ROKOLECTIV

MIHAI MIHALCEA IN CONVERSATION WITH bela

ROKOLECTIV

You have been recently involved in a SHAPE+ residency in Bucharest, where you worked together for a live show at the National Dance Centre. It was maybe an atypical encounter, since bela activates more in the electronic music scene, while Mihai is rather linked to the performance art / contemporary dance scene. However, you both have a fluid artistic practice, multiple interests, and a curiosity / openness that are not necessary a given in our times. How do you feel about your respective scene, are there enough meaningful cross-, intersectional-, intergenerational- collaborations or do you feel that the cultural landscape tends to become rather focused on micro-scenes? 

bela

I live in Berlin where all kinds of artists flow into each other’s scenes, looking for exactly that kind of intersectional collaborations all the time. Of course depending on your usual social boundaries you can be focused on a certain scene, but as somebody who freshly arrived here, I see a lot of potential to mix in, at least here. However it feels like a luxury allowed only in cities with large networks of professionals and up-and-coming artists, most of them working within or around institutions. Back in Seoul, I observed a different type of mingle more—where kids with no money are doing self-organised gigs for no money. They still manage to create great performances with multi-disciplinary approaches, with cheap labour and resources they can pull from the city’s old industrial districts suffering from gentrification problems. And some of them, in turn, try to contribute to the local political discourse via direct and/or indirect engagements.

I come from a more isolated background, which makes it difficult for me to access different talent pools… at least if I keep sticking to my usual MO. I really want to work with others in different fields and practices because that is how I learn, but of course it depends on the institutional budget because living costs are rising so fast in Berlin. It is absolutely not feasible to “try and fail” unless the time and energy spent experimenting is compensated financially. And honestly, who can write for funding when they don’t even know what to expect from working with others—which they have to find out from experimenting with others in a space, with necessary support… Unless you’re someone who can rely on your name or your label or someone that will root for you, you get trapped in those kinds of limits.

MIHAI MIHALCEA

Cross intersectional projects exist in Bucharest, but intergenerational ones are rare. My problem is that they are not as meaningful as I would like them to be or maybe not bold enough for my taste. I need things that challenge me, destabilise me and take me out of the zone of predictability. In general, the local scene seems to me to have become trivially well-behaved and quite conventional in recent years. I have had the chance to grow artistically with a group of artists who have produced some of the most daring and radical artistic projects. We experimented a lot, and together we tried to break some rules, barriers, break some boundaries and not to lose the critical dimension but also the playful spirit. It surprises me that, 20 years later, a significant part of the art scene is getting tired and conforming so easily. Of course there are exceptions, but they are so few that they become invisible in a sea of conformity.

ROKOLECTIV

Some artists love residencies and see them as great opportunities, while some others feel that residencies occupy a lot of their time (for usually low budgets, with a lot of expectations in terms of outputs), so they prefer to be in their studio or focus on their own projects. How do you feel about the whole “artists in residency” mechanism? 

bela

As a beginning artist, I feel as though I am stepping into an already-established worldview. I like residencies, I usually thrive under pressure even though I sacrifice my health a lot in the process. I’ve come to treat this system as a living organism, this network of good residencies, awards, galleries, stipends, festivals, and art market. I feel the need to appease it and adopt its language, tempers, economics, and politics. I am not sure if you are really given much choice as an artist anywhere—because of my own language limit, also. Reading, speaking and thinking about my intentions for a residency in English is quite an exhausting procedure. Thankfully what I want to say is usually within the interest of this organism. It is incredibly territorial and is based on almost-tribal alliances, even when it is full of doctors in liberal arts who work on de-colonialism and new materialism. SHAPE+ was nice because I could push myself a bit more forward in the process, because I somehow had a belief that they wanted their musicians to do what they came to do.

MIHAI MIHALCEA

Artist residencies seem to me a good opportunity to get out of your common places, to meet artists, contexts and work situations with which you are not necessarily familiar and thus to generate new possibilities that you would not otherwise produce. I am energised and inspired after meeting bela, because bela is so intense, dense, profound and playful. As soft and beautiful as wild and strong. We come from two different continents with quite different histories and artistic backgrounds that don’t necessarily intersect. Plus, we are many years apart in age. Nevertheless, the meeting was extremely nice, in a very warm, open, human spirit, with respect for each other’s vulnerabilities and unknown territories. Not to mention that what resulted in the end was in my view exceptional, a very intense and powerful artistic act. bela is an extraordinary artist on stage.

ROKOLECTIV

bela, your music, as heard on your album Noise and Cries, recontextualises pungmul, a Korean folk music tradition that incorporates performance in various forms: drumming, singing, dancing. However, in some more recent conversations, you were saying that you also feel the need to take some distance from this sound and the associated “labelling”, and try out new directions. Can you detail on that? And do you fear that, by taking distance from your Korean music background, you might lose that “exotic” or “non-Western” sound component that a lot of promoters are looking for nowadays?

bela

As I mentioned before, I still have to think in Korean and spit it out in English. In the process a lot of lived experience, and local or even traditional knowledge gets transferred (or lost in translation...) - which is something to consider as a more advanced keyword than overtly “diversity hire”. The scene seems to be too tunnel vision when it comes to anything “exotic”. Why not diversify a little bit, and look for something more subtle? Isn’t having Korean language in it something to dig into already? It all boils down to a final write-up anyways. I read a public review of Noise and Cries that is written in a way that connects it so strongly to Pansori, when there was only one sentence containing the keyword in the press release. I thought, art is in the eye of the beholder, indeed. I am a Korean artist, I am a queer artist. If you’re going to keep me in the box, you’re going to keep me in the box. Do I have to care that much about interpretations? It is simply not economic to think about such things.

ROKOLECTIV

One aspect of your collaboration was, of course, connecting around queer sensitivities, and how that translates in your practices. bela’s performance openly reclaims the depths of queerness, in a well-constructed sound and queer performance “exorcism”. Mihai, you grew up in communist Romania, then developed yourself as an artist throughout the wild but not so queer-friendly ’90s. (Loved your comment regarding bela’s dress designed by Oláh Gyárfás for the show: “I would have loved to wear a dress like that...”) Were you forced to completely repress your queerness back in the days, or did you find subversive ways to express it in your projects? And can you think of one particular show from your past where you would love to be able to go back and “sport” such a dress? 

MIHAI MIHALCEA

I stopped believing things were only one way a long time ago. Even in a dictatorship, life always makes its way and creates hidden parallel realities, less known. On the one hand, I remember studying and rehearsing my movements in the mirror to avoid being feminine, even though no one had told me I was. There was no talk of such things around me, but the fact in itself that I thought on my own that femininity was something to be changed says a lot about the context. On the other hand, I felt a different energy inside me, a strong desire for life, an overload of feelings and emotions that needed to be expressed, and that made me express myself exactly as I felt. The lines were no longer straight, the angles became less sharp.

From a distance in time, I am amused and I think that a form of queerness was present even at the famous official galas at the huge stadiums, where, as a student at the choreography high school, we were forced to dance for Ceaușescu and the political power of that time. Sometimes I was dressed as a snowflake, sometimes in a pigeon costume, sometimes disguised as a blue sea wave. It was like an ongoing drag show. By ninth grade, I was cast in a cross-dressing role, on pointe shoes, to play one of Cinderella’s stepsisters. I became the school sensation. After the Revolution, around ’94, my first show spoke directly about my identity, and later, at a protest, I appeared in drag in front of a room full of politicians and journalists. Of course, now it seems like something trivial you could laugh at but it was totally unusual for the local context in which, remember, being gay was punishable by law until the law was repealed in 2001. In 2002, I premiered a solo at Tanz im August in Berlin called “Memory for sale (childhood included)” in which I was elevating my memories on a pair of golden high heels. I remember a line in the text presenting the piece, saying “Sometimes I find my past in the present of gestures. I carry my body like a cactus hiding its flowers.” In Romania, I performed this solo at the Odeon Theater in Bucharest only once, and what for me was a warm, intimate act of maximum openness and generosity, was received by a tense and cold hall, as if unable to receive my gesture. After the show, I had the feeling that my whole body was literally scratched by the cold stares. It hurt.

I think that in that solo I would have liked at some point to wear the beautiful dress that Gyárfás Oláh created for bela. 

ROKOLECTIV

While your residency was part of the Atopia project, it could have fitted as well in the context of the other project Rokolectiv runs this year, focused on recontextualising past and present forms of rituals and ceremonies. Do you feel there is a certain ritualistic dimension in your performances?

bela

Oh, absolutely. I proxied my voice and my body through a moving cart, wearing a dress made initially for a doll, dragging around the cart, limiting and impairing people’s vision with the lights, growling and screeching through my diary in the dark. It cannot get more ritualistic… or maybe it can. Mihai and I were talking about external forces and devices…

MIHAI MIHALCEA

In Nespus, a performance presented once on the stage of the CNDB over the superimposed scenography of the other performances presented a few evenings before, left on the stage like a ruin, I buried my past and in the years that followed I was reborn as Farid Fairuz. For 10 years I performed a fictional biography. In “Farewell (or about the discreet escapes of the limbic system)” together with this birth I exorcized the past of Romania. From the curses on the Parliament of Romania made by a group of Romany witches who inspired this performance to exhausting the waste of my own culture, there has always been the dimension of procession, of ritual.   

ROKOLECTIV

What do you feel are the biggest obstacles / limitations in your artistic paths right now?

bela

My own low energy. I treat people worse when I am low energy.

MIHAI MIHALCEA

We are all much more tired because we are nervously overstimulated with information coming at us and pulling us in all directions. We live in a continuous visual assault. At the same time, we are being asked to be relentlessly creative, to constantly squeeze ideas, to produce, and to be in constant competition for attention. It’s exhausting. What looked like it would be rethought and slowed down during the pandemic has turned out to be just the opposite. Most of us are working harder for less. We all need to do less, and have more time for ourselves.

ROKOLECTIV

What is up for you next?

bela

After a break in Prague, I have an autumn tour season. Some gigs here and there… I think I could finally visit Italy, I am looking forward to that. A collaboration with a performance artist is in the talks for next year. Other than the obvious, I am interested in small scale installation works and noise sets, with or without a PA system.

MIHAI MIHALCEA

I will start a new project together with Simina Oprescu, Dinu Bodiciu, and Andu Dumitrescu. I will rewrite and perform the movements that I have been going through in the last 30 years and that I carry in my body, both those from my choreographies or those of the other choreographers I have worked with, as well as movements and gestures taken from protests, social movements and political events that have overlapped or intersected with this personal choreographic history. I will add a sound layer with pop songs that have invaded the public space and that have synchronised with/overlapped over this gestural and choreographic history. I will take singing lessons. I will sing “Vision of love” and I will talk about violence. All this is also related to the violence that has been part of these 30 years, violence that is growing and seems to be intensifying. I don’t know what will come out. On the one hand, I feel like I’m about to explode, on the other, I feel the need to retreat into a protected space where I can give myself time to breathe in between all these events. We’ll see.

Cover image: CNDB, Bucharest, performance bela, Mihai Mihalcea, Oláh Gyárfás. Credits: Vlad Dudu