Ovidiu Caița and Ovidiu Cioclov - sharing a joyful look at relationships and our collective experiences!

This October, we are thrilled to celebrate the premiere of the show Beyond the Golden Hour! This wonderful production was 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 Program. The show is an exciting co-production between Reactor and Váróterem Projekt, bringing multicultural coexistence into the spotlight. It is directed by the talented Ovidiu Caița, based on a delightful text by Ovidiu Cioclov. To discover more about their creative journey, we invited the two of them to answer a few questions!

What captures your interest when you start working on a new show? What are you exploring? Is there anything currently on your mind regarding your work as a director?

Ovidiu Caița: It depends! For every show, I find myself drawn to something completely new. Usually, I search for just the right text to match a particular moment or phase I've gone through. This can be highly personal, ranging from deep emotions to social or cultural situations that got under my skin. Lately, I've been loving working closely with the actors and the playwright to explore shared emotions and questions. Sometimes I notice common themes popping up across several of my shows, but when it comes to research, I think I have always been fascinated by human relationships. That is my constant passion – how we position ourselves as individuals in the wonderfully complex relationships we share with one another.

How did you design the creative process and rehearsals for Beyond the Golden Hour, especially since it is a bilingual show? What wonderful joys and unique challenges come with working this way?

Ovidiu Caița: I have to say, the entire process – right from writing the text to bringing it alive on stage – was a beautiful collective effort! The text was created through fun workshops with the actors around Reactor, and also from inspiring documentation discussions with various socio-cultural groups in Cluj. The stage performance itself bloomed from improvisations during rehearsals. I truly believe this is the greatest success of the show – the wonderful bonding between the Hungarian and Romanian artistic teams during rehearsals, especially during our early creative exercises when they really discovered each other. I truly hope we manage to make this beautiful connection visible to our lovely audience too!

What was the background of your artistic research for this text – the initial ideas, the laboratory stage, your individual research, and your work with the team? 

Ovidiu Cioclov: In the beginning, I didn't have a single clue! I just knew we needed to create a show about the multicultural Romanian-Hungarian context in Transylvania. I was born and raised in Turnu Severin, and later moved to Bucharest in the Berceni neighborhood—places where this multicultural setting didn't exist, so I had no ready-made ideas or formulas in mind when I started. It actually scared me a bit at first! But then I thought, this could be my superpower! I have no preconceptions, no emotional baggage, and no bias about the subject; I just have my skills in crafting a text and a structure. That's where I began! I relied heavily on the rich experiences gathered during focus groups with the youth of Cluj, as well as with our wonderful team of actors. Starting from their real emotions and lived experiences, I began to build. The cast and our director, Ovidiu Caița, helped me immensely in decoding all the meanings. Then, I fell in love with exploring the city's geography; I walked all over between the center and the neighborhoods, visualizing places full of symbolism, did online research, played around with AI, enjoyed meals at Bulgakov, drank delicious coffee at Sisters... and all of this found its way into the show in one form or another! I think our audience will truly feel this wonderful polyphony.

You've had quite a few stage experiences so far and were also part of the Drama 5 residency. What is your relationship with playwriting?

Ovidiu Cioclov: Both at Drama 5 and during this show, I absolutely loved the laboratory format! The collective experience beautifully enriches your ability to create brand new elements that are so different from what you would usually write alone. The truth is, the script for Beyond the Golden Hour would not exist without this amazing interaction with the others. Of course, you need balance and the ability to make decisions, otherwise too much outside input can dilute the result. For that, you also need the experience of writing individually, knowing who you are, and having a well-defined vision and ethics.

How was this theme of interethnicity approached in the show? In what ways did you get close to it? How do you think the audience will receive the play?

Ovidiu Caița: I think I've partly answered this already. We started from our own personal experiences—everyone involved in the playwriting research. At the same time, I find it almost amusing that this topic is still on any research agenda—ethnicity, ethnocentrism... these should have been understood and embraced long ago. Yet, I constantly see they are still right there, unchanged—just like the miraculous origins of each ethnic group. So, we approached it by diving straight into all the clichés we knew about each other or ourselves! But we did this with immense tenderness and warmth, and I hope this very tenderness and warmth will touch the hearts of our audience.

Ovidiu Cioclov: My hope is that it will boost empathy between people and melt away socially and culturally constructed prejudices. It might stir things up for some, as we aren't living in the most tolerant historical moment, and although the show isn't politically targeted, it certainly doesn't shy away from talking about these things in a lively way!

Do you look at the role of a dramaturg differently after working on this show, since the text is inspired by the actors' and actresses' own stories?

Ovidiu Cioclov: Since the text is inspired by their personal stories, I felt a deep responsibility to be respectful and to constantly ask whether something felt right or comfortable. Our director, Ovidiu Caița, taught me this from the very beginning, drawing on his fantastic experience with team-focused work. I see my role more as a happy mediator of their experiences, a bridge between these real-life stories and our audience. To get certain reactions, theatre can sometimes be manipulative, and that's something I definitely wanted to avoid!

You have worked a lot in the independent theatre scene, and this is your second collaboration with Reactor. Does your role as a director change when you work in the independent sector?

Ovidiu Caița: The most exciting thing that changes in independent theatre is the team's incredible readiness to take creative risks! There is a dynamic energy in this sector that fuels this courage. And that is precisely why independent theatre has made such a massive and wonderful contribution to our cultural scene in recent years!

How does the blend between the show's physical form and the content of the play look to you? What did you discover through meeting this artistic team?

Ovidiu Caița: Out of all the gathered stories, Ovidiu wrote a script with a very special, warm, and direct poetry. I tried my best to keep that magic alive! Mihai has a wonderfully delicate touch on the entire show, beautifully translating the text's poetry into images and concepts. And as I mentioned before, the meeting and bonding of these two artistic teams, coming from different cultural backgrounds, is the absolute highlight of this entire journey!

Ovidiu Cioclov: I thought Ovidiu Caița's idea of the bus stop was brilliant! A bus stop is the perfect place where the most diverse people meet. We actually wanted to include the bus stop or the bus line in the title, but since another cultural project was launching at the same time with a similar theme, we decided not to overdo it. I also loved the idea of those monoliths representing AI—they instantly made me think of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey! I was also wonderfully surprised by the deeply human nature of the approach, using simple means to create powerful emotions. There is a breathtaking scene where a heartbreaking song is sung a cappella in Hungarian, while a dance is performed in an almost primal, essential way, and a story about depression, transformation, and identity is narrated in Romanian. That could easily be one of the highlights of the show—not because of a plot twist, but because of the sheer intensity of the emotion! I originally wrote the text in Romanian, then we happily decided as a team to make it bilingual. The artistic team translated it, and even though I lost control over the Hungarian parts—watching the show without subtitles and not understanding the Hungarian—I felt it sounded even better, bringing a wonderful sense of authenticity!