International Festival of Performing Arts BABEL 2026 in Targoviste, about performances that transformed time into experience.
“The Maids Materials”, inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids and built from fragments signed by Jean-Pierre Siméon, Dimitris Dimitriadis and the Constitution of the French Republic, brings before the audience three women locked in a refugee shelter. Linora Dinga, Mara Opriș and Monika Wachowicz do not simply interpret characters, but construct identities that are in a continuous process of negotiation and survival. Oscillating between audition, confession, interrogation and ritual, they try to affirm their dignity in a world that reduces them to labels and statistics.
The set design seems built from fragments of a broken world. Water becomes liquid memory. Glasses are containers of an absence. Mirrors multiply fragile identities. Plastic gloves introduce a cold distance between the body and the world. The wire brush transforms cleaning into an act of violence. Neon mercilessly exposes. White dresses suggest innocence, vulnerability and the ghosts of suspended lives. And the red sheet dominates the entire visual construction as a symbol of collective wound, blood, sacrifice and survival…
… There are moments in The Maids. Materials and SEVEN when you find yourself breathing along with the performers. Moments when the silence in the hall becomes almost material. Moments when you startle because you recognize something deeply human. A fear. A memory. A loss. A hope.
In this sense, the two productions of the Grotowski Institute were among the most representative of the spirit of the BABEL 2026 edition. They did not talk about time as an abstract concept, but as a lived experience. About time that leaves traces in bodies, about time that shapes identities, about time that destroys and preserves alike.
In the end, what remains is not just the memory of powerful images, but the rare sensation of having witnessed an authentic artistic act. An experience that does not seek to provide answers, but to open spaces for reflection. A living, visceral and organic theater, that surprises you, unsettles you and embraces you in the soul. A theater that does not end when the lights go out, but continues to exist in the viewer’s memory, like a small, persistent flame that refuses to go out”
International Festival of Performing Arts BABEL 2026
cotidianul.ro
Lavinia Lazar
