This month, Reactor is absolutely thrilled to host its second premiere of 2022, the wonderful show "Habituare"! The talented Irina Ionescu joined this production as the video artist, while also contributing her creative spark to the stage design and costumes. Here is what Irina joyfully shared with us about working on this beautiful project:

Our collaboration with Reactor came about quite wonderfully by chance, almost naturally! The "Habituare" project was the very first where our artistic search truly aligned. The themes of eco-anxiety and the climate crisis are areas I have been exploring for a while, though I often felt a bit stuck facing them. Collaborating with Ioana Hogman and Raul Coldea brought me to a fresh new perspective through their wonderfully indirect approach. Much of the project was brand new to me, but I felt everything fell into place so beautifully and organically, especially during rehearsals, as the dramatic, directorial, and visual concepts came alive with our fantastic actors and actresses!

In the "Safe Zone" project, where I had the pleasure of illustrating texts for the information campaign, things were much clearer. The theme of abuse is deeply important to me, even if I have approached it in different ways before. I tried to bring a touch of warmth to this heavy topic through my illustrations and the gentle rhythm of the animation, making it a bit more inviting for everyone.

I simply love playing with different mediums of artistic expression! In this playful exploration, film always remains a guiding filter or a reference point to help me connect with new mediums, which in this case is the magical world of theater. It’s my way of understanding something new through what is familiar; I work through a constant, exciting comparison, always searching for what is shared and what can be borrowed from theater to film and vice versa! For example, in this case, I felt the show functions like a lovely mix between the principles of slow cinema and the Greek Weird Wave, beautifully transposed into specific, performative tools.

In addition to the different artistic medium, the roles I took on in the project were excitingly new to me, yet warmly familiar—acting as both stage designer and video artist. The set design and costumes were a wonderful collaborative effort, built upon the concept envisioned by Raul. By crafting the set and costumes together, we had clear guidelines, but also the wonderful freedom to enrich the concept with our own aesthetic vision and adapt it to the show. As a video artist, it was once again a joyful task of adaptation and finding a unique language that works beautifully in our context.

The themes explored in this show have captivated me for a long time! I focused most of my energy on how they reflect in relation to social inequality. I had my first exciting attempt at this when I participated in a radio documentary workshop on the climate crisis, where one of the interviewees was actually Ioana! I feel there is a beautiful evolution from that project to "Habituare"—moving from focusing on how people from different social and material backgrounds support each other in a community, to how communities collectively react and feel. In a way, you could say the show captures what preoccupied me back then, now translated into a less direct, more sensory form, where we speak more allegorically and poetically.

________________________________________________________________________

"Habituare" is a show proudly produced within the cultural project "Solastalgia", co-funded 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 how the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the grant beneficiary.

Like this post? Share the excitement! Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Pinterest