înLOCUIT/inHABITED Project

înLOCUIT/inHABITED project tackles and explores the theme of (in)habiting through a dialogue between dance, music and image.

The starting theme generated a series of searches and a dialogue between the 3 different artistic environments: dance, music and film. The  effervescent and extraordinary variety of answers we  channel to the public through:

• INHABITED contemporary dance film whose cinematic type approach captures every move of thought and emotion, proposing a choreography of the inner spaces, potentiated by the sound compositions signed by Vlaicu Golcea and Kinga Ötvös.
• înLOCUIT/inHABITED contest that provoked participants to create a dance film starting from the music composition given or vice versa, to compose a soundtrack for the dance movie given. The 78 remarkable works submitted show us how big and valuable the artistic scene in Romania is. The winners (who each received a prize of 1400 lei) are Eugen Curelici with the dance movie ”Zi (D)” in the category of Music inhabited by Dance and Andrei Petrache with the musical composition ”House in the Sleeping Forest” in the category of Dance inhabited by music.
• inhabited.ro is a reference website with a rich multimedia content that presents ideas, artists, inspirations, pieces of footage, musical themes, photo gallery and everything about the contest: concept, proposed pieces, judging criteria, winners and the finalists with their pieces, their artistic motivation and judges opinions, link to the gallery that includes the vast majority of the submitted works.

Two distinct productions emerged from and  continued this project, generating high interest from the public and the hosts of such cultural events:

• “INHABITED the ATTIC” – a 5-minute excerpt from INHABITED movie was selected in Bucharest International Dance Film Festival 2020, in the national competition. The jury offered a special mention because “it manages to create an intimate and personal world by creating links between visual, poetry and symbolic realms”.
• The audio-video installation – in which the viewer (re)discovers the contemporary dance film INHABITED immersing into its deconstructed space. Premiered at Stagiunea CORP on 12 and 13 September 2020 at Pavilion 32, Goethe Institut, due to the appreciation received, will hopefully resume soon.

Project’s origin

“inHABITED is an artistic journey that started two years ago with the concert-show ”Inlocuit” (replaced), in which I collaborated with seven contemporary chamber music composers, with the Sonomania ensemble led by Diana Rotaru, and the dancers Ana Costea and Răzvan Rotaru. I was fascinated by the different possibilities of creating together or in dialogue, the dance inspired by music, or the music generated from movement. This is where the idea of this project and the contest started. I wanted to carry on the search, the effort to translate contents from one world to another and attracted me into the movie the possibilities of a sound from far or from inside, a sound going through walls or penetrating the membrane between the protagonist and the world. The possibility of having a voice that is not dancer’s but could be. Which lives him temporarily.”-Smaranda Găbudeanu

Concept

Man tries to tame the space, to domesticate it. When it becomes safe enough, he can expand. His body limits become one with the place.

No matter how much you seal it, you impregnate it with you, the space where you live in is still permeable. Through the pores, things from outside enter. Until you wake up one day inhabited by something else…

Contemporary dance movie INHABITED

IT brings Benno Voorham, Mădălina Dan, Svitlana Pashko, Simona Dabija, Denis Bolborea, Laura Vlad – personalities of the Romanian and European dance scene as well as emerging artists – in a brave and original piece that sheds them in new light, unknown to the public so far. The physical space in which each protagonist is located (“an art in itself finding these spaces, as if they came from my brain”, as the composer Irina Vesa remarked), reveals a different layer of reality and demands its own manner of approach in image and editing (Răzvan Bumbeș, Daniel Drăgoescu, Tania Cucoreanu). From a nature that gives an artificial feeling, a fantastic attic with noir accents, to the claustration of an insect-human, or the impossibility of a breakup, the movie does not promise a trip, but a voyeurist teleport from one world to another, guided by the malicious smile of Benno.

The film premiered online on August 26, 2020, on TIFF Unlimited, the streaming video platform of the Transylvania International Film Festival. The concept and directing of the movie are signed by Smaranda Găbudeanu who brought together an international team of artists from the dance, music and film area, with whom she worked for 3 months in the înLOCUIT/inHABITED project. The premiere, followed by over 430 spectators, was preceded by an artist talk moderated by Cosmin Manolescu. A part of the project team together with their special guests – the winners of the contest, whose movies could have been watched during the talk – discussed about artistic processes.

Audio-video installation INHABITED

A “gorgeous music that gets under your skin right into your soul. Just as the creators of the movie wanted, the music is inhabited by the movie, but the movie is also inhabited by music, and I couldn’t conceive them separately. Strange vaiers, at the intersection of sensuality and mourning, together with refined micro-noises populate each frame and each character.”-Diana Rotaru, composer

After the premiere of the movie, the director Selma Dragoș told us that she had that feeling “when you sit very relaxed and try to imagine what’s the shape of your inside or what’s the shape someone else has, how someone else feels as himself. Or like not being inside you, but scattered, crumbs that float and stick to things”. The composer Diana Rotaru said that “I literally felt like I was going into the head and mind and soul of Smaranda Găbudeanu and I start exploring”. Well, the audio-video installation promises to amplify all these experiences.

The contest

We extended all these searches to the public as well, and we wanted to see how dance inspires a musical or sound creation and vice versa, how music generates movement and image. We were interested in this cross-game of perceptions in which participants, handlers of different media – like puppeteers – end up collecting them in a whole unit: a contemporary dance film. As a spectator, looking at all these variations, you get closer to the heart of this process, you perceive nuances and details otherwise, perhaps invisible.

The jury – members of the project’s artistic team – Denis Bolborea, Tania Cucoreanu, Daniel Dragoescu and Kinga Ötvös, had a difficult mission to select the 2 winners. Thus, at a short distance they also designated 4 finalists: Alice Mureșan with the movie “Exit” and Octavian M Gorgan with the movie “INHABITED MIND” inhabited by dance and Irinel Anghel with the song “Borderline” and Răzvan Krivach with the song “I’m the only one I’m” in the dance category inhabited by music. The authors’ artistic motivation as well as the jury’s are all on https://inhabited.ro/concurs/

“Almost 80 high quality works attached to this project. Established artists, young emerging, students and passionate enthusiasts dedicated themselves extremely creatively and together they managed to resize the concept and the entire form of the project.”-Tania Cucoreanu

“Beyond the fact that the majority of the creations have added value to the works given in unexpected ways, it was very interesting to observe how the constant of each category generates new decoding possibilities, how it is carved and inhabited in a personal and authentic way. – Denis Bolborea

“I was happy to be part of a collective of artists and nice people and to be able to watch how a variety of dynamics and criteria enter into the dialogue in appreciation of candidate creations and where we meet, “on common ground”, with similar visions.”-Daniel Dragoescu

Inhabited.ro

The website developed within the project is a reference with rich multimedia content that presents ideas, artists, inspirations, pieces of filmed material, musical themes, photo gallery and all about the contest: concept, proposed pieces, judging criteria, winners and the finalists with their pieces, their artistic motivation and judges opinions, link to the gallery that includes the vast majority of the registered works.