The Ruins of the Theater: The Universe of Dragos Buhagiar

The Treasure Trove of a Great Stage Designer: Dragos Buhagiar

“The poetry of ruins” is inseparable from European melancholy, which discovered its modernity by gazing at crippled busts, fractured columns, crumbling palaces. Melancholy lay at the origin of the Renaissance and in time developed its capacity to revive disappeared worlds in the imagination. From this perspective, we can explore the heterogeneous world exhibited by Dragoș Buhagiar as a poetic vestige of what continues to exist of his work in the memory of the spectators of yesterday and which invites the spectators of today to recreate it in their imaginations. A dislocated world where dreams are born and journeys embarked upon. Dragoș Buhagiar loves the stage, but also the texts: this explains the constant celebration of their marriage. Neither indifferent nor a slave to words, he creates spaces of dialogue that allow them to resound, leaving the bodies to express themselves fully. “Mighty Venice now has fallen low,” reads a famous line by a Romanian poet, which we might easily paraphrase, but actually it is contradicted here, for, in these ruins, we might say that, “The mighty stage lives on”.

Dragoș Buhagiar exhibits the retrospective treasure trove of his work and we, in Prague, are its beneficiaries “for a summer”.

Country/Region Romania

Presenting Organization Romanian Cultural Institute (president Liliana Turoiu) and Romanian Cultural Institute – Praga (director Ionut Petre Munteanu)

Curator Georges Banu

Artists Scenographer: Dragos Buhagiar