small and the world is huge. You can show the people what you have seen in our visions. And this is grace. Nobody can give it to you. Nobody can take it from you. Because grace is what you are as an artist. Grace is poetry and poetry is grace. Music is poetry and poetry is music and so on. So I can speak of art in a way in front of you. Now I'm a bit ashamed about this. I'm not like you and I would give ten years from my life to be like you. And now I get to the real core of what I have to tell you. It's nothing new. I will only tell you things that you know as well as I do, but things that must be reminded to people from time to time because they are essential. Let us imagine a piano player of genius, one of the greatest, who brings tremendous joy to the people who listen to him. And after the show, his show is over. He gets outside, walks on the street and meets all kinds of people. He meets humiliated people. He meets people humiliated because of their race. He meets humiliated people because of their poverty. He meets humiliated people because of their gender, gender orientation. And so on. There are so many motives for someone to be humiliated by his or her peers. What has this person to do when he meets this kind of things? Should he act? Should he interfere? Or should he or she just pass because he is a great artist? Because he can play the piano better than anyone else. What does it matter if he goes and says or does what has to be done in these circumstances? Of course, every one of us know the answer. We know the answer. We have to act. We have to interfere with the bad people who do these kinds of things. But fewer of us know why. Why has an artist to do this? Isn't enough for an artist to create beauty? We are here on this earth to create beauty. This is our job. This is what we have to do and we can do. And other people cannot or can in a very small amount. Isn't this enough? We are winged people. We are privileged people. We are stars. Why should we go and tell the people it's not fair and it's not right what they do? The old Greeks knew the answer. They had a fundamental notion that they called callocagaton. Maybe you heard about it. You surely heard about this notion. Which fundamentally means it means lots of things. But fundamentally it means that three notions which we all know, truth, good and beauty are actually the same. The Greeks knew that it cannot be imagined a world that is true without being good and without being beautiful. You cannot imagine a world that is good without being true and beautiful. You cannot imagine a world that is beautiful without being the other two qualities, without having the other two qualities. So an artist, a producer of the beauty cannot be only an artist. He can be and he should be, she should be some other kinds of a person. The same person having three ways of acting in three different situations. If you are performing in front of the people, you are on the side of the beauty. How can you be on the side of the truth? It's easy, being an intellectual. So the intellectual is sometimes opposed to the artist. The artist thinks with his heart, the intellectual thinks with his mind. But it's the one and the same thing actually. Because an intellectual is the one who deals with ideas. And ideas for being real should be also beautiful and should be also good. An intellectual is a person who thinks with compassion, with empathy about the others. About all the other people, about all his peers, all his compatriots, all the people in the world. He can and he must in a way think of their good. But thinking of their good transforms the intellectual in a citizen, as we all are. A citizen is the representation of the good in this trinity, in these three ways of being the same. A citizen is what an artist should be and what an intellectual should be. Because an artist represents the heart, the feelings, an intellectual represents the reason and the mind. A citizen represents the action. So it's hard to imagine for me an artist who is very good in what he does. He's a very good singer, a very good writer, a very good dancer, a very good poet. But who chooses a wrong direction. It's very hard to me to think of someone who is a very good piano player but he's also a Nazi, a Naziist. Or someone who is a very good thinker but he falls himself under the fascination of a very bad ideology. Becoming a terrorist, for example. It's not possible in a way. I know that there are some examples. I know that Celine, for example, in the French literature used to have very bad feelings about the Jews, for example. He was an anti-Semitismist. But these are exceptions. Usually, and I'm an optimist, I believe in the human mind in a way. I don't think that it is possible to be like that. This expression of the old Greeks, callocagaton, is the way that we should look at things. We should be very good artists but we should think about what happens around us. Unfortunately, very bad things happen of late. And of course, we should take some action to make the world a little better. Because we are really very small. This is what I should have said first because it's a thing that we have to remind all the time. Yesterday, a meteorite, as you know, just passed over our heads at a very short distance from the Earth. If it hit the Earth, there would have been some unpleasant consequences, one of them being that my conference would have been cancelled, for example. And also some other little consequences like the race of the human race. So we only have this extremely tiny world. We have a small planet surrounded by a blue atmosphere. In the known universe, there are 2.3 trillion galaxies. Each of them with, I don't know, billions of stars. Where is the place for salvation? Where is the place for somebody looking right towards our world? Well, salvation is in our hands. It's at our fingers. We can do it. Nobody will do it instead of us. But actually, as you know only too well, we are good at the reverse. During our history, we proved to be very good at destroying ourselves, not at creating wonderful conditions for everyone. So given the conditions that we have to live today, we have to take some action. I only remind you what are those conditions that we're living in. I think we are doing bad. The world is very badly ruled at this moment from many points of view, not only from the political point of view. Of course, from this point of view, we have Syria, we have North Korea, we have Venezuela, we have what happens in Europe. Europe has never been in this terrible condition from the Second World War. I'm afraid to say so. We look everywhere and we see only damage. We see dictators. We see abominations as the Bible says. We see on one side Donald Trump. We see on the other side Putin. We see Erdogan. We only see bad things. Where are the great leaders that we used to have? We don't trust in anyone now. Where are the parties that we used to trust in? They are in a huge crisis. Every side of the political world that we are looking towards seems to be in a crisis, seems to be in a big change and not in a good change. It seems like democracy that only 15 years ago everybody believed in and Francis Fukuyama in his book said that, well actually the Western democracy won everywhere because every state, at least as an ideal, talked about democracy, about the democratic principles and values. Now it's the other way around. Most of the states in Europe and outside Europe seem to try to get rid of democracy, seem to try to get rid of the Western values, seem to try to get rid of everything that our culture is centered on. The nationalisms of all kinds are re-vigorated in Eastern Europe. Many of the countries show some nationalist and very populist tendencies. Romania has left one of the very few practically democratic countries in the whole region. It's very scaring for us. Many countries show a tendency towards what we call democratures. Half democracy, half dictatorships, sorry. So it's a very scary situation from the political point of view. We cannot just stay and wait to be destroyed, to be destroyed by these kind of people. We have to act, we have the power to act as you all know. We have at least to get into the street and shout our wishes, shout our principles, shout about stand-up for something, shout about our values. And I think this is a very good thing to do, even for the artist. The artist should get into the streets with their compatriots and shout against what they think is evil in the politics. I did this the whole winter. I was in the street with many artists, many Romanian artists in all the fields, shouting and occupying a place in the squares for democracy, for democracy, for liberty, for everything was wrong in my country. Against, of course, everything was wrong in my country. And it was minus 10 degrees and I had three layers of coats on me and two hats, one above the other. It was really terrible but I knew I had to do it. And at a certain moment we were 600,000 people in the streets, in all the cities and all the villages of Romania. It was the famous resist movement, resist movement, which spread after that, spread all around Europe and maybe in the States too. So each of us can do something. Even if you feel an empty place in a square or on the street, it's important, it's really very important. But unfortunately the challenges that we're all facing do not end with politics. We are in the middle of a technological revolution. I think this is even more important and more dangerous than the bad state of the world politics. We are on the brink now. Many of us feel that if we are making only one wrong step in front of us, we just fall. We fall in the precipice. It's on one side the huge revolution that the internet brought and the social networks brought. We now are in the middle of it. We cannot see it clearly. Can you imagine how much change is this? That each one, for the first time in our history, each one can connect with each one. Everyone can connect with everyone on the whole planet. Seven billion people connected. But this is only the ideal situation because actually what we see on these networks and what we see that happens there, we see much hatred. We see a lot of hatred. We see a lot of haters. We see a lot of trolls. We see people spreading false and dangerous ideas. We see people spreading false and fake news. We see that what we thought of as a sort of fraternity among older people changes the other way around, becoming a general hatred among people. Actually, we don't share on the internet, on the Facebook, on the Twitter and so on, we don't share the good things in ourselves. We are aggressed all the time by the people who take advantage of this wonderful media to spread hatred. Of course, I won't talk about the other dangers of our scientific, technical and social revolution. And there's another threat which is as great and connected to the others, the ideological threats. All kinds of ideological monstrosities that we feel around ourselves as cancer... ...metastasis, religious ideologies, social ideologies, political ideologies, ideologies of all kinds, many of them extremists. So what the artist can do when he finds violence, when he finds or she finds intimidation, when he finds, I don't know, despise for people because they are black, because they are homosexuals, because they are, I don't know, poor, because they don't belong to the place where they are forced to be when they are immigrants. What can we do about it? We can do. We can do because we are stars, because we are the stars of the societies, because the people know us, because we are opinion makers. Even if we dance, even if we don't talk, even if we are singers, we can sing our beliefs. And I truly believe in this. We can dance our beliefs. We can speak in poetry our beliefs. We can paint our beliefs. We can sculpture our beliefs. We can make movies about what we really think about the state of this world because we don't have another world. This is the only one that we have. It can be destroyed at any time by a meteorite, by a madman who has the nuclear panel in front of him, or by any other thing, by pollution, by destroying the animal and the vegetal world and so on. So I think that even if we lose a lot by doing this, even if we get a lot of enemies by doing this, even if we are banned for our ideas, I think that we still must stand up for them because it's, in a way, in our definition as artists. It is in our definition. We bring the people beauty, which is also truth. We bring the people truth, which is also good. So we must not forget that we are privileged people and we have to share our privileges with the unprivileged ones just to make a better world in a way and in a world and in a very simple one. I got to these ideas rather late. I did not think like that always and I think all of us have to fight the barbarian in himself or in herself. We don't have to tell ourselves that we are good, that we are worthy because we are not. Because all of us, and it's no secret, all of us are actually racist. All of us are actually homophobic. All of us are actually, I don't know, all these kinds of cliches and discriminations in herself or in himself. It's our bad inherited. Our species is violent. The primates are violent. The chimps are violent. The gorillas are violent. So we have to know that we have violence in ourselves and we have the evil in ourselves. But at the same time that we can fight it, we can keep it underground and we can try to show the other side of ourselves, the lighter side to the other people. These are some thoughts that I wanted to share with you. You only know them very well, but as I said, sometimes they have to be reminded. Thank you very much for listening and I hope we'll become close friends, most of us. Thank you, Mirza Katrescu. Before we, well, now it's time for our drink and for all the meetings and greetings that we didn't manage to do up till now. I forgot to say thank you to Uniter, which, as Vava told me, was a really big help in realizing this meeting. So Uniter, the union for the artists, also supported very much our being here. Okay, time for a drink. Hope to see you downstairs. And don't forget that the performances used to start early here.