Elena Morar - about "goddesses of small things"

Soon, we await you at the premiere of the play “Dandelions and Speedwells”, based on the text written by ioana serota. The text was developed within this year's 11th edition of Drama 5 and was selected to be staged by director Elena Morar. In the lines below, we talked with Elena about what the rehearsals for the show were like and her encounter with this text.

What are you working on right now? What is the context of your artistic research?
Elena Morar: I've noticed that over the past few years, I approach projects as placing my creative resources at the service of social aims, goals, and values that I believe in. In short, "the message determines the medium." And that's how projects came about, such as directing a one-act opera (set to contemporary classical music) where the subject of the libretto is femicide, an immersive installation about the history of reproductive rights in Romania, an educational show about the choices of a pregnant teenager, or a "chamber" show about the power dynamics between director and actresses.
Although I do not explicitly research a feminist theme, I naturally gravitated toward topics that seem urgent to me, mental places that hurt me, or injustices where one cannot remain silent.
And memory is a second major thematic area that concerns me, more and more. From how a pop festival by the seaside lingers in the collective memory, to the way memory is constructed/deconstructed with age.
I rather believe in the "shapeshifter" creator who can undergo mutations while remaining consistent with their worldview, and can juggle various registers, aesthetic languages, and forms of expression.
And this is the model that I tend to apply to an idea / proposal / seed of something.
You have had all kinds of stage experiences so far, both in state theaters and independent theaters, as well as abroad. This time you are working within a project that you were also part of as a resident playwright in another edition of Drama 5. Does anything change in your role as director in this context? Do you work differently with the text after having gone through this residency experience?
E.M.: I am more attentive to bringing out the value of the text. It's something I do anyway, but now it has another nuance. Having gone through the experience of being a Drama 5 resident myself 6 years ago (and how great it was and how much I discovered about myself as a writer AND about myself as a director), I am aware that a large part of what is written springs from delicate affective places. Where you don't enter with muddy boots, but where you have to be careful about how you make a healthy and definitive distinction between biography and fiction. Where the real source must be honored, but without getting stuck in it. Because part of the dramatic material often carries autobiographical echoes (as is the case with the text I am staging now), a permanent balancing act is needed, especially since it is a finished text, not a devised one. In order to enter into a dialogue with the text, not just display it in a showcase.
Especially when it's a text that pushes infallible emotional buttons really hard. And one that we can resonate with very easily.
What do you aim for from the process? Can we talk about a type of approach/aesthetic that you practice through the show “Dandelions and Speedwells”?
E.M.: I would speak of two concurrent aspects. Regarding the result, the creative team and I set out to offer an experience that is not only emotional, but also sensory for the audience. So that they can enter almost hyper-realistically (this would roughly be a possible "label" for the aesthetic that inspired us) into the scenic universe. To be able to almost touch, smell, hear, taste the memories pouring out of the "broken time machine" that is the text's central character. So that (hyper)realism and the meticulous reconstruction of the atmosphere in the grandmother's house complete the dramaturgical discourse on a deep, neuronal level, reaching an overflow, an avalanche of stimuli. I think there is a risk of it being perceived as tautological, but what we propose is not a 1:1 realistic "movie set," but somehow a museum of memories, where archiving is just as important as reliving.
As if the grandmother's house were being sold after her death, and an inventory were being taken so that everything could be donated/given away/put up for sale. An unashamed display of family secrets.
And for me, since the process is truly just as important as the result—it's not just a saying—we aimed to discover things about ourselves during rehearsals for the show. To confess, to grow closer, to reveal ourselves. Especially at the beginning of rehearsals, during the exploratory stage. To dig into blind spots in our relationships with the women in our families, the heavy generational legacy, the sweet trap of nostalgia, the way we carry forward pain and formative experiences. No matter how much the self-development industry has hijacked the benefit of reconciling with the past, thereby trivializing it, I truly believe that in order to be better fighters in today's profoundly unjust world, we also must pass through the gray area (as the text says) where we revisit moments from the past through reenactment.
One of the qualities of the text “Dandelions and Speedwells” written by Ioana is precisely its high degree of recognizability: we can easily project ourselves into her story, because it's about everyone's female ancestors. We had many personal, even hyper-personal discussions generated by understanding the text, and I'm glad I feel they make us, in the most concrete way, better artists. It is also a kind of ongoing artistic-emotional education through such occasion-texts.
What does the merging of the show's form and the play's content look like for you? Have you discovered new things through meeting the artistic team (playwright, actresses/actors, set designer, musician)?
E.M.: I could write an essay about each female artist on the creative team. And here I clearly include the actresses: although it is not a collective creation, it is a creature conceived with multiple mothers, in which the ideas of each woman (and each man; Tavi Voina is invaluable) contributed to the form the spectator will see. Not by chance, we gathered (mostly) women who do not run from affect, who do not freeze in front of emotion, and who have an extra inclination toward the memory of "small," personal history, the iconography of the everyday. Maybe it doesn't sound like the most revolutionary thing at first glance, and maybe this inclination has been superficially associated with the so-called attributes of "feminine directing" (🤮👾 whatever that is). But it is a very difficult bet to be able to work "hot" with emotions, memories, and theatricality without cringing. And without sliding down the slope of sentimentality.
Instead, being able to explore the area that I would name (using the title of a famous novel) "god of small things."
In Oana Hodade, composer of the show's music and creator of the sound universe, which is very important in the performance, I discovered an extraordinary gentleness and openness. Since this is our first collaboration, it seemed to me that she understood precisely (from her dual role as performer and director) the bond between the conceptual side and the affective side. Which, in people like her, intertwine rather than exclude each other. Bianca Veșteman translated the content of the text through textures, colors, choices of objects, and feeling, and I felt from the very first moment that this text suited her for set design. What I discovered is her aesthetic eye, as demanding as it is resourceful.
How do you think this show will be received, both in terms of form and regarding its content? I am also thinking about the fact that staging the text can alter something of the play's initial intention.
E.M.: I'm thinking now about something mentioned by the playwright in one of our first conversations, regarding the world she described: "they could address macabre themes without ruining anyone's mood." That sentence guided me in my directing process now.
First of all, I would be delighted if other artists discovered Ioana's confident and interesting voice as a playwright on this occasion. One theory says that the mark of a good text is that it can inspire several different stagings, and I think that's a quality found here. I would be very curious to see another staging of Ioana's text as well. In my proposal, the emphasis is placed on the one hand on the actors' performance, and on the other hand on how we manage—I hope—to create a sensory and especially auditory capsule, in which the "absent" characters also materialize through the objects, smells, or sounds with which we associated them. Like the goods that were placed in a sarcophagus by the ancients.
The more "grandma's" mind in the text unravels, the more the granddaughter's identity takes shape and comes together. This parallelism generates an authentic visceral emotion anyway, which we try to preserve and highlight in the performance.

photo: Bogdan Botaș
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Cultural project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or for how the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the grant beneficiary.