This October brings the exciting premiere of the show Beyond the Golden Hour, created as part of the project "Fágáș. Multicultural Perspectives – strengthening cultural entrepreneurship in Cluj-Napoca in a Romanian-Hungarian interethnic context", a program funded by the EEA Grants 2014-2021 within the RO-CULTURE Programme. The show is a wonderful co-production between Reactor and Váróterem Projekt, bringing multicultural coexistence into the spotlight with a fantastic mixed cast. To find out more about this creative adventure, we invited Alina Mișoc (Reactor de creație și experiment) and Zsolt Csepei (Váróterem Projekt) to share some of their magic behind the scenes!

What are you working on right now? What is the background of your artistic journey? What excites you and what do you hope to discover in your work as an actor/actress?

Zsolt Csepei: Oh, wow! Right now, I'm working on the surtitles for "Beyond the Golden Hour." A bilingual text surtitled in two languages means bilingual squared! (laughs) That's keeping me busy at the moment. Lately, thanks to some plays I translated for Reactor, I've started doing more translations. I realized I absolutely love it—it has a wonderful creative side, but it's also wonderfully concrete.

Otherwise, in my artistic life recently, it feels like I've been in a bit of an active pause. I think there are two things I'm not physically working on, but they're constantly running in the background. I want to learn to work on my own, to carry a project to completion by myself, to learn to plan, and rewire my brain a bit. Until now, I've always worked in a group or with someone else, which made it easier to make decisions, overcome blocks, and find confidence in an idea.

On the other hand, also in the background, another project is brewing—I've made a few attempts at it, but it seems quite challenging. It will be a show/exhibition/board game/performance! I don't know exactly when I will start working on it, or if it will take one year or ten. It's a very personal project, so it needs time to bloom.

Alina Mișoc: After a quite long break from working on children's plays, at the end of August, I started working on a delightful project—a reimagining of Pacala's story with an independent company I've collaborated with before. It is always a wonderful challenge to play for a young audience, who are so incredibly honest and tough! The rhythm, the play, the presence can all shift for an actor who also does theater for adults. That's why I love mixing the two, because you constantly have to adapt and find that perfect balance. Beyond the great technique children's theater brings you, I feel it is so essential because it helps shape future generations. In this project, I'm working as both an actress and a puppeteer, which is great for developing my precision and object work!

Right after the premiere of "Beyond the Golden Hour," I will start rehearsals for an exciting new Reactor project. I can't wait to work with Dragoș Mușoiu, a director I've wanted to collaborate with for a long time, and I love the idea that it will be a collective ensemble piece rather than individual scores. I adore the fairytale frame of the text, the themes, and the all-female cast. The visual universe designed by Mihai Păcurar is so captivating and creative, relying beautifully on suggestion.

You've had all kinds of stage experiences so far, in shows with very different creative processes. In the case of "Beyond the Golden Hour," this project included a laboratory stage, and the text is partly inspired by the team's own stories. Tell us more about how you worked! Did anything change compared to other projects you've been in? What were the challenges and the joys?

Zsolt Csepei: What was unique for me was knowing right from the start what the performance space and the scenography would look like! Often, at the beginning, we only have ideas and weeks go by before we decide on the space. This time, we had the wonderful opportunity to adapt our movements to a specific space right away. Besides that, we had a lovely workshop for a few days, and our stories there became the basis for the text. At the start of rehearsals, we improvised without text, searching for what moves the characters, what is essential to them, discovering relationships, and just having fun playing around with the material!

Alina Mișoc: The project kicked off with a casting workshop where we shared our thoughts and personal stories about interethnicity, the idea of emigrating, and how these topics were handled in our families. However, the playwright beautifully expanded this workshop beyond the artistic circle to gather a rich variety of stories and perspectives. By the time we started working on stage, the text was already complete, needing only minor tweaks. The set design was presented to us during our very first rehearsals, which made it so much easier to quickly grasp the concept of the show. The most exciting challenge for me was having to perform in Hungarian—since I don't speak the language—and the fact that we are constantly interacting with the surtitles as if they were another partner on stage!

How was this theme of interethnicity approached in the show? In what ways did you get close to it?

Zsolt Csepei: The better question is whether we could even avoid the theme! (laughs) We are three Hungarian actors and three Romanian actors, each speaking our mother tongue, and sometimes we try to interact in each other's language. Sometimes we are narrators, sometimes fictional characters with fictional lives in a fictional society—which is a clone (sometimes successful, sometimes less so) of reality. Since the show is built on interpersonal relationships, the theme of interethnicity naturally shines through in these moments, though we also play with clichés and stereotypes in a fun way.

Alina Mișoc: The theme of interethnicity, unfortunately, remains a sensitive topic. I think we both got close to it and kept our distance. At times, we chose to treat it with a bit of irony, playing with stereotypes. On a personal level, it really opened my eyes to what it means to live within another culture and how challenging that can be in certain moments. As for the Hungarian language, I still find it quite tricky, but I've truly fallen in love with its beautiful musicality!

How do you think the audience will receive the show?

Zsolt Csepei: I have no idea! I just hope people don't take the theme too seriously and enjoy the ride.

Alina Mișoc: I hope they will find it to be a wonderful, funny show, with touching moments that successfully spark a warm conversation about topics that are so often avoided.

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