Shukar Collective reloaded

A little video that confirms what we were saying earlier: the Shukar concert was an experience worth seeing and living in Plac Nowy. Yes, we’ll keep talking about the Festival every now and then. We’ve just ended the second edition and started planning the third.

In the meantime, we’re getting ready for the Bookfair. Next week is dedicated to Romanian literature translated in Poland

 

Did you say Transylvania?

Most likely, the first things that come to mind when hearing Transylvania are Dracula & Bram Stoker (and vampires of course), mountains and forrests, medieval castles and citadels.

How about checking myths, legends and facts, during a night dedicated to Transylvania? Like tonight, for example, in Zak Klub in Poznan, where you can discover Transylvania in a photography exhibition, you’ll get the chance to discover the cultural diversity of this region and, of course, find out some more info about Dracula. You’re also invited to watch Radu Gabrea’s movie, The Beaheaded Rooster, and the evening will end – how else – with Romanian music.

The event is organized by the Romanian Studies Department of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and the Romanian Cultural Institute in Warsaw.

 

Doru dixit

During the Festival, he didn’t have time to write and I did not insist (told you how our days, hours and tasks were divided into millimeters). I’m not saying time is now on our side, but today I insisted. And so I give you the Festival of Romanian Culture, Doru’s version:

I was quite tense before the Festival, I can now admit it, because it was our biggest project and, in many respects, a premiere. We probably shouldn’t be the ones telling that, but as far as I know, there’s no other Romanian cultural event equal in size to this one (number of events, number of guests, investment. During Easter, I was walking with my girls on the splendid beaches in Hel Peninsula and I was thinking that Hell is just about to break loose. Practically, the Festival has absorbed all our resources, it required the maximum of our abilities, it activated all our local contacts and it double-checked everything we knew, or assumed, about Cracow’s cultural market. During one of our visits in Cracow before the Festival, a local dignitary warned us, somewhat warm-hearted, that April is not a good month for us, because we’d be competing with other big festivals, that we won’t have any visibility. So, as to avoid taking any risks, we should have our event sometime between January and March, when it’s not that crowded (in terms of cultural events). His warning was like a shot of adrenaline, for both Monica and me, as we both function way better under such conditions, when there’s serious competition around. We’re also used to some kind of condescension, which we love to take by surprise, in the end. What our interlocutor didn’t know was the fact that, despite the warning, we still decided to organize our event in April, thus competing with a very important film festival, with a huge budget and huge publicity. Last year, we also held the Festival in April, and we wanted this to become a tradition, we wanted this month to be associated with Romania, Romanian culture, Romanians. In Cracow, the street itself is the biggest show, and he who dominates the street, is the big winner. So our strategy was to take our big events out in the street, thus transforming the crowded squares in our public. We had everything planned in the tiniest detail, the choices we made were potential winners (Masca, Shukar), we knew exactly where we had to be and what we had to do, every second was carefully planned, but there was one unknown element in the equation, which could have easily blown everything up: the weather. Ten days before the Festival, we were monitoring in parallel several weather report and, thank God, we figured out it would turn out ok. It was more than that, the weather was splendid, sunny and warm. The events we organized indoors were also meant to attract a big public, and this is exactly how it happened: Balanescu Quartet performed fantastically on the opening of the Festival, and the Romanian night in Piekny Pies was crazy, even the owners of the club confirm it. Even though we took care of most of the aspects of the Festival, managing everything from our office in Warsaw, we wouldn’t have made it without the help of our partners in Cracow, old ones and new, who did an excellent job, and who expect us to be back in 2010. However, our great discovery was Ruxandra, and we owe her not only this blog, but also a visibility without precedent in the blogosphere and even in the media. Anyway, having recovered after those exhausting days, I am mostly thankful to Monica, the direct coordinator of the project, and to all those who have worked for the Festival. And one more thing, a secret that we only partially managed to keep: the 2009 edition was a test for another project we would like to release next year – we want to make 2010 the Year of Romanian Festivals, or Romania’s Year in Poland. We’re planning to organize five Festivals, inspired by the one in Cracow, in the big Polish cultural centers: Warsaw, Cracow, Poznan, Gdansk and Bialystok. These days, we’ll have our evaluation meetings, after the Festival, and they’ll be, at the same time, brainstorming sessions for Romania’s Year in Poland (who, when, what).

P.S. I could hardly refrain from publishing this “secret” here, especially because ever since I found out about it, I keep making all these enthusiastic scenarios about next year, with all those Festivals. My theory is that, one way or another, we all wished this Cracow episode would not end, would somehow go on, and this is one of the explanations for such an ambitious plan regarding 2010:)

 

It’s over

Theoretically speaking, the second edition of the Festival of Romanian Culture is over.

Practically, it’s not really over – it’s time to draw the line, to write our reports, to catch our breath, put order in pictures and in the (still) fresh memories, and to think about the third edition. In the meantime, we have a full month ahead of us: confereneces, book releases (in May, Warsaw hosts the International Bookfair), movie nights. Anyway, getting back to what I was saying writing earlier, the Festival is over, after an intense and tiring week. Tiring in that particular way, in which the things you do with pleasure drain your energy, but turn out to be sometimes even better than expected.

I don’t know how others feel about this, but I’m in a Sneaker-Pimps-After-Every-Party-I-Die mood. Maybe because only now things are beginning to calm down. Most likely, it won’t be for long, next week we’re back in business, full speed ahead.  We’ll obviously keep you updated, and the invitation is still open (for all our events, no matter in which Polish city).

But since this is a good moment for conclusions-order-denouement,  here’s a review, for the sake of an adequate closure:

an encouraging and enthusiastic burst of applause after the opening concert of Balanescu Quartet

a club packed with people, dancing their night away to the music of Teo and Bully

an entire Square fascinated by the two performances of Masca Theatre

a concert which gives the ones who were not present in Cracow all the reasons to regret their absence: Shukar Collective

These were the highlights of the Festival. The enumeration above is strictly chronological, I told you last week that I’m giving up tops and hierarchies, since I can’t decide which event was the best.

While all these things were happening onstage, backstage we had to fix all technical and logistic details, our agendas were full and every minute was strictly calculated, the phones were ringing incessantly, we were writing against the clock and climbing walls/roofs/historical buildings in order to take pics – but we really have no reason to complain. We didn’t lack entertainment, either (we couldn’t have been the ones to miss it, right?)

Monica and Doru trained intensively, in just a few hours, climbing up and down the abrupt stairs to the stage on the roof where Shukar Collective performed.

Monica and Donata in our “press office”, which had its temporary headquarters at Cafe Les Couleurs.

Doru and the Shukars, before the concert.

***

It’s over… above all, we have the great satisfaction of having faced the challenge of a demanding public, of having organized a very good event in one of the cities with the highest standards in terms of entertainment and culture.

 

Promo

Some time ago, I was telling you that during the Festival in Cracow, competition was quite serious. So we had to keep pace and be practically everywhere.

Out in the streets and at the sometimes annoyingly crowded crossroads:

In bookshops, coffee shops, conference halls:

Eventually, in those not-so-crowded-but-impossible-to-avoid places (especially if you’re spending a few hours in a bar / club / pub):

 

Back in time

I pretty much expected anything and everything before the trip to Cracow for the Festival: a lot of work, marathons through the city, crises to be solved in the very last minute, twice the fun (you know, work hard, play harder), sleepless nights and coffee overdose. There was just one thing I didn’t expect: such a touching evening, like the one we had yesterday.

We met at Dom Polonii, to commemorate The Polish Refuge in Romania (1939 – 1947) and also to hand out anniversary diplomas to the few refugees who are still alive. What might sound like a history lesson turned out to be a trip back in time, blending stories from those turbid  years when, after the inavsion of Poland, 50.000 Poles found in Romania the freedom they had lost back home.

Our guests talked about school – many of them were only students back in 1939, about the first love stories, the first earthquake they lived in Bucharest, about how they miraculously survived the bombs of the Allies’, about the trains that were to take them back to Poland. One of the most famous Polish refugees was Stanislaw Wislocki, composer, conductor and pianist, who had studied in Timisoara and had worked with George Enescu, but also Danuta Bienkowska, an excellent translator from Romanian to Polish, and Andrew Victor Schally, biochemist, laureate of the Nobel Prize.

It’s sometimes unbelievable how stories, old pictures and fragments of the past manage to shed a new light on the present. Like one famous American, whom I’m very fond of, would say: everything is illuminated.

 

Romanian movies and an editorial event

After a full weekend – clubbing in Cracow, concerts and dancing, theatre performances in the Square, wine tastings and a photo vernissage – on Monday, we added to our programme the movie series “Southern Routes”. This week, you can find us in Kino Ars. Because we like movies, and because we strongly believe Romanian cinema has a powerful message to send across Europe, we’ve made a point of promoting Romanian productions in Poland. And we did that a long time ago.

So in order to keep the tradition alive, we couldn’t have missed the opportunity of presenting Romanian movies during the Festival. We started with Gruber’s Journey, directed by Radu Gabrea, a movie inspired by the realities of the Pogrom in 1941. Yesterday we watched Reenactment, a movie directed by Lucian Pintilie and forbidden by Nicolae Ceausescu only a few days after the premiere. Our proposal for today is Sequences (Alexandru Tatos) and the movie series will end tomorrow with Contest (Dan Pita).Monday evening we were happy to discover some familar faces in the public of about 70 people. And that didn’t happen because we had invited our friends, our colleagues, our grandmas and our neighbours to see the movie. They were the same people who had applauded Masca Theatre in Cracow’s Main Square, who had danced in Piekny Pies and at the Shukar Collective concert, and who had taken the Romanian language classes, thus greeting us, smiling, in Romanian.

Yesterday, the bokstore Pod Globusem was the host of an editorial event: the release of the Big Romanian-Polish Dictionary. Have you ever wondered how it feels to try learning a language having as an instrument nothing more than a dictionary published back in the ’70s? If you haven’t, try to picture this, just for a second, and you’ll understand why we were so happy to have supported such an initiative.This is the object we’ve been waiting for:

Scores of people in the library: students of the Romanian Philology Department, translators, professors, authors of books about Romania, members of the Polish-Romanian Friendship Association. The moderator of the discussions was prf. dr. hab. Marcela Swiatowska, dean of the Faculty of Philology, Jagiellonian University in Cracow. The speakers were dr. Joanna Porawska, author of the dictionary, together with Halina Mirska Lasota (one of the most important figures in the field of Romanian studies), dr. Gabriela Gavril-Antonesei, lecturer of the Romanian Studies department in Cracow, Ireneusz Kania, translator of Romanian literature and prof. dr. hab. Stanislaw Widlak, who worked in editing a grammar annex to the Dictionary, and who insisted upon the necessity of publishing a Romanian grammar reader.

Now we’re off to Dom Polonii, where in the afternoon we’ll be commemorating the Polish Refuge in Romania, between 1939 – 1947.

 

An exceptional concert

We promised we’d be back with pics from the Shukar Concert. They alone can tell the story of Sunday night, and just by watching them you could figure out how this concert rocked. But I can’t help making comments (professional shortcoming), so here’s the photo-story:

1. The announcement.

Our flyers were already in clubs, pubs, handed to the passersby, the flyers Alchemia made were hanging on the entrance door, in their event calendar. It was really hard to miss the concert.

2. The stage. Told you it was on the roof, now here’s the proof. High standards, high stage, high entertainment.

3. People had gathered in Plac Nowy long before the concert, and while Transkapela were performing, things looked like this. And they kept coming…

4. We expected a successful concert, as we well knew who we were dealing with. And we were not wrong. After a short while, this was the result:

5. The Shukars on stage:

6. And their newly-gained Polish fans in front of the stage. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for them to go wild, to dance, applaude and go berserk over Sorinel’s every word.

If you were there, you’ll agree with us, and if you weren’t, you’ll have to take our word for it: the concert deserves a perfect 10. And it was prolongued into the night, downstairs in Alchemia, with DJ Vasile responsible for the music & the entertainment. If dancing started in the square, it was a matter of the obvious it would go on in the club:

And this is where we stopped documenting the evening. After all, we were entitled to mingle and join the party

 

In the meantime

As you well know by now, our general headquarters is in Cracow, for the time being, since an event like the Festival of Romanian Culture requires serious troop mobilization. But this does not mean we’ve vanished from the cultural map of other cities.

At the same time with the Shukar Collective concert in Plac Nowy, Oana Catalina Chitu performed in Warsaw, in the Polish Radio Concert Hall “W. Lutoslawski”. In front of a numerous public, she interpreted songs reminding interwar Bucharest, old tangos, and songs of Maria Tanase. The Romanian-born singer is accompanied by musicians from Serbia, Germany, Russia, Moldavia and Peru, and they’ve seduced the public in several European countries. Their latest succes, confirmed by the burst of applause, was in Poland. Yesterday, Oana Catalina Chitu performed in Poznan, at “Estrada Poznanska”.

P.S. These days, we’re watching Romanian movies at Kino Ars, and we’re getting ready for tonight’s release of the Big Romanian-Polish Dictionary. I’m beginning to feel sorry the Festival only lasts until Thursday, and that teleportation has not yet been invented, because last night I really wished I could have been in Poznan, at least for an hour or so.

 

Planned and unplanned events. Day 4

The neighbourhood called Kazimierz is at this moment Cracow’s hotspot: the gathering point for artists, bohema, hipsters, probably the area with the biggest density of fancy coffee-shops and events on square meter. Ans yesterday we set camp here.

In the morning we started off with wine tastings – pour les connaisseurs (i.e. those who had made reservations in Club Alchemia beforehand, or those who are nostalgic about those days when you could find in Poland Cotnari wines) but also for those who had found out, taking part in our other events, that the Festival gives them a chance to taste not just culture. The Romanian language classes were held once again at Hologram Institute of Foreign Languages, and in the afternoon we inaugurated the photography exhibition Romania. Agnieszka Perek and Iwona Hajto took vivid and detailed pictures of the Romanian realities they were exposed to while working as volunteers in Sebis.

In the evening, we left the coffee-shops and moved to Plac Nowy, a multifunctional square: it’s the location of a flee market, sometimes pigeons are sold here, in the central building there’s some fast-foods with Polish food and the roof is transformed into a stage for concerts. The terraces were full even during the rehersals and sound checks, and in bars the tables upstairs had been reserved (ad they have a good view towards the stage). At 7 p.m. the Polish group Transkapela started the concert, and by the time Shukar Collective were to perform, there were about 500 people in the square (and this is not based on our estimations, but on those of the security guards, and they have an eye for such details and numbers). Sorinel simply delighted the public, talking to the in Romanian and Romani. Just a few minutes after the beginning of the concert, the square was one huge dance floor. And not just in front of the stage, but also on the terraces and at the crossroads. The concert ended at about 10 p.m. (because that’s what put papers and authorizations required, and the policemen didn’t come to check them this time, although Monica was already used to this) after applauses, thanks (the public even thanked in Romanian) and after calling the band back on stage.

These were the events in our programme. Luckily, we don’t lack spontaneity, especially when the public’s reactions are so encouraging as they’ve been during the first three days, so without any previous planning we organized a second Romanian night in Club Alchemia. DJ Vasile came down from the stage on the roof and landed in the basement of the club, which he left at 6 a.m., after mixing the night away.

Tonight, we invite you to the cinema. We start our movie series, “Southern Routes”, in Kino Ars.

A bit later, we’ll be back with pics. Now we’re charging our batteries, our phones, our laptops, hence my lack of promptitude when it comes to pictures. I’ll work on that soon.