Gigi Căciuleanu and the architecture of void

Photography, just like dance, tells of a thrown off balance, of the fragile moment in
which the body is suspended… Photography, just like dance, is a dislocated moment, its
place is a continuous passage, a space of imprints, a promise made in the future
tense… That which the dislocated moment announces remains always à venir, the
dislocated moment is always projected in the future…
For choreographer Gigi Căciuleanu, in dance imbalance is as important as balance.
Dancing, in his view, is this continuous motion of decomposition and recomposition of
matter, body, feelings, world, universe. After its balance is disturbed and the flow of
motion is broken, the body must regain stability, it must recover itself so as not to fall
into the abyss... For Gigi Căciuleanu dance always occurs on the edge of this precipice,
of this abyss in which the world ends, balance ends, as well as any illusion of control.
Dance is thus a dance with the void and at the same time a dance projected in the
void... It is the interplay between the empty and the full, where the emptiness, the
breath, that which is not seen is in fact the matter that stirs the movement: “Movement is
born of a depression, the void, which demands to be filled.” Dance, like photography,
happens in these breaks, these short circuits of movement, of continuity, of time.
*
From the darkness a sound is slowly emerging, moving timidly, but as relentlessly as the
passing of time, as the rotation of the Earth, a few chords that gradually increase in
intensity with the firmness of the first ray of light announcing the day. The movement
(and, with it, the world) emerges from darkness, we are, by ourselves, witnessing the
birth of time itself, the beginning of the world, of the universe. Each viewer is alone in
this dialogue initiated by the visual language of choreographer Gigi Căciuleanu. The
photographer’s eye captured this loneliness, this dialogue between souls and between
bodies. The performance does not impose borders, but it dispels them, the viewer sees
himself in this dialogue, in this performance, in the destinies that meet, bind each other
and break apart on the stage to the rhythm of the natural flow of life and love. The

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viewer is present, is contained in dance just as he is contained in the photographs of
Mircea Albuţiu, who managed to capture and to continue this interpellation of the viewer,
this calling and inclusion of the viewer in the world of the performance Amor Amores. If
photography marks the place of absence in the world, this absence is probably in these
images (of the performance, of the dancers) which produce absence while trying to
preserve presence. The power of photography lies precisely in this duality of a both
present and absent image (when the photograph manages to capture it), because, as
Barthes understood, what the photograph reproduces to infinity could never be repeated
existentially. Photography is this language that gives presence to that which passes.
The bodies which the photographer captures in their suspended fragile moments are
fastened down in the image like in an insectarium, and yet the photograph does not stop
their movement. In Mircea Albuțiu’s photographs the bodies of the dancers appear like
flashing instances. All movement comes from outside the frame and continues beyond
it.
*
The word "photograph" originates from the Greek word 'phos', which means 'light', and
‘graphé’, meaning 'drawing' - so photograph would thus mean drawing with light. This is
a meaningful point in which the two creative spaces (that of the choreographer and that
of the photographer) meet. The choreographer gives the impression that he is painting
the movement with light, that he recreates the movement through the employment of
light. The bodies emerge from darkness, take shape and eventually fade away resorbed
into darkness; the entire performance is a continuous, flowing motion, a neverending
journey of the bodies through time and space. This motion is rendered visible by the
choreographer through the light that encounters the bodies, removing them from
darkness, accompanying them for a while and, with it, we accompany them too; we then
once again lose sight of them, as they are reabsorbed into the darkness out of which
they emerged, just to meet them again later… From beginning to end, the performance
reiterates this continuous movement of life, of bodies contained in time and space
engaged on a spiralling movement that never stops. And in this continuous movement

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the performance and dance happen, just as life happens on the thread of destiny - like
the acrobat performing his act on the high wire, from one end to another. “The Fibonacci
sequences scenically assemble and disassemble in my ballets,” says Gigi Căciuleanu,
“life is an electrifying battle between opposing forces, between weight and
weightlessness, between the negative and the positive, between line and movement.” In
this electrifying battle reproduced by his dance, the choreographer requires fluidity and
precision and madness, he asks his dancers to speak with their eyes and hands and he
does not accept the pose, the premeditated, sought out, embellished gesture. The
dancers learn not to work with poses but with situations, with states, with the situation
between two people, with the empty spaces created between two people, with the void
between two bodies, which functions as a binder or as a rupture; any closure creates
openings elsewhere. Dance is for the choreographer a poem, a metaphor for life: “I
cannot conceive a gesture for gesture’s sake, movement without any significance
(poetic, metaphorical, psychological)... Dance is something that cannot be expressed
otherwise than through dance... Dance is poetry in the sense of concentrating in a very
little space and time an energy and meanings with unsuspected, countless
compartments.”
What Gigi Căciuleanu seeks is the stillness, the position which is not posed, which is a
form of suspension of an instant of time. For him, every dance gesture equals time, it
represents a privileged moment: “Someone who is jumping is in a moment of
culmination of his existence; someone who is touching the floor sinks into it with all his
being, he doesn’t stop at the floor, but goes much further, he goes into the abyss…” The
dancers are always pushed to come out of their comfort zone, to inhabit intense,
contrasting feelings; their movements and stances employ a supplementary difficulty
because they are out of their axis: “What we learn in school is to be in axis, to stay in
balance... I ask them to give me imbalances, so that when you’ve found your balance
you must feel like you are on the brink of the precipice and want to recover, so as not to
fall into it.” Dance thus becomes this way of organizing the body in motion, while falling,
it is a whack of madness, of non-comfort; the choreographer asks from the dancers an

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uncomfortable dance where the illusion of certainty and control is shattered. “When he
meets an obstacle or faces a danger the dancer resorts to this necessity to survive. It is
said that dance is the art of life. I say it is the art of survival.”
*
The dance proposed by choreographer Gigi Căciuleanu is a perpetual interplay
between that which is vague and that which is precise, a genuine architecture of
emptiness. It is as if dance itself is evading, escaping us, like a promise perpetually
deferred. Movement is more like a breath, it has a life of its own, it animates the body, it
inhabits it, it carries it along like destiny. For Gigi Căciuleanu, the art of dance begins
when the body is animated by movements which no longer belong to the body: “In
dance I am concerned with this entire energetic world, an invisible side of movement,
acting in secret, but decidedly, upon the side that can be observed. An interplay
between the visible indistinct and the invisible distinct. The hidden face of the moon…”
What Gigi Căciuleanu’s performances reveal (and Mircea Albuţiu captured so well in his
‘New Energy’ series of photographs) is that there are certain forces that move us all,
and what dancers do is to decant the expression of the soul through movement. For
Gigi Căciuleanu, every performance is a human adventure that you want to share with
the others. The essential thing is how to draw the viewer into this adventure of yours
and how to manage to do so that this adventure remains not only yours. Could this be
one of the keys to understanding the photos Mircea Albuţiu has selected for his ‘New
Energy’ series? This series surely is an expression of this adventure Gigi Căciuleanu
tells of, an adventure which undoubtedly has become that of photographer Mircea
Albuţiu, too.

Aura Poenar