.

a family and a single guy on the beach. young mum and dad + 3 yo. playing wth the personal/vs public space and holiday convention seems like a good start.
discovered the amazing suzan lori parks lately. 

sketches

2 tineri cu un carucior intr-un decor postapocaliptic mergand pe langa doua guri de canal care scot aburi ca un dragon. un batran homeless cu barba sta lungit pe unul din ele. putin mai incolo, un alt batran care arata fix la fel ca celalalt sta pe jos, inconjurat de vreo 30 de carti dispuse spre vanzare, si mananca supa cu taitei dintr-un borcan. pe partea stanga, santier cu metrou in constructie. e soare.
o tipa intr-un gang cu ecou langa un cinema parasit are o replica pe suprflow agresiv, foarte lunga, catre interlocuto. ecoul supradimensioneza totul
pusti pe role, trotinete, skate-uri. in general roti de tot felul

spark

Discovered her lately:

little spark

she doesn't want to leave the house. in a subtle way, she wants to convinge Jo that it's better inside. she tries to cook. she hates the noise. the neighbors have a small baby. she can't understand why would anyone want to have babies. she tries to fool Jo so he doesn't realize that she is terrified of leaving the house. she's afraid she'll get stabbed or that they'll both die in a suicide bomb attack. it's about how you adapt to this new narrative. do you still go to the concert? do you still go for a walk in your favourite central area? do you start carrying a gun? how do you relate to this and also- how do you tell the others about your fear? do you admit this is really happening or you'll just wait until it fades away? will you live your live indoors from now on?
what other changes will happen around you? 

home

HOME. what does that mean? it became such a strange word nowadays. Is it a physical space? Is it the place written in your ID card? Is it your room? Is it your head? Is it a physical construction? Who defines your home? Who are the ones that tell you to "go home"? How should you relate to them?

It's actually a topic that after Brexit became so complex, that it definitely deserves more thought. 

how a day can get better

Just discovered that after you finish writing a play, it's a very good thing to get over the feeling that it's worthless, and come back to it after at least 3 weeks, with a fresh eye. Then you can add up stuff. And also value it, go back to the text and rediscover and value it. So important. And also use the news you've been swallowing in the last days in a Fb binge, in order to improve your characters. As they find new shapes and meanings after the whole Brexit surprise. And just add value to your work.

Like what happened to me when I started writing this statement draft:

" I have written “Who’s to blame?” before the Brexit events, starting with a thought about how people try to find shelter in a “better country” after a traumatic experience in theirs. How “better” is “better” and how does life go on after you finally “made it” are questions that made me think of these characters and their story. The story that unfolds in “Who’s to blame?”gathers a number of characters that represent typologies from nowadays society: the old conservative “right wing” mother, the teenage emotional introvert socially anxious daughter, the adult political correct integrated young woman, the rich alienated bank manager and the newly come emotionally vulnerable immigrant. The way these characters affect one another leads to a tragic event. But the question is, at the end of the play: who’s to blame for it? As each character has his or her own motivation, we witness a complex process in which a chain of not-so-well-thought decisions lead to a tragic end. My main goal in building this story is actually related to my statement regarding the process of dealing with similar experiences, and this is also why I chose that the title should be a question. I think a good political play should raise questions not give answers, and this is how I designed the story: you see people heading towards a disaster, but you can’t point at anybody for sure. Whose blame is it for getting so alienated that you fall into this constant mechanism of sabotaging your own moments of empathy? What triggered this mechanism and what is the solution?

In a moment of crisis, probably the first step is to ask the right questions, and also analyse the context. And I think one key of a valid analyse  is to be patient in gathering all the information and not rushing in to put the blame on somebody.

As a Romanian who used to live for a while in the UK and also documented the status of Romanian Immigration there, I felt it a bitter taste when thinking about what this process actually means. I tried to put this mixture of repressed emotions and feelings into the main character, Suzanna, who has a strong sentiment of hate towards her mother. As the story moves forward, we discover the reason Suzanna can’t stand her mother- because she was the one who dragged them from Romania to the UK when she was only 12. This can be a traumatic experience for a child, but as much as Suzanna hates her mother for taking this decision on her behalf, she has to agree it was for the best. Which is actually leading her to a very repressed emotional state. People tell her she is “frozen” and “cold”, as she keeps on living in the same loop of going-to-work-and-then-coming-back-home narrative.  

Suzanna embraced the system of her hew country, and also its political values. She is annoyed and pissed with her mother when she makes “right wing statemens” and actually she judges her for stating that her new neighbors are “terrorists” because they dress in a traditional Muslim fashion and “pray all the time”. Suzanna doesn’t have the patience nor the nerves to comfort her mother, who is in a very fragile state of mind after having terrible nightmares that repeat traumas from the past. Combined with the state of fear induced by the news, these dreams turn the mother into a irrational person, who repeatedly says that she just needs to spend time with her daughters in order to calm down. But her daughter doesn’t have nor time, nor patience.

After the Brexit events, the mother’s character became even more interesting for me, as she has the manifestations of a typical “leaver”- old, conservative right wing racist, who forgets about her own flaws when she accuses others. So it's very interesting to see what does actually bring her in this state of irrational What this character asks from her family is affection, and the fact that she is not listened to aggravates her irrational state.

This constant fragmentation in the small comunity which is a family is something that interested me, when writing the play. Each and every member of this family lives in a state of alienation: the younger daughter doesn’t want to leave the house because of social anxiety and blames Suzanna for not being there for her, mother is consumed by her irrational fear that something will go wrong, Suzanna doesn’t want her mother to move in at any stake.

In a strange way, as Anna says, the only moment when she actually felt a real communion between people was after the attack, when she lost her fright and was able to go our of the house without fearing that people will judge her. This brings up another strong theme: the lack of values and goals as a real community, as Anna tells Selim when she tries to explain .

The characters function up to a point, then they’re all just broken: Anna can’t stop her tabliod-teenage-enthusiastic reaction when she hears Selim used to be enrolled in ISIS for two months. Mother can’t control her fear. Maxie, the banker/dog can’t actually intervene when he feels he should.

There is a strong feeling of fragmentation and lack of real community that sabotages any human connection that can be made between the characters of this play.

[develop a bit more in the actual play the “who’s to blame” monologue for Maxie; also- mother: more clear that she wants to be listened to, and she is irrational; she should say about Maxie that he is English; she is proud of her UK citizenship- maybe some family/historical tied, so she’s not entirely immigrant; but overall, just work a bit more on this character and her features, including the irrationality and fear she is dominated by]

 “Who’s to blame” becomes a symbolical question that wants to trigger this process of trying to find answers. Now, in a moment of crisis, we all need to ponder upon this and not rush into irrational judgemental decisions, but rather start a process of lucid analyse towards the facts and possible solutions.  

.

Suspicion- interesting dynamics between people- targeting the real meaning behind the words. Based on the "are you implying that...." or "is this what you're saying? "... like a continuous negotiation to discover the real meaning of what one is saying. You can build an entire play based on this.   

more on andra

right from the middle of the war zone in my head, well maybe studying andra and her depressive habits so much brings her even closer, as i had a full retrospective/reliving day yesterday and today as well, let's keep it positive, let's keep the experiment story. when she cries, she can't stop. it's the only way to channel the anxiety, the anger, the self shame, the guilt, and she has two ways of living: the strong calm positive diplomat action oriented girl, and in the back of that, a fuckin shivering river. that's what's in the back. a neurosis as big as the house of people. that's what's inside, and she knows it, so she has to invent rituals to protect herself/find small imaginary islands to escape. when she isn't able to perform her protective rituals, or when she lets the guard down, BANG. she invents herself internal imaginary islands of protection, that's why the narrator from Pacepa's book impresses her so much. when she's with adi in london, she finds an island in the relationship with b. when, years later, she has a fight with b, she tries to find another mental source of calm and protection. she is unstable and so easy to shake, which makes her furious with herself. she is furious when she looses her calm, because half of the day she works on maintaining it. she stays calm, and stays, and stays, and stays, until she breaks. and when she breaks, she is so angry with herself that she just breaks herself more. she is angry that she is so easy to shake. this drives her crazy. songs she listens to calm down- for a long time, top of the list is m's song, which he always sings to her when she desperately writes. their pattern of communication is: andra writes when she's down, i'm having a nervous breakdown, he immediately answers, encourages her, makes her feel strong again. (years later, she will discover that he's also on a depressive path, but that's another story). so m quotes/sings her this:

and, funnily enough, usually she cries even harder.

also i noticed she's afraid of adi, in the RCI attick, so she's afraid to pronounce certain words or subjects that may trigger the thing she knows will put her down. she is always put down, immediately, by adi's coldness when he refuses to communicate for days, as she later will be by b's anger when it comes to money. the reaction is like an emotional switch for her: you press the button she has no control, bang emotion, breakdown, no way to handle it. this also maes her VERY angry with herself. she promises herself she won't react like this the next time, but everytime it happens just as well. so she tries to find ways to avoid the switch.

when at the RCI, she listens to b's podcast, it feeds her, until she finds some voice of a girl that she knows is a good friend of b, she goes crazy when she hears the tune coz it seems to her there's more than just friendship etc etc etc. i can't find the tune for now.

Andra notes

A new theme that goes round my mind, triggered by the other text I'm working at. The more painful one. GUILT. Sometimes I think of my last five or six years as an experiment, to see what happens to you when you dive in Romania so deep that not even the devil can get you out at some point. When you invest all your enthusiasm, contacts, money, every fucking thing you have, into this place because you actually love it, in a twisted way, and you think it matters. Change matters, you tell yourself, and you just dive, enroll, plunge into the abyss. Looking at it now, seems a bit stupid. On the other hand, maybe you need this kamikaze sort of energy to move the big inertial stone. I started to work on the story line of "Should I stay or should I go", putting together all the ideas me and Sorin discussed over the last years, and I was struck by how dangerously fucked up Andra is. Confused, not able to say her own opinion, with all these "plans" which are supposed to fill her actions with meaning, actually so depressed that she can't even realize her own depression. And, most of all, guilty. She feels guilty for everything, guilt is the great force that moves her around. It's not even because of Adi, it's something deeper. It's incredible how strong this comes out as a feature, and scary how much I became this character in the last years. That's why I started to consider this as an experiment rather than my own life. What I learned lately through the "Write Yourself" experience is that you are more than your persona, more than this contextual identity built by circumstances. I try to understand and reconnect, slowly, with who the fuck I am besides the context. What do I like to do? I like to write plays. Then fuckin write plays, build yourself a playground and live in it for at least one hour a day. If there is something you need to defend, it's THAT freedom. Write your plays, send your plays to contests, do your thing. What else is there to do. The context always changes, there's always struggle for money, there's always things to take care of, there's always stuff to worry about. But the core of it, the resistance, the land where you are more than just this- is there. Maybe that's how I started to look at Andra without remorse or hate, and finally write this story line. After 5 years. Because it's clear to me how fucked up she is now. Her breakdown is scary, really scary, it's a girl who can't stop crying for 3 weeks, there's so much confusion and fear there, and presion, that she just can't not cry any time she's alone, and this IS fuckin scary, because she is representative for a young person who is supposed to be of value for her country, for her culture, and she is on the verge of going mad in the RCI attic, in the richest area of London. So I would like to dig deeper and see how this happens, what is the mechanism that leads her there. I have no idea where to start this serach, but I feel it's vital to understand how the girl that got back to Romania from London in 2009, fresh and ready to start so many initiatives and bring stuff that she learned, after a year of actual bliss in which she finally feels she actually learns something in school, and she makes great progress, on every level, the girl that writes this great dissertation, and has such a clear view of what to do, ends up only two years later in this situation. I won't lie if I say I have no idea what happened in the next years, as something definitely changed in that month of July 2011 and after that many decisions Vera takes are just because she tries to live on, but with a double. The broken puppet mechanism just continues. 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, no sign of interior life, growing depression, the only meaning she finds are in the islands of connection she finds with the people from "Write Yourself", but she constantly breaks this connection because she has to ask money from the same people she works with, always more, debts she can't pay back, or before the date settled by the common agreement, and so on, so guilt becomes even bigger. Because the most valuable thing for her is human contact, and it is precisely what is attacked by the managerial enterprise that she and her colleagues are fighting to sustain without any government financing or any funding at all. So all the bridges for her are basically burned. That is why depression leads to constant suicidal thoughts, during a year or two, and this is how in six years the girl that comes back to her country after a glorious scholarship, gets to become this broken puppet. It's very hard for me to write this, because I am this puppet, and I still live here. But, after reading "I refuse to grow up" again, and realizing that it's actually a good text as it went very deep into the reality of this girl who works as Peter Pan statue on South Bank, I just decided it's time to shape this experiment called "going back to Romania" in the character of Andra, with everything she contained, good and bad, and attack one of the darkest episodes that built Andra's identity: the two months residency in the Attic Arts, 2011.



        

.

a talk about meaning of "dynamite" words which gets you to huge fights, as you fight and accuse each other of hidden implications and about the way you think, because you use "white"/"black"/"proud". dynamics between accusing and being accused which grow in a hysteric way.

people using the words: "my therapist"/"my masseuse" etc. interesting relationship of hidden slavery, people who afford to pay therapy actually speak of the person who is doing the therapy service as if they're his/her. as if they own them. also heard something like "i have a very good hairstylist/let me take you to my hair stylist/my nutritionist told me off for eating so much meat". it's an interesting relationship, linked through money but also creating family like ties.

today's reads

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/12/reluctant-jihadi-recruit-lost-faith-in-isis?INTCMP=sfl

and how young people go to enroll

one girl fell in love with an isis soldier

families and their struggle when they hear their daugther or son is in syria now and they joined isis

furries

to write about

stuff i would like to write about:

depression and loneliness in a big city, schizophrenia and Facebook, identity and how you build your identity through media, people who have many certainties, mothers who eat their daughters, daughters who eat their daughters as well, parents who eat their children and hold their children very very very close, people with anxiety, people who live only in a mental flow of counting money without realizing that there is space for something in their head, just a continuous flow of counting money and seeing life through that, people who dress up as in the case of the guy who decided to live a 5 years old's life and left his family to do that, changes of identity and ways in which people change their identity not just gender, mental rape performed by friends and habits as in friends who make you do stuff you usually do with them because that's how things are done, education and forms of education, assisted death and suicide as compensatory fantasy, a couple in which one of them, for no apparent reason, has this fantasy on a daily basis, even though they are really happy, people who program themselves to do stuff and they get closer and closer to a state of robotic dream, in which everything is programmed, dreamy and sad as if the whole world is at its apocalyptic sunset, they know what they will do, they have to know every little thing they will do, and then they do it, and if they don't do it they punish themselves, how this self-programming appeared, people who work in institutions that host young homeless people and forbidden friendships between them, as not to create attachment, institutionalized care, CCTV based friendships, people who project themselves in another physical space than the one they live in so to make it from one day to another, people who harm themselves promising things that they cannot keep and not telling that they can't keep their promise so they end up depressed and suicidal, in a mental loop of not being able to action, not being able to action as an issue in itself, people who are not able to action even if they see somebody who is dying in front of them as if they see him through a screen, the issue of building up ignorance and the way the world is just nonsensical because of  the choice and pattern to ignore somebody who begs from your help on the street, people building up plans and actions that damage humanization, rape and the way people want or do not want the other one to rape them, the marriage between rape and guilt and also the need to be raped, connected with the love of the oppressed towards the oppressor and the impossibility to handle freedom, humiliation caused by precarity, political correctness taken to extremes and the negotiation of human touch, in different forms, at different levels, starting with adults who are not allowed to touch children, ending with couples who cannot touch themselves in public, PDA and PDLA, a very intense 24 hour meeting between 2 people who love each other, in different public spaces all around the world, self sabotage in its never ending forms and with different narratives, self sabotage of the immigrant in front of the locals, the story with the guy who survived the collective tragedy and his mother who stole his money, the story with 3000000 Romanians who signed the Pro Family petition, the story with the Mega Image downstairs and all the employees that run from it

i feel a shame of writing. i feel a shame of taking my time, from everything is there to be done, to do this. i don't know where this GUILT came from. i feel it as a forbidden territory. and slowly, after years, trying to unfold this in a strange very hard way, as if you pull a string from your chest, you on't even know what's there.

.

cultural management anxiety

i am a cultural manager therefor i

give my blood and tears and night dreams to build

projects that matter

in a place that doesn't stand new projects

run by mafia and old securitate

i am a writer therefor i write

what i see and what i hear and what i see is

anxiety negativity fear

one good deed followed by three bad

one good day and then you smash your head

with guilt, remorse and mother-like worries

this is the way it goes.

will i have money for bread? can i pay the site?

can i see one month ahead?

x will need money soon, y as well

i have a baby inside me and the world seems like hell

pay the rent for rehearsal space, find time to think

about a visionary plan so your project won't sink

swim 3 meters ahead and then drown for a bit

so when you breathe again you feel this is it

a whole new revelation, a truth from above

i feel so alive now the world is brand new

so you take it from zero with new powers new goals

this time i know it, this time it will work.

your colleagues are tired and nervous and tensed

you feel you don't trust them as you don't trust yourself

you all talk of good things and always make plans

but next day when you wake up, it feels like world's end

and then you drink coffee and talk to yourself

what scared you? what happened? where did you get lost?

which day in these six years you paid such a cost

that now you sit brainless, and fail to respond

to your own thoughts?

hopeful lil bit of hallucination

had a dream about nick cave who was an artist i was supposed to take care of
so my boss kept on screaming in my ear, at the phone, random instructions
while i was running on the street to meet nick cave and he wasn't there, he wasn't there
my mum and a woman i don't know washing [rufe] in the bath tub like in the olden days
i ask is nick here they say yea he's till working oh that's good then i go in the room to meet nick
instead of him a blonde woman, wth large hips and small tits, smiling- hi, i say
then i go out to mum and unknown grandma you said there's nick there but it's a woman
well who has time for stuff like that they tell me

i wake up with that song in my head i realize i haven't listened to music for a long time
foi na cruz it goes on in my ears it's sunny today bogdan is sleeping the cat is sleeping

it's sunny today

i turn carefully so not to disturb the 500 grams being living inside of me
everymorning a bit of a challenge

every waking up into a new reality

i go get coffee speak with rasvan about the fact that if you really want to run away
from your mother, you have to change the country, many stories about this

double identity

i read some pages from salman rushdie [versete satanice] gibreel dreams about True London

i write this book i write this play i see this photo i remember

some very vague moments of building a life and then just breaking it
like for example i don't remember what happened to this

i had this on my wall

have no idea what happened to it