Iulia Popovici writes about independent theatre in Romania.

Iulia Popovici examines the state of independent work in Hungary during dunaPart, an organized showcase of mostly theatre and dance.

Iulia Popovici shares the work of Monika Strzępka and Paweł Demirski, a couple who make challenging and exciting work often based on political events happening in Poland.

But what interested me in that scene, besides the actual incredible fact that in a Romanian city somebody had decided to build, in 2011, a wall between “white people” and “gypsies,” was the current Romanian political discourse. And I was interested in whom I was addressing too. I realized that I was speaking, just like the current political discourse, to a middle-class of which I was a part.

Writing about a national theater as far away from the United States as the Romanian one means, in the end, performing exoticism—playing the monkey for the zoo visitors that do expect a monkey. Because, in the end, it’s not about the theater—a specific economic and aesthetic system designed to produce and share artistic work—it’s about how a society, in this case Romanian society, is perceived at an international level.