Thursday, May 10, 7 pm
Alina Nelega: “Amelia Takes a Deep Breath (Amelia respira adinc)" - staged reading
How Plays Feel Different in Different Language - panel
This play follows one woman's life-long encounters with cruelty and deprivation under communism and how she endures against all odds to survive. Against the backdrop of modern Romanian history, Amelia recounts the catalogue of her losses, from her body which she traded to the soldiers for scraps of food to her beloved dancer-brother who abandoned her for Paris. Throughout, she has held onto something she learned from her mother: to keep breathing. Translation developed by Alina Nelega in cooperation with playwright Kelly Stuart.
The event will also include an excerpt in Romanian performed by Dorina Laz�r who starred in the Romanian production of the play, and will be followed by a panel discussion with the artists. 

“The overall goals of the ARTE project are to explore translation methods that work for the unique demands of theater, to share and explore methods for developing new plays and theater works and to raise public consciousness about the role of theater in international diplomacy and the exchange of ideas”, explains John Clinton Eisner, the producing-artistic director of the Lark Play Development Center.

The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York launched in 2006 its New Drama Support Program precisely in order to accompany the projects of exchange in the field of playwriting and translation between the Romania and the US that had been initiated in the past years. The ARTE program was one of them, and RCI New York is happy to take active part in its continuation in 2007, hoping as well that it grows into a fully fledged long term program of play development and translation.