Dance.Ro – Romanian contemporary dance nowadays

Choreographer and performer Cosmin Manolescu will present the contemporary dance scene in Romania in a special event at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, on August 26. This evening will open the fall season at RCINY. The presentation will be illustrated with video clips from "Dans.Ro 2007", a special DVD produced by Gabriela Tudor & Project DCM Foundation with the support of Romanian Ministry of Culture. A Q&A session will follow. The video presentation is dedicated to the memory of Gabriela Tudor.

The event follows Cosmin Manolescu's participation to the Cal-laboratory Kitchen, a collaborative choreographic research lab to be held at the University of California, San Diego from August 1-16, 2009. The project is organized by Allyson Green, Chair, Department of Theatre and Dance. A final presentation will be held at Sushi Performance and Visual Art on August 15.

The "Cal-laboratory Kitchen" will bring together artists from Latvia, Macedonia, Mexico, Romania, Great Britain, and California for a two-week residency to pursue a cultural exchange in choreographic processes. The choreographers will be in residence at the University of California, San Diego where they will work in improvisation and choreographic research with professional dancers and graduate students from San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. The choreographers will also collaborate with visual artists, composers and musicians from Great Britain, Mexico, and San Diego to explore interdisciplinary collaborative processes.

"Cal-laboratory Kitchen" will culminate in an informal sharing of the ideas generated in a public performance presented at Sushi Performance and Visual Art on the last Saturday of the residency August 15, 2009.

The Cal-laboratory Kitchen has received generous funding from The Suitcase Fund: Dance Theatre Workshop NYC, The Rockefeller Foundation and The Trust for Mutual Understanding, and from the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York.


Cosmin Manolescu is a choreographer, performer and cultural manager based in Bucharest. He is executive director of Gabriela Tudor Foundation (the new name of the former Project DCM Foundation). He made his debut as a choreographer in 1994 as part of “Marginalii”, one of the first collective dance groups created after the 1989. Since then, his artistic works were successfully presented in important festivals and venues in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beirut, Bremen, Bucharest, Dublin, Florence, Liverpool, Lyon, New York, Paris, Rome, San Diego etc. Between 1999-2007, in collaboration and with the support of DTW New York, the Trust for Mutual Understanding and DanceAdvance, Philadelphia, Cosmin developed several projects with US artists such as Donna Uchizono, Allyson Green, Melissa Putz, Ju-Yeon Ryu and Eric Schoefer, Yanira Castro and presented in Romania performances by John Jasperse, Homer Avilla, Amanda Loulaki, Allyson Green dance company, Leah Stein dance company, Pima Group and Ivy Baldwin dance company. Read more about his work...


[Image: Cosmin Manolescu, photo by Franck Hamel for the cover of "Bucharest, the Thaw / Bucureşti, dezgheţul", a book of interviews by Mirel Bran]