Niram Art Magazine

Somebody wrote to me, in 2004: “I went out last night with several friends. They talked a lot about love; each of them gave his or her opinions on this matter. I was the only one who kept quiet, with a tear trying to escape at the corner of my eye. It was clear, by the relaxed way in which everybody was talking and my impotence to utter one word, that I was the only one who loved somebody. I left them there and went out to get some air, to understand what cannot be understood, the heaviness on my chest, the melancholy of a far-away memory...”

I have been trying for weeks to write this chronicle about the show “Dorian Gray” and have always failed, without knowing why. I couldn’t seem to find any suitable words. In front of true art, just as in front of true love, one should remain silent.

The same friend passionately believes that there can be no art without love. One can be a dancer, a painter, a writer, but without a true emotion inside one’s chest, without that burning fire, one can never be an artist. That is why there are so few artists in the world. There are many writers, dancers, painters, sculptors, but how many, among all of them, are artists? An artist is a creator. This is the most accurate definition. How can someone create something without a genuine feeling of love?

It is easy to recognise a man in love just as it is easy to know when you are in front of a true artist. You feel it. Without any reasons, without any explanations, you simply know you are in the presence of something divine, as art is, after all, together with love, the quickest way in which a Man becomes a God.

I met an art critic in Madrid who said she gavup writing about contemporary painting because nothing could impress her anymore. There is a general feeling that so much has been done in art. That all true art has already been created. And suddenly, out of the blue, somebody appears and changes all your previous perceptions and convictions. Pouring fresh blood on the altar-stage of the theatre, the dancer Razvan Mazilu can change your world in seconds.

We, the audience, experience side by side with him, the painful birth, the joys and sorrows of life, the excruciating death and the luminous resurrection of ART itself. With each new show, he re-invents ART. Is it dance? Is it theatre? Is it painting? Ballet? All words are poor. Language has been kneeled down. Words have become useless. A new language has been born, the language of motion and emotion, of colour and music. It is not a dance; it is life itself, the dance of the creation of mankind. Deep in your heart you feel, you know, that he is an Artist. Love is pouring down through him, out of him, with every drop of sweat, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his sweat, at the end of the show, were blood, not water.

The transfiguration of Man into the Divine. This is what attracts us to art, what leaves us bewildered and what seeds turmoil in our hearts. I could go on saying how beautifully this man dances, how versatile he is, how perfect his moves are. This all has been said before.

I don’t go to see Razvan Mazilu’s shows to see a dancer, not even to see the greatest dancer. I don’t go there to see a theatre – dance, a fantastic never-before-seen choreographic show. I go there to experience the transfiguration of the Human into the Divine. I see a Man, walking barefoot on an empty stage, just as walking onto an altar. He is both the priest and the sacrificed. Each move makes him sweat blood. Each move elevates him. He twirls, he falls down, he rises.

The more he moves, the more he glows, as it is the very move that nourishes him just as the living water in our fairytales refreshed the power of the beautiful princes who struggled with the dark forces. He, too, struggles. He puts up a fierce fight against his own humanity. He rips his flesh out while we hold our breath, throwing away his sweaty, bloody, exhausted Human skin. The sacrifice is complete, the dance is over. The music stops. The figure who stands up in the midst of the howling ovations and the frenetic clapping audience is not a man anymore. He has gone to the other side as a Man and as a Dancer and has come back a God and an Artist.

The divine Eucharist of Art makes us all whole again, and puts a bit of hope in our souls. He has broken his body and gives it back to us in thousands of energetic particles. He has been through the torture of the artistic transformation and has crucified himself on its axes, dying on stage for all of us.  Behold, he has risen in front of our eyes so that we may not lose the path. The path of true emotion, of art and love.

If you ask me about the dance of Razvan Mazilu, I can only remain quiet, with a tear trying to escape at the corner of my eye. All the rest is, as the Ecclesiastes said, הבל הבלים “vanity of vanities”.  Among all the mist and the vapour, the portrait of the true artist will never perish.