cndb

The National Dance Centre – Bucharest

People who move the world

The context…

The year The National Center of Dance – Bucharest (CNDB) was founded, July 2004, there was no other institution dedicated to the art of contemporary dance in Romania. The Romanian contemporary choreographers and their work were much more known abroad than in their own country.

The building of the National Theatre

Setting & facilities

The Center was founded as a public institution subsidized by the Ministry of Culture.
Situated in the University Square, in the very center of Bucharest, where the Romanian Revolution took place, CNDB is located at the 3rd and 4th floor on the north side of The National Theatre.

Thus, the 0 Km of Romanian freedom became synonymous to the new frame of contemporary dance. A dynamic art in a transitional context obtained the most needed official acknowledgement.

CNDB received in administration a former exhibition space of approximately 3000 square meters, which had to be adapted to the new requirements.

Currently, CNDB has offices for the stuff, two rehearsal studios, a Media Library and a hall with a capacity of 180 seats.
The National Center of Dance appeared due to a long term campaign designed to impose a necessary space in a cultural context deprived of any support for contemporary dance. The campaign was sustained by artists and structures involved in the field of producing contemporary dance.

Workshop with Martin Sonderkamp
By the end of 2005, the temporary general manager of CNDB was the choreographer Ioan Tugearu. In 2006, Mihai Mihalcea became the general manager of CNDB and Vava Ştefănescu – the artistic director. At present, there are 13 employees in CNDB.

Mission

The National Center of Dance Bucharest is an institution whose purpose is to sustain, develop and promote contemporary dance. It is conceived as an open space and as an integrant part of the international choreographic context.

CNDB’s programs and projects encourage critical perspectives, the research and the experiment in the field of contemporary arts’ practice and theory. It encourages the rise up of an internationally extended platform reactive to dialog, reflection and debate.

Created as a dynamic and flexible interface between professionals and the audience, CNDB presents every year a dance season. Romanian and foreign contemporary dance productions and international co-productions sustained by the Center are performed in CNDB, offering a large panel of artistic discourses and aesthetic choices.

The Center also proposes projects in which the body is explored in its multiple forms of expression, in relation to a changeable reality. The projects BodyRealities and Contaminations create links between different discourse practices and gather creators from various fields.

Drawer is another project launched in 2006, a project of documentation and research. Drawer brings forth important choreographers who put a consistent mark on the history of contemporary dance. It’s an exercise of emphasizing the role of relevant personalities, stories and facts.

Every year CNDB organizes two project selections in order to encourage the creativity, the competition and the artistic mobility. This way, the dance professionals – choreographers, dancers, teachers, groups and companies, theoreticians, critics, foundations and genre associations – can obtain financing, rehearsal spaces and logistic support for their projects.

Besides the programs and projects financed until now, the Center housed various debates, lectures and international projects and events: The Days of German Dance in Bucharest, The Bucharest Biennale, and the Labo-Mix project organized by the Wallonie-Bruxelles Commission in Bucharest.

Discussion among professionals / meeting with Xavier Le Roy in the frame of German Dance Days in Bucharest organized by Goethe Institut and CNDB

Visual artists launching their new Fanzine
In 2006 CNDB financed and co produced 18 projects created by young professionals from Bucharest and Cluj. Some of them were presented on international stages in France, Germany, Austria, Norway.

CNDB co-produced and supported productions created by international artists such us: Franfurter Kuche, Isabelle Schad, Brynjar Bandlien, Mart
Kangro.

Programs

A special attention is paid to the evolution of dancers and choreographers. The Center organizes classes and workshops for dance professionals and for the audience eager to get in touch with the language of contemporary dance.

Starting with 2007, CNDB launched a program of dance workshops focusing on the students from the Choreography High Schools.

The National Center of Dance is associated partner of IDEE International Network initiated by Tanzquartier Wien, together with Centre national de la danse – Paris, The Place – London, Dansens Hus – Stockholm, Mercat de les Flors – Barcelona and other institutions in Estonia, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland and Greece.

Acknowledgement

CNDB obtained international recognition for its intensely proved mobility in the development of projects. Maison d’Europe et d’Orient in Paris nominated Mihai Mihalcea at the “Paris-Europe 2006″ award.

Sustaining value and innovation, vitalizing the entire choreographic environment, CNDB became one of the most generous spaces of creation, debate and artistic reflection in Bucharest.

Another acknowledgment came from the Romanian magazine “Cuvantul”, which rewards the most significant Romanian cultural personalities. The Grand Prize for 2006 was received by CNDB for establishing a new and dynamic cultural platform and for opening an art that addresses to a very specialized public to multiple areas of nowadays culture.

Mihaela Dancs in “A little more real than necessary”, by Florin Flueras

“The artistic champion of 2006 was, without a doubt, The National Centre of Dance – Bucharest. Being preceded by an ugly scandal, the opening of CNDB brought into the lives of the amateurs of cultural sensations, a new, much stronger essence. Beyond the quality inevitably variable of its productions (a lot, for only 12 months), a European Weltanschauung, that lacks the usual Balkan behavior. What used to be a badly compartmented industrial type hall, suffocated every middle June by the “Bookarest” fair, became the most generous space of artistic debate and reflection from Bucharest, by simply being inhabited by people with a genuine vocation of creation.”
Extract from “Good things 2006 brought”, By Iulia Popovici, Ziua, February 2006

Our (artistic) team:

Mihai Mihalcea>> Director

Vava Stefanescu>> Artistic Director

Denise Radulescu>> Medialibrary/research coordinator

Carmen Cotofana>> Project coordinator

Anamaria Pravicencu>>Project coordinator