In March 2015 RtR sponsored George to facilitate a series of workshops across Romania … here’s a report from his experience in Cluj.
We had spent a week designing and playing forums around ideas of freedom of expression. Through improvisation, we had explored the struggle of student workers and autonomist squatters in Cluj attempting to establish independent and non-hierarchical spaces. We had re-enacted riots, occupations, battled cops and capitalists and defended the rights of homosexual couples to express themselves intimately and publically. We had explored the oppressions of religion, of self-doubt, of the cops in our heads, attempting to find solutions to set ourselves and our companions free.
On International Theatre Day – a year and a day since students occupied Cluj University for two weeks of forum and self-actualisation – our little group of theatre artists hit the streets, unsure of what exactly might happen, but determined and prepared to find out. We played with invisible balls in the park, passing them to passerbys to returned them with a laugh. We rediscovered benches, lamp-posts and bins, converting them into make-shift percussion.We chased after each other for the sheer thrill of the chase.
Later, in the streets of Cluj, we staged an attempted bike theft from one of our own, and were shocked by the bold and indignant intervention of local street traders, who berated the ‘thief’ and chided the ‘owner’ for being so confident in leaving her bike unlocked. We provoked, and our actor afterwards was concerned that everyone in town would think him a thief. We talked as a group and decided, better to let them think it was real than be the boy who cried ‘wolf’. We had wanted to incite a response and had succeeded.
In the late afternoon, we wandered over to the National Theatre, where they were having an open day. In the grand interior we sat, mute and appalled, as some bespectacled elitists asked and answered their own questions on the relationship of theatre and society. Alienated by their monologue, we slipped out into the street and growing rain.
That night, 300 cyclists gathered in the Piata Uneri for the monthly Critical Mass. A horde of wheeled barbarians wheeled around the city, blocking traffic, taunting the police, sounding horns and chanting ‘bi-ci-cleta!’ as they reclaimed the roads. People smiled, waved from windows, realised their mistake as they tried to push through a crowd of militant cyclists with their car. A group of anarcha-feminists buzzed the abortion clinic where pro-lifers were holding a 40 Day Protest ‘For Life’ with screams of ‘my body, my choice. Bikers blockaded roads to allow the mass to pass, and at the climax rallied back at the Piata to decry the corruption of the Romanian government with hundreds of other protesters.
